Artists & the Internet Part 3: E-mail Marketing, On-Line Purchasing & Mobile Payments

I’d like to share some of my experiences and thoughts on the internet and how it’s affected my creativity and art.  I’ll cover blogs, domains, websites, social networking, electronic newsletters, on-line sales and taking electronic payments.   There may be something you, the reader, are interested in, shared, or experienced yourself; but also I hope to dissolve some of the intimidating mystery and perhaps make it feel more accessible to the Pacifican artist.

Read Part I: Blogs & Domains here.

Read Part 2: Websites & Social Networking here.

E-Mail Marketing

Before we get into on-line purchasing and payment information for the artist, let’s talk about e-mail marketing or e-newsletters. In the second part of this three part series here, I went over the benefits of marketing art using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.  A natural progression in marketing strategy for the artist, a small business person, and a way to reach the many people interested in your work quickly is through the use of electronic newsletters. When you receive colorful, newsletter style information from Art Guild of Pacifica, you are receiving it from Michael Risenhoover using an e-newsletter platform called Mail Chimp.  Mail Chimp is only one of the many different services available, yet it is quite user friendly, and it is free.  Some services are best to target a small audience and some are more suited for large mass mailings, but they all include the ability to manipulate statistics and reveal how many of your recipients look at your message.

In my opinion, the most important part of using an e-newsletter is building a list of recipients. You need email addresses to do this.  Start with addresses you have at your disposal, people interested in what you do, and then build upward by asking people to sign. The service you choose will no doubt have html language (the mysterious language of the internet) to plug into your site.  Once all email addresses are saved in the program, you send your message only once to reach all recipients simultaneously.  Herein lies the grand benefit of the e-newsletter -- using technology to provide information to your clients quickly and efficiently.  E-newsletters serve the artist well to announce shows, exhibitions, monthly updates on your art, or any other information however often you wish to send it.  

IMPORTANT: Federal law regulating unsolicited email states that anyone sending a mass e-newsletter must include their name and address visibly (there are other rules, too, so be encouraged to read up on it). Artists wishing to keep their home address private might consider renting a P.O. Box just for their art business.

Mobile Payments

An artist’s greatest pleasure can also be her/his greatest challenge.   Fairs and events like Fogfest potentially bring your clients to a full, store like representation of your work, but in the absence of cash or personal checks, how do you take payment?  The ability to take a credit card is important to the artist, but in the past meant using a manual credit card imprinter, paying huge fees to companies like Visa or Master Card, or worse, running the risk of payment denial once slips are batched and submitted.  Those fees can be prohibitive, threatening to eat a huge chunk of an artist’s profits.  Our work is too personal, too wonderful, and too much effort to throw its benefit away on needless and expensive fees.

The advent of technology like the smart phone offers new reliable ways to take payments in the field.  There are a number of these tools available now (PayPal’s Mobile Credit Card Reader, Intuit GoPayment), but I can only speak to my experience with Google Square.  Square is an application that allows your iPhone or iPad (or any variation thereof) to process Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover payments over the internet ... and to do so right on the spot!  

A thing of the past!

Visit squareup.com to sign up and when you do, Square will send you a card reader or what is fondly referred to as a “dongle”.  Do the same by uploading the app directly to your phone.  The card reader plugs directly into your smart phone.  Mine took less than a week to arrive, a benefit of living so close to Silicon Valley.  Upon receiving your card reader, downloading the app, and signing up you are able to take payments immediately.  Square takes a small fee from each transaction and will download money directly into your bank account nightly if you want it to.

IMPORTANT: Like your cellphone or smart pad, Square is available through your carrier’s mobile network.  If you are exhibiting at Sanchez Art Center, for example, note that certain parts of the gallery have limited cell reception. This can happen anywhere.  If you don’t have a strong signal for your phone, Square won’t be accessible either.  You must be on-line to process payments.

On-Line Purchasing

When the internet prompted business on-line (the sale of goods and services, or what is referred to as e-commerce), it opened the door for internet identity theft and fraud. Early on, the only way to make a credit card payment to a small business person on-line was to use an insecure internet connection, one that allowed crawlers and bots to pick up your credit card number and publish it in search engines, or worse, sending your credit card number through email.  That was eons ago.  Now, e-commerce has become secure and easy.  PayPal makes e-commerce safe and available to the artist.

“PayPal is a global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders … PayPal is an acquirer, performing payment processing for online vendors, auction sites, and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee. It may also charge a fee for receiving money, proportional to the amount received. The fees depend on the currency used, the payment option used, the country of the sender, the country of the recipient, the amount sent and the recipient's account type.” <source>

If you can use the design features on your blog or website, you can use one of Paypal’s serveral purchase buttons.  They plug right into your site and link up directly to PayPal in an expedient and secure manner.  It has numerous safety measures, as well, and when used properly, they protect your transactions from fraud or threat.  But don’t take my word for it.  Be encouraged to research PayPal as a viable option for your small business.  

Donna L. Faber

This concludes my series on artists and the internet.  I hope it's dissolved some of the mystery around using the internet to pursue your small business and convinced you it can be a powerful tool for marketing and selling.  With the right teacher, all of these things (blogs, domains, social networking, etc.), can be mastered by any artist who has drive and determination in their arsenal of talents.  

I wish you the best of luck as you pursue the internet and all it has to offer!

Read Part I: Blogs & Domains here.

Read Part 2: Websites & Social Networking here.

Blogged by Donna L. Faber, Board Secretary of the Art Guild of Pacifica.  Please do not reprint any part of this information without prior permission.  Visit me at www.donnalouisefaber.com and see what's happening!