Building your on-line list

Build­ing an on-line list of poten­tial buy­ers is a crit­i­cal and com­ple­men­tary part of cre­at­ing a strong net­work of fol­low­ers. There are many ways to go about cre­at­ing that list here are some impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tions to always be included in any list build­ing strategy.

Call to action

The key to hav­ing a suc­cess­ful on line list is get­ting peo­ple to sign up and in order for that to hap­pen they have to first get to your blog. Dri­ving peo­ple to your blog is one of the objec­tives of the off-line efforts dis­cussed last Mon­day so I won’t go into those details today. Assum­ing you have attracted peo­ple to your blog why would they want to sign up to be on your list? Gen­er­ally peo­ple sign up for some basic reasons:

• They were reluc­tant off-line until they saw more social proof
• They see a value in sign­ing up

Those reluc­tant to give their e-mail address inspite of your won­der­ful nature most likely wanted to check you out more by vis­it­ing your blog…they were look­ing for what we call Social Proof. They want to see if you are who you say you are and prob­a­bly want to see if you do more than talk about what you had for lunch on your blog and like­wise for twit­ter and Face­book. The degree to which you have been reg­u­larly post­ing on your blog, shar­ing with your read­ers your process, your work and your fail­ures the higher your cred­i­bil­ity will be and the more likely they will want to be part of your artis­tic life.

While cred­i­bil­ity is the core rea­son peo­ple might want to join your com­mu­nity there are other rea­sons as well all linked to their per­ceived value of join­ing. For most, value will be based on mutual val­ues, the “scent” I talked about awhile back. Your “scent” is strongest when you know your own value, that thing in you that attracts like minds.

You may also decide to pro­vide other things of more con­crete value like a newslet­ter, show “events”, spe­cial pre-show sales etc. If you decide to do any of these remem­ber it is you and your value that is the foun­da­tion so make sure what­ever you offer rein­forces you and your mes­sage stay true to your­self because those who respond to your true self will be your strongest sup­port­ers. Here is an exam­ple of an artist using a coupon to entice her buy­ers to sign-up.

The most impor­tant “take away” here is this…You must Ask them to sign up by hav­ing a call to action as part of your on-line sys­tem. when you ask you do three things:

• You let them know you value them
• You let them know that you are con­fi­dent they will find value in being con­nected to you
• You give them a choice to say “yes” or “no” by doing so you honor them and their abil­ity to choose leav­ing the door open for future connections.

Now for the how

If you have sub­scribed to this or any other  blog’s newslet­ter you are receiv­ing it by way of an Autore­spon­der oper­ated and hosted by an online busi­ness who’s sole pur­pose is to auto­mate e-mail com­mu­ni­ca­tions. There are many choices out there depend­ing on what you want to get done, many give you a chance to try before you buy, but if you have no expe­ri­ence with this sort of thing it will be dif­fi­cult to know what you really need…believe me I know. So here are some of the things I dis­cov­ered in the process:

• Abil­ity to send out both html and rich text e-mails Han­dling html e-mail can be tricky and some e-mail pro­grams don’t play well with html, so hav­ing a text ver­sion that can be auto­mat­i­cally loaded in place of html insures your mes­sage got through.
• Abil­ity to seg­ment the list This is very impor­tant if you are try­ing to col­lect infor­ma­tion for more than one pur­pose. For exam­ple art fair artists would ben­e­fit from a ser­vice that per­mits devel­op­ment of sep­a­rate lists based on venues, doing so lets you focus on venue spe­cific infor­ma­tion and per­son­al­izes your communications.
• Flex­i­bil­ity and ease of opt-in process In my test­ing I stum­bled a lot and in the process dis­cov­ered that I needed to have dif­fer­ent forms for dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions. Con­se­quently I was able to develop forms that col­lected the info I wanted and be able to sort that list for specifics like newslet­ter only, or whether the sub­scriber was an artist. Doing so made it eas­ier for me to send the right rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion to the right peo­ple. I also was able to design dif­fer­ent ways to present the sign in forms to read­ers for exam­ple at the bot­tom of every post on my blog or on the side bar or many other variations.
• Analy­sis and test­ing One of the most impor­tant parts of being suc­cess­ful is col­lect­ing and ana­lyz­ing intel­li­gence (ya I used to be a spook) or the data your forms col­lect. Know­ing where the best place to put your opt-in form is impor­tant because it will effect your sign-up vol­ume. There have been lots of eye track­ing stud­ies that show where peo­ple look on a web page, know­ing that infor­ma­tion will help you get more sign-ups. A ser­vice that allows you to test options whether it be place­ment, word­ing or extent of info requested, will also help you focus on what really works. This is called A/B test­ing where options are devel­oped and ran­domly shown to read­ers, and stats on the results are recorded.
• Opens and clicks Other impor­tant ana­lyt­i­cal tools would be the abil­ity to col­lect click infor­ma­tion on links you may have in newslet­ters or broad­cast e-mails, the infor­ma­tion can tell if peo­ple are actu­ally click­ing on the links. Obvi­ously it would be good to be able to know if your e-mails are being opened and the per­cent­age of the total that are being opened, if you are not get­ting any opens you will need to find out why.
• Abil­ity to eas­ily import off line infor­ma­tion Since you will be col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion off-line also it is be very impor­tant to make sure your ser­vice can not only import that infor­ma­tion but also make it easy on you.

Choices choices

As I said ear­lier there are many ser­vices that pro­vide all or com­bi­na­tions of the key options above, know­ing what you want to do with your list plays an impor­tant part in choos­ing the right ser­vice for you. I will review some of these ser­vices in later posts so that you will be able to make an informed choice.

Inte­grat­ing all of this

Another strong deter­mi­nant of suc­cess is the abil­ity to see trends in behav­ior and respond­ing accord­ingly. One of the best ways to do this is to link the infor­ma­tion col­lected above to prod­ucts pur­chased. So for exam­ple Betty bought one of your pieces , by link­ing that pur­chase to her name you can keep track of what she pur­chases and offer sim­i­lar items ( like Ama­zon does). You will also be able to send her a thank you and other follow-ups because you know what she pur­chased. Hav­ing a data base that allows you to keep track of cus­tomer pref­er­ences and buy­ing habits can sup­port your con­nec­tion with each cus­tomer.  Fur­ther more link­ing cus­tomers, venues and inven­tory can go a long way towards focus­ing your inven­tory and pro­duc­tion efforts (remem­ber the 80/20 rule).