Artists: Better Serve Your Customers by Knowing Who they Are

Having spent twenty years in the gallery business, I’ve seen every type of buyer. I’ve worked with celebrities, business people, the retired, the young, the old and everything between. In past posts, I’ve encouraged you to treat every contact as a potential collector – you never know when someone you least expect will turn into a buyer. If you’ve been selling art for any length of time, you’ve certainly established a base of collectors from many walks of life.

After a while, however, you probably began to notice patterns among your buyers. You may notice that most of your buyers are of a certain age, that many work in a particular field, or come from a certain region. Eventually, you might even start to feel that you can spot a buyer from a distance based on your experience with past buyers.

I would caution you to be careful about this. It’s great to give someone who fits the profile of your buyers care and attention, but if you aren’t careful, you might develop a prejudice against people who don’t fit this profile. This may lead you to miss out on sales to those who are outside that profile because you don’t put your full efforts into engaging them.

With that caution out of the way, I would encourage you to spend some time analyzing your past buyers to see if you can discern common traits among your buyers. Understanding who your buyer is will help you better target your art marketing efforts to reach them. If you know who your buyer is, you will be better able to place your art in galleries or other venues where your buyer can see your work. You will be better able to say the right things about your work in your artist’s statement to appeal to the buyer’s sensibilities. You will be able to price your work in a way that will fit your buyer’s budget.

To the extent that you are able, try to answer the following questions about your buyers:

• Age?
• Professional background?
• Residence location?
• Gender?
• Are your buyers putting the work in their home or business?

So how do you get this information? You don’t want to come across as an interrogator as you work with your clients, but by engaging them in good conversation and asking a lot of questions you can start to tease out these details. Questions are incredibly beneficial – they not only give you information about your buyer, they help you engage at a deeper level with the buyer.

Prospecting for Information When You Are Not in Direct Contact With the Buyer

What if you are selling your work through galleries and not having direct interaction with buyers? Train your galleries to get this information for you by asking them about the buyers.

“I know you can’t share the clients’ contact information,” you might say, “but tell me a little bit about them, where are they from? Did they mention their professions? Where is my piece going to be displayed?”

If you want to dive a little deeper and you have the client’s home address, you can also use a site like Zillow.com to discover the approximate value  of the client’s home and how long they’ve been there. Again, you want to exercise your best judgement here. I’m not suggesting that you try to invade your client’s privacy, but understanding the home value (using public documents) can help you in your future marketing efforts if you decide, for example, to do a direct mailing campaign.

In the end, all of this research will help you better serve your customers, and better place your art in front of those who are most likely interested in it.

I received an email from an artist who recently went through this process of analyzing her clientele. I asked her permission to share her findings here so that you may see what she discovered by spending some time getting to know her clients.

MY COLLECTORS: A PROFILE

Prompted by an article I had read, I looked back at my art sale records to find out what sort of person had been buying my paintings. Did they have anything in common?

I found that my patrons were usually married women or married couples, most with solid upper-middle incomes and traditional homes, in upscale rural or suburban areas. The great majority were local, residing within 50 miles of my home, where I maintain a studio/gallery. I was also selling paintings to a husband or wife who was buying the work for their spouse, often as a surprise because the spouse had had an opportunity to see and admire the work previously in person. The majority of my collectors have purchased more than one artwork from me. Most of my collectors were known to me before they bought a painting.

These buyers had a range of exposure to art, and most were in the early stages of being bitten by the “collector bug,” rather than being seasoned collectors. In a number of cases, I had sold work to people who had never purchased an original artwork before, and their excitement at doing so was extremely rewarding. Nearly all of those first-time buyers returned to purchase additional pieces from me.

These collectors valued what I have to offer, which is reasonably priced paintings, in a range of sizes that are still small enough to fit into the wall spaces offered by most traditional homes, executed in a loose but still representational style that emphasizes surface texture and the individual stroke. My collectors have always commented on and liked my framing, which they say fits seamlessly into their homes and is most often a simple and unadorned gold frame setting off the piece.

Some of my collectors have loved my watercolors and others my oils, and although they tend to go with their preference in repeat purchases, there are instances of crossover. The subject matter they choose is of interest: my plein air landscape work painted while traveling and during plein air competition events is quite often purchased by a local buyer from that location because the scenes will be familiar. A well-executed landscape of a remembered, beloved location will also trigger a purchase from a buyer, as well as a painting of a particular subject such as skipjacks or horse racing for those who follow what I do in those areas. Those who purchase watercolors may be attracted to still lifes or florals, which I often paint in watercolor and much more rarely in oil. Those who like watercolors usually have a strong preference for the medium, and so will also seek out landscape subjects.

Rather than seeing the wide range of collectors I had expected to find, I saw a pattern of patrons who were most often female, married, in their 50’s and 60’s, well established financially, and who leaned to the traditional in their tastes. Although I knew many women buyers to be married, the female purchasers often felt confident in their choices without a consult with their spouse, whereas this was much less often true when men made the purchases—these purchases were more often made as a couple, or as a gift preselected by the wife.

Prepared by Claudia Brookes: claudiabrookes.com

Have you analyzed your customers? If so, what did you learn? Share your thoughts and reaction to this article in the comments below.