What should I focus on to prepare my email marketing for Q4?

Focus on five key areas: (1) Housekeeping—consolidate all your email addresses from every source into one list that you can actually send to. (2) Email reply hacks—ask open-ended questions in your emails to encourage replies, which improves your inbox placement and deliverability. (3) Friends, family, and coworkers—send them one email letting them know you’re a working artist with sales coming up; do this once a year without guilt. (4) Capture more emails—run contests, add lead capture to your website, collect emails at shows, because new emails captured before Q4 are especially valuable. (5) Increase your email frequency—send more often than you currently do, building up to the actual sales periods. These steps are easy to implement, they’re not things most artists do, and if you start now (early October), you’ll see results before the holiday buying season hits full force.

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Asked by synthesized from teaching · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2025-10-03