Before you read this post subscribe to my eNewsletter.
If you are an artist trying to build an audience – and what artist isn’t – or if you just want to stay in touch with your friends, collectors and fans an email newsletter is a great way to go. Because my site is a combination blog, studio news site, and online portfolio the primary purpose of the newsletter is to pique my friend’s interest enough for she or he to click on links to specific areas on my site. I will talk in more detail about content in a future post.
Several presenters at last years SmArtist Telesummit convinced me that I needed to blog and start a newsletter. I knew the design needed to be as professional, clean and to the point as my Website. Creating each issue needed to be quick and easy. It needed to have a great database system that would make easy work of building and maintaining my mailing list. Traffic and click-through reports needed to be detailed and comprehensive. This is very important because without great traffic reporting I wouldn’t know who is clicking on what. I also wouldn’t know if I was making the kind of connection with my audience that you intended make.
I am fortunate to work at a University with in a very aggressive online marketing program. One program director in our business school had years of experience tested several email services and felt, for my needs, Constant Contact was a good choice.
After using them about six months I can honest say tell you that I really like Constant Contact. It is not very expensive (I pay around $15/mo for a mailing list under 500 people). There is good flexibility in design with several templates available or you can create your own design (html/css knowledge is helpful to do that). You can set up several mailing lists and their management is very easy. The stat reports are great. You can see how many clicks-throughs you get and who did the clicking.
The only restriction at that low cost is the low number of images I can have in my account library (I think it is around 10 images). There is an upgrade that is also not terribly expensive that allow many more images. My newsletter is simple and I have been able to do a little workaround to compensate for the low images count.
I have not had any problems with it except for my own mistakes as a novice e-mailer who doesn’t like reading instructions before doing things.
If you haven’t done email newsletters before you should know that there is a legal (anti-spam) requirement for a physical address to be included on your email. If you do not want to make your home or studio address public, I you should get a P.O. Box before setting up an account.
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I need to do this but have no idea how to go about starting. I had been recommended Constant Contact too. My problem is going to be the physical address. Another hurdle!
Anita: I just arranged for P.O. Box and it was not too bad. Most of the transaction in online. A P.O. Box is a legitimate physical address.
The most important thing in starting an eNewsletter is to have a point of view. Think about what people find interesting in your art or you as a person and start from there.
Good luck.
I researched a lot of email newsletter companies before settling on Constant Contact as the most reasonably priced, and it allows custom html, so you can match the look of your website or blog. However, you do not need to pay extra to use their image hosting. If you have your own hosted website, you can simply point to the URL of your image. I always use custom html, so I’m not certain, but I believe there is an edit html option on the templates where you can type in your image URL if there isn’t an option on the form.
Jennifer: I am looking into another company that looks promising, Vertical Response. Lower priced with larger image/media library space than CC. Will post if it turns out as good as it sounds.