Indie.Biz - Email Marketing Etiquette, or How to get people to come to your event

This post is about inviting people to art events– openings, performances, readings– any art event. In fact, any event at all. A lot has been written about email marketing, but most of it is super PR person oriented, and a bit frightening. It feels wrong to approach the opening night of a play with a “sell sell sell !!!” attitude, but just like businesses, most artists want people to experience their work. There’s always issues of integrity and morals involved in the equation of working for art and needing to eat, have a home, etc. And I think it’s that weird ambivalence toward publicity that makes artists particularly guilty of bad email etiquette.

Recently, I was impressed by an email from a vernissage organizer inviting me to come see her and her friend’s work. I was actually struck by how much more inclined I was to post her press release on the Indyish blog, and it got me thinking about what makes an effective invitation.

In a time when you can check a box next to someone’s name to add them to your event’s invite list (or just “invite all”), it seems extra important to actually do the work of inviting people, ie. making them feel invited, not just solicited.

I’ve made a bunch of mistakes in different contexts. Sending invitations to the wrong people, with typos, translation errors, huge attachments, too much text, exposed recipient lists, the wrong time and date….not all at once, luckily. My advice here is gleaned from these mistakes, from my past experience as an Indyish intern, as well as from some personal research online, and 12 years of having an email address.

Many of us are our own publicity people. We organize and take part in various projects and end up contacting press to get the word out about what we’re doing. Even if you’re just emailing a group of friends to give them a reminder about your show, the idea is that if the right people find out about your event in the right way, they’ll give you the right kind of publicity, without either person having to grovel or trade in their morals.

How do I send emails to press contacts?

- First of all, if you’re gonna be sending semi-regular announcements to a group of people, no matter how informal, it’s illegal in Canada to not include some kind of information on how a person can be removed from your mailing list.

- If your list includes people beyond your immediate circle of friends and family, you probably want to write the addresses as blind copy (bc), which means each person only sees that they received an email from you that was sent to other people, but they can’t see the addresses of all of those other people. If you make all the addresses visible, it’s likely that people will copy and paste them into their address book and when those people send press out, your friends get messages they never asked for.

- Another reason not to treat your contacts lightly is that for a lot of small businesses and groups, a press list is one of the most valuable assets to foster. I remember hearing from my friend who runs her own business how horrified she was to be asked for her press list as payment from another entrepreneur with whom she had collaborated. “My press list is my entire business! It took years to build up contact with that many people!” And as much as I’m down with sharing, it’s always proven much better to go through the work of making a contact, rather than copying someone’s info without the relationship. Plus, people don’t really listen to what they find annoying, and unsolicited mail is annoying.

- Build your list by making it easy for interested people to join. Have a quick form on your website, or tell people to write you an email with “newsletter” or “signup” in the subject line. Indyish uses Zookoda to organize signup and send out focused newsletters for the Monthly Mess as well as different updates for Indyish Artists, Members, and Visitors. There are lots of others that offer good services.

- Find appropriate media contacts by looking on the Contact or About page of any publication’s website. Make sure you’re addressing the right person and be specific to the department you want to reach. Follow the instructions that every different group has about how, when, who, where, and why to contact them. [Risa wrote a great post about contacting press]

What should the email say?

- I recommend a personalized introduction. The vernissage organizer started her email, “Hi Tessa”. You can hand type the introductions and paste in the body of your email, or you can look into (sometimes costly) email merge software that uses spreadsheets of your contact list to form introductions. If people sign up for a newsletter from you, don’t worry about using their first name, since they’ll be expecting to receive your messages, and are used to a newsletter voice.

- Speak directly to your audience. “I just wanted to invite you to…”. Use a professional, objective tone in your press release, but when you send the release to people, introduce it with a friendly couple of lines of personal text. You don’t necessarily need to use “I”, especially if you’re speaking on behalf of a group, but use the tone of your organization. If your organization doesn’t have a tone, get one. Also, I think that even if you’re speaking for a group, it really impresses on people to hear from a human being, whoever it may be, introducing the show.

How do I avoid being read as junk mail?

- Don’t use a spam-like subject line (”Have you heard about the VERNI$$AGE OF THE CENTURY????!!!!!!”) Caps are bad, weird characters are bad. Informative titles are best (”Pictionary, May 19-30, Vernissage May 20, 7-9″). It also makes your message easy to find in someone’s inbox.

- Don’t send big attachments to people who haven’t asked for them. You wouldn’t deliver an elephant to a stranger’s house and make them deal with figuring out what to do with it. The people you’re emailing receive tons of messages each day, and even if they don’t, most people have spam filters to avoid being delivered an elephant. Either your post will end up in someone’s junk bin (this elephant analogy is turning into a feel-good movie premise) or your big file will fill up their inbox and crash their computer. As an organization, you don’t want either.

- Include a jpg of the poster/flyer or a pdf of the press release. This is why your press release or poster should say and show everything that would be important to a news writer, while staying simple enough to be legible and interesting. You want them to come to your show, not feel like they’ve already got the show in their inbox. Your message is like an enticing party favour from the world of your event.

- As for the actual message, keep it short, and don’t use crazy colours or fonts. This will help you not look like spam.

- End your message with “Feel free to contact me if you’d like more information”.

Bottom line: You’re putting tons of energy into your event and it’s a huge deal for you, but for anyone else it’s just an art show. Learn to strike the balance between conveying the style and image of your event while keeping it contextually digestible. Otherwise, your invitation will get written off, instead of written about! And that would be a shame, considering how much effort you’ve put into the event itself. Just make it easy for people to wanna put energy into talking about it.

>> More tips on running an Independent Arts Organization at the Indie.Biz tag archive.

IndieBiz is an open column with multiple contributors. To become a contributor, Indyish Artists can title their blog posts “Indie.Biz” and tag them “indiebiz”. Anyone else can send their writing to info @ indyish . com with “IndieBiz Submission” in the subject line.