Textpattern CMS support forum
You are not logged in. Register | Login | Help
- Topics: Active | Unanswered
any good online marketing people here? I have some questions for ya
Hi,
How do you successfully follow up on a contact email from a potential customer that sorta wants to buy something from your site but is not 100 percent committed?
I have a textpattern photo blog that’s been up for about 7 years. Last year I put up some small landscape paintings in addition to my photographs, they were all from an exhibition that I was in, they all sold. Recently I’ve been getting inquires from people looking at my the paintings and asking if I have more. I don’t have time to paint much right now. But I’ve been telling them that they can commission new works for a low price. This is a hobby for me not what I do for real money, just extra spending money. But recently the frequency of requests has got my attention. It’s been like two requests per month for the last 4 months. If I could turn those all into sales it would be a nice bit of extra change doing something I love. But so far I seem to scare them all away after a few emails are sent back and forth. Up to about 3 years ago I was selling photo prints off the website but no one buys those anymore since digital photography saturated the web with images, that was easy, they picked a print and you mailed it to them. Paintings and commissions are different it requires building trust, i thought a good way to handle it was to ask for a phone number after the first email. But when I did that the lady seemed to back away. I’ve been writing longish replies when I get an inquiry but it seems like the more time and detail I put into the replies the less response I get back… There’s got to be some kind of formula for following up with an iffy customer? Any ideas?
thanks sorry this is so long….
kev
edited for spelling
edited to say that all inquiries come from organic searches.
Last edited by kvnmcwebn (2013-03-14 13:45:58)
its a bad hen that wont scratch itself.
photogallery
Offline
Re: any good online marketing people here? I have some questions for ya
or does anyone know of a good online forum for this kind of thing?
its a bad hen that wont scratch itself.
photogallery
Offline
Re: any good online marketing people here? I have some questions for ya
Hi Kevin, My wife has an art portfolio site for about 13 years now. from all the emails she received since then only a handful were for real and ended up in her exhibiting in shows. None of the emails to by artworks ended up anywhere. My suggestion might not be what you are looking for but the best way is to have an online shop – using yap-shop and move on from there.
Yiannis
——————————
NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.
Offline
Re: any good online marketing people here? I have some questions for ya
well thanks for the encouragement haha :)
You mean like an etsy shop or something?
I think for me it’s a niche though, I used to sell photographs because people are nostalgic about the location. But no one’s bought prints in a few years since a bizzillion other sites came up. Anway its the same for my landscape paintings, they are all from the same location people are nostalgic.
whats the url to your wifes website?
thanks
kev
its a bad hen that wont scratch itself.
photogallery
Offline
Re: any good online marketing people here? I have some questions for ya
Might not be quite what you’re after, but this guy might have a few ideas: http://faso.com/fineartviews/9123/on-selling-art-part-1 and http://faso.com/fineartviews/9301/on-selling-art-part-2.
I just Googled around the concept of “closing the deal” with the word ‘painting’ in there (and a few searches with ‘via email’ too to see if it yielded anything) and got a few hits back that might be relevant. Or not.
Unfortunately it seems a tonne of resources are all for “the art of cloing the deal” and aimed at bigshot sales monkeys who will make you think the streets are paved with gold if you follow their magic formula (which they’ll glady sell to you!)
Edit: Make the links work..!
Last edited by jstubbs (2013-03-14 15:08:56)
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
Online
Re: any good online marketing people here? I have some questions for ya
I think you will find that many people would be happy just to buy existing works if you have them rather than go through a protracted process of commissioning a new one from you.
I think the key to successful ecommerce is to make it as frictionless as possible. The minute that you try to engage with someone and expect them to carry on the conversation, hopefully resulting in a new commission, the response rate is likely to drop off a cliff.
I realise that it is probably not what you want to hear, but I think that the chances of finding someone via a website who is willing to commission new works is vanishingly small.
Offline
Re: any good online marketing people here? I have some questions for ya
Steph, yeah that’s why i asked here because all these “free” advice marketing forums ask for a one time fee at the last part of the registration process. Also a lot of the experts on these forums are weasels looking for customers.
Steve I think you might be right, what you describe is sort of what happens…
its a bad hen that wont scratch itself.
photogallery
Offline
Re: any good online marketing people here? I have some questions for ya
thanks for those links though steph reading now.
its a bad hen that wont scratch itself.
photogallery
Offline
Re: any good online marketing people here? I have some questions for ya
Steph those articles were really good, they gave me an idea,
I’m going to try something. thanks.
its a bad hen that wont scratch itself.
photogallery
Offline
Re: any good online marketing people here? I have some questions for ya
Yiannis
——————————
NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.
Offline
Re: any good online marketing people here? I have some questions for ya
colak wrote:
kvnmcwebn wrote:
whats the url to your wifes website?
thanks
kev
whoah that’s some intense installation art.
its a bad hen that wont scratch itself.
photogallery
Offline
Re: any good online marketing people here? I have some questions for ya
kvnmcwebn wrote:
whoah that’s some intense installation art.
What can I say:/
Yiannis
——————————
NeMe | hblack.art | EMAP | A Sea change | Toolkit of Care
I do my best editing after I click on the submit button.
Offline