An important part of building your art career is networking and building relationships. Probably the most important aspect of this is managing or keeping track of those relationships via a Mailing List, Marketing List or Contacts List.

If you can grow your list with genuine contacts and manage your relationships with those people it will certainly reflect in more people attending your exhibitions, more sales and more commissions.

How to compile a Contacts List
The best way to manage a Contacts List or Mailing List is by keeping a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet. See below.

Using Microsoft Excel
Excel has functions which enable you 'sort' the data, so you can view all contacts by order of 'state' for example, or all 'family contacts', all 'past purchasers' or simply 'alphabetically'. In this way you can easily compile different custom lists for different purposes in the future.

Setting up an Excel document to manage your contacts list may take a little time to initially do, but it is worth doing. If you don't know how to use Excel, search online for free Excel Tutorials or improve your art business skills by doing a short course a local Community College.

What data to collect
When creating your contacts list try to collect as much information as you can, and always use separate columns becuase this will enable you to selectively create custom lists if you need to. Useful columns to have are:

• First Name, Last Name
• Address, Suburb, City, State, Postcode
• Phone, Fax, Mobile Email
• Business Name, Website
• Relationship - eg: Family, Friend, Workmate; Job1, Workmate Job2, Buyer; know, Buyer; Don't know. Media; know, Media; Don't know.

The relationships column/s is particularly important, when sending our your Exhibition Invitations you may not want to send to the full list, or you may want to send slightly separate letters to "Buyer; Know" for example: The buyers of artwork who you know personally.

Printed Mailing Lists:
The data in Microsoft Excel can be ported into various labelling programs including Microsoft Word allowing you to easily print address labels using the stick-on label paper available from any stationary store. This will give your posted promotional material a professional edge and save you time. Additionally if your contacts list becomes so long that you can no longer handle it yourself you can provide your spreadsheet to a mailing service and they will fulfil your mail-out for you.

Online mailing lists:
If you have your own artist portfolio website, you may want to look into implementing a simple database where visitors can subscribe to your email list. Many Content Management Systems provide this as a standard module. However simple forms can also be built by any webs designer. Bulk Email and List Management Facilities need to be built by a database programmer. 

Starting a contacts list is certainly a very good start to your marketing plan but don't forget to actually use the list for promotion, see: Artists Business Cards, Artist Websites, Online Marketing or Art Flyers & Postcards.