Note: This post, Open the Art Sales Floodgate by Combining Email Marketing and Facebook is a guest post by Kevin Devoto. You can learn more about Kevin at the bottom of the post.
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It’s time to stop thinking of email and Facebook as separate marketing strategies and realize they are actually two sides of the same coin. Some estimates put the percentage of people that follow you on Facebook and are already a customer at 84 percent. That’s a pretty solid majority. It makes sense when you consider that most of us don’t go randomly surfing around looking for completely unknown pages to ‘like’. The secret is to consider Facebook as a tool to keep you at the top of your customers’ minds. Now let’s think about how to make them work together for the greater good, like Superman and Batman.
The Old Switcheroo
Wherever you get your email marketing best practices, it should include the idea of putting an email sign-up option on your Facebook page. Zuckerberg’s engineer minions created this option recently and you should take advantage of it. In this world of split-second attention spans, it’s critical to collect that contact info immediately. If they like what’s on your page, they’ll probably enjoy your emails as well.
Conversely, you should include social media buttons in all your email messages. If the method to do this doesn’t seem immediately obvious, talk to your email provider for directions. As with all things marketing these days, think mobile. There’s a good chance much of your information will be compressed to a tiny screen, so make the buttons big enough for a clunky human fingertip to push.
Implement Custom Audiences
If you haven’t stumbled across the Custom Audiences feature in Facebook yet, it’s definitely worth looking into. If you already have segmented email lists, you can export them to your Facebook Ads account in CSV format. To locate the option, log into your account and click the drop-down menu in the top left corner. If it’s not readily available in the ‘frequently used’ section, look under ‘assets’. Facebook will then attempt to match email addresses to member profiles, resulting in a success rate of anywhere from 20 to 70 percent. Presto, you just learned a lot more about the people on your mailing list and can now target them more precisely with Facebook Ads. When it comes to marketing a product or service, it’s all about multiple exposures to your sales message.
The Unsubscribe is Not the End
We all hate to have someone unsubscribe from our list. Now you can do something about it without getting turned over to the spam police or offending the departing customer. It might be that the person isn’t leaving because they hate you and everything you stand for. It could be that they are desperately trying to stem the flood of daily emails. Perhaps they’re just scrolling through their account and getting off every list they can find. Here’s an idea, somewhere in the process of unsubscribing, offer a message that talks about you know how out-of-control an inbox can get and you would like to offer them an alternative chance to follow you on social media. Then pop up the good old Facebook button. We don’t have any hard numbers, but if you save even one customer it’s probably worth the effort.
The Rest is Up to You
Marketers serious about their craft will launch a promotion via email and on Facebook at the same time. How you do it will depend on who you want to reach. Many encourage sending the email out in the morning so it is fresh on a person’s mind. Since too many follow-up email reminders will probably get you reported to the “internet cops”, use Facebook throughout the day to act as a refresher to the sale.
The thing to remember is that email and social media are not separate entities. In fact, we might consider email to be the first social media platform. Smart marketers see that the power in using them together provides exponential benefits over keeping them apart.
Kevin Devoto graduated with a BS in Computer Science and an MBA from UCLA. He works as a business consultant for InnovateBTS where he helps companies integrate technology to improve performance. He shares his knowledge and expertise not only with his clients but with his fellow bloggers and readers.
Guest Post – Open the Art Sales Floodgate by Combining Email Marketing and Facebook
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