Promotions, promotions, promotions.
Fun for everyone involved. Or is it?
They can definitely be king for getting those tasty cash injections into our art business that we dream of, but if you aren’t careful they can complicate your life.
Let’s start with the basics. What is a promotion, in the context of an artist?
In a nutshell, it’s attracting attention to a product you have (painting, print, service, etc.) and more often than not, offers some sort of incentive that entices customers to buy.
Now there are two main principles behind successful promotions: urgency and scarcity.
Urgency is exactly as it sounds – instilling that “I need to hurry” vibe that makes people take action rather than sit on the fence.
Scarcity is similar to urgency, but tends to rev up the “fear of missing out”, or FOMO factor. If you offered a “promotion” indefinitely, then it would make no difference to the customer if they bought today, next week, next year, or even never. But to the artist? That makes a big difference.
So a good promotion infuses both scarcity and urgency into their offer, and also touches on a few other factors as well.
Benefits – a good promotion will mean that your customer will experience a wonderful benefit, and you conveying that clearly can truly make or break a good promo.
Excitement – You might be offering a killer promo on something, but if your fans are lukewarm towards the idea then your promo will fall flat on its face.
Community – infusing an element of community into your promotion can be a super powerful tool for not only bringing in more customers in the moment, but creating superfans. People want to feel part of something bigger than themselves.
Promotions can be powerful tools for your art business – they drum up some serious excitement among your fans, and the quick cash injection into your life is always enthusiastically welcomed.
But there are downsides that you have to keep your eyes on as well.
Launch promotions too often and you train your audience to only buy then – you’ll see sales during “regular seasons” drop of heavily.
Pushing hard on sales can make you feel desperate and slimy – so managing your mindset during this time is key.
And finally, offering promotions all the time will cause the perceived value of your artwork to drop – which is the last thing that we want.
As long as you keep these factors in mind, you’re golden.
So let’s jump into 5 killer promotions that you can run for your art business that will increase profits without making you feel slimy, desperate or like a sell-out.
Special Commission Types
Emphasis on the “special” aspect here. Lots of artists integrate commissions into their income strategy as they’re truly a wonderful way to connect with your customers and create some great art.
But if you offer commissions all the time, then you end up lacking the scarcity and urgency aspects to make this an actual promotion.
So what you can do instead is to offer a special commission type for a limited time – this works especially well if it aligns with an event that already drums up excitement.
Rather than giving your customers a lot of choice, you create the choice for them. Offer one main commission type, make your cart “open” for a limited amount of time, then the offer goes poof.
Here’s an example.
Say Christmas is on the horizon and you want to offer a special commission type for your fans. You don’t take a lot of commissions during the rest of the year, so this is a treat.
Rather than offering any type of commission, you’re going to be opening up your “cart” for 2 weeks in early October where you will take on anyone that wants a portrait of their pet that will be done on 8″x10″ cradled canvas. Oil paint, busts only with simple backgrounds.
You can choose to offer a slight discount here if you want, but it’s not necessary.
Let’s go over our Promotion Factor Checklist.
Urgency – you’re only taking them for 2 weeks, so after that they miss out.
Scarcity – you don’t take commissions often, so if they miss out they will have to wait a long time to get another opportunity.
So why does this work?
Setting up a workflow for these commissions is easy-peasy since they are structured very similarly. Whereas you might spend a lot of time going back and forth communicating with a customer for other commission types where the guidelines are looser, if set up the promotion with clarity in mind the process will flow so much smoother.
That being said, watch out for areas where details can get a bit fuzzy, and ensure that things are crystal clear. Define exactly what commission type is being offered, as well as timeline guarantees, costs, shipping and other details.
BOGO With a Print Release
We all love those amazing folks that leap at the opportunity to buy our original paintings, but you can’t deny the fact that they are higher ticket items and there are only one of them.
Prints are a great way to get your art into the hands of more people, and because they’re more affordable it lowers the barrier for becoming a new collector.
For this promotion, rather than offering discounts on the prints, you offer them at full price but you offer a buy-one-get-one deal.
Why does this work?
In most cases, whether you make 1 print or 100, the work that you put into it is relatively the same (short of packaging and mailing the prints to your customers).
Prints typically have a higher profit margin for artists as well, so offering your customers an additional free item doesn’t come at a steep cost to the artist.
Offering a BOGO deal also doesn’t reduce the value of your latest print, which is something we always have to be conscious about when running promotions.
You can give your customers a choice for their extra free print (this does take extra work on your behalf), or you can instill a bit of mystery into the mix by choosing it for them.
It’s also a great way to clear out extra stock!
Free Gift with Every Order
This works similar to the BOGO offer, but you can scale the gifts according to the purchase value.
If someone buys a print, you might send along another smaller print as a free gift.
If someone buys a mid-sized original, maybe you can send them a pack of 3 11″x14″ prints that all pair nicely.
If someone buys a $1000+ original paintings, you can show your gratitude by sending a more exciting package filled with more prints, stickers, or even a smaller personalized original painting.
This is especially powerful for repeat customers if you have always focused on delivering epic value. The thought of a mystery gift coming in with their art can be seriously exciting.
Free Shipping
You can pair this with other promotions, but it also works super well stand-alone.
The psychology behind how people view shipping fees is interesting – people typically view shipping costs as an “extra” fee that doesn’t add value to their purchase.
We’ve all been there – shopping online for something, then once we hit our cart and see that we have to pay shipping fees, we bail entirely.
So offering free shipping can do wonders to remove that mental barrier that stands between your fan staying a fan, or becoming a paying customer.
You might want to give some thought towards setting restrictions – if your customer isn’t paying for the cost of shipping then you have to eat the cost. And shipping a painting locally is going to be vastly different from shipping that same painting to the other side of the planet.
So be wary of what it actually costs to ship your artwork to different locations (most couriers have rate calculators online now).
Another thing to consider is minimum purchase in order to get free shipping. If you offer small prints for $10, consider that shipping that print might also cost close to $10.
Proceeds Go To A Good Cause
Rather than discounting your work, offering free shipping or a gift, you can choose to donate a portion of the profits (or in rare cases, all of the profits) to a fund, charity or cause of your choice.
Choose something that will strongly resonate with your audience.
Afterward, when you have the opportunity to actually donate those profits, you can share the details with your audience to boost the happy feelings all around.
There’s also a psychological aspect to this as well – donating to a good cause usually comes with an endorphin rush, and you’ll actually fall under that umbrella since you initiated the donation process.
Plus, donating to causes we believe in is always a powerful thing. Spread the love!
Bonus Promotion: Flash Sales
We can’t deny that discounts DO get people revved up and typically bring in a flood of sales, but they should be used with caution.
Offering discounts too often will train your audience to wait for those discounts, which not only will lower the perceived value of your art (we want to avoid this at all costs) but they won’t purchase your art when you aren’t offering discounts.
This makes for sad artists, womp womp.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t even offer discounts though – you just need to be a bit more strategic.
My favorite was to do this is by doing flash sales.
But here we are putting extra emphasis on dialing the urgency knob up to 11 by only offering the flash sale for 24 to 48 hours.
Give your fans a bit of warning – post on social media, send an email to your list a few days before with a teaser of what is to come. Be crystal clear on when the flash sale starts, and even more clear about when it ends.
They need to be aware that this is a very limited time deal, and the second the timer expires prices are going back up.
Every single time I have run a flash sale, I’m blown away by the results. Floods of sales roll in, and when you are careful and only run these in a surprise fashion and super infrequently, you avoid training those bad “I’ll wait” habits into your fans.
So those are 5 killer promotion types that you can run for your art business that will skyrocket profits without making you feel slimy, desperate or like a sell-out.
Which of these promotion types do you want to try first?
Want to take an even bigger flying leap towards your (inevitable) success as an artist?
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