Why is building a collector list so important?

It’s really hard to get a new customer - to get someone who doesn’t know you to buy your art. But the easiest customer to get is always the one you already have. Over your entire art-selling career, the easiest customer will always be someone who has purchased from you before. This is why selling direct and maintaining your own customer data is fundamentally important. When you sell through galleries at a 50/50 split, you often don’t maintain information on your collectors - you don’t know who’s buying your work. But when you sell direct, you keep 100% of the revenue AND you can market to those collectors in perpetuity into the future. Your collector list becomes your most valuable asset for future sales.

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Asked by general teaching point · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2021-07-22