Mirka Hokkanen: how a multi-faceted artist makes email marketing work on her own terms

Mirka Hokkanen is a Finnish-American author, illustrator, printmaker and educator. She runs a creative business that spans fine art prints, picture books, online classes, and a shop – all while adapting to a new city or country every few years.

With audiences ranging from art collectors to parents, educators, and aspiring illustrators, keeping everyone in the loop could easily become a full-time job in itself. Instead, Mirka has made email marketing her quiet constant – a personal, low-pressure way to share real news with the people who genuinely want to hear it, without the clickbait or the hard sell.

Read on to see how she keeps email marketing simple, sustainable, and effective, without it ever getting in the way of the work she loves.

Tell us a bit about your journey as an artist. What inspired you to pursue this career path?

I’ve always been a maker and wanted to be in a creative career field. But the biggest deciding factor that pushed me toward a career as a freelance artist and illustrator was getting married to a guy in the military right out of graduate school. While I tried different “official” jobs over the years, like teaching at universities and photography, I wasn’t able to hold down anything steady because we would move every 2-3 years to a new state or country. In the beginning, I made art and networked heavily at each new location to find galleries, teaching opportunities and art fairs, but after 10 years of relentless networking and chasing opportunities, I turned to picture book illustration and online teaching. The relationships for those are built online, so it didn’t matter where we were stationed, and I could work around our kids' schedules. 

What are some key themes or styles that define your work, and what kind of audience do you connect with?

I have a few audiences: one for fine art prints and another for picture book writing and illustration, and an overlapping segment of people interested in classes in those areas. My work features a lot of animal and nature themes. My art is more representational and usually features animals, inspired by my Finnish roots. I grew up spending a lot of time in nature and with animals at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother often took me to flea markets and antique stores, and I grew to love vintage designs. All that ties in for inspiration for my work. 

My books are funny and often feature forest/nature backdrops. My picture book style is cuter than my fine art style, but you can find humor in both, and a desire to bring positivity and joy to collectors' and readers' homes with my work. Many of my books also have educational elements in them as an extra bonus for teachers and parents.   

How did email marketing become part of your overall creative business strategy?

I have been keeping an email list for around 20 years already! I started with emails from friends and family, then expanded to include people who signed up during gallery shows and events. My emails have been more sporadic for most of my career – a way for me to update followers on what I was up to, and where we were moving. But sometimes half a year would go by without an email.

In recent years, I have been trying to send one out more evenly, about once a month. I have pretty high open rates and only try to email people with real news and upcoming events, not fluff or overly salesy things. I’m not the greatest with keeping up with social media, and I prefer emails because they feel more personal and intimate, and I feel like I can be more myself in them.     

You work across books, printmaking, classes, and running a shop. How do you use email to support these different areas without overwhelming subscribers?

I try to send no more than one email a month. In recent years, I started asking people to check which news they are interested in hearing about. If I don’t have any news in a specific area for a month, I might not email those people at all. But most people seem to check all the boxes for newsletter topics, so I usually send one email, and it’s segmented to art, book and class news. People can skip over the things they don’t want to hear about and just read the parts they want to. I wish I had the time to write three different emails to three audiences, but I’m just one person and can only do so much.  

How do you approach segmentation or tailoring content for different subscriber interests?

As mentioned above, I now have people check the areas they want to receive news on, and a custom field value is automatically added based on what they checked. The only issue is that I wasn’t creating segments at the beginning of my list, so over half of my subscribers have never selected the type of news they want to receive. 

When I have a new class, I most often send an extra email to subscribers about it. That’s the instance where I most often use the EmailOctopus segmentation feature, excluding people who have opted out of receiving class updates. Otherwise, most news is included in my monthly newsletter, which goes out to everyone. 

Have you experimented with different formats, subject lines, storytelling styles, or calls-to-action in your emails? What have you learned from those experiments?

I must confess I'm pretty horrible at split testing and experimentation. I have taken marketing classes over the years and have implemented some things into my emails, but I'm not a clickbait, send-a-ton-of-emails-out-to-sell-things kind of gal.

I think most of my subscribers expect their once-a-month email and are happy to open it, so I’m more of a slow-and-steady kind of creator. I don’t super enjoy collecting and writing email newsletters. It’s always an extra thing I have to do, so if I make it harder and more cumbersome for myself, I know that I won’t go to it and do it. For me, the best thing to keep consistent and send emails is to keep it easy and low-pressure for myself.  

What results have you seen since using EmailOctopus for your email campaigns? 

I enjoy knowing that a large segment of my subscribers opens my emails. For my general mailing list, the open rate is usually between 35% and 41%. For my more specific email lists, like the monthly art challenge I started this year, the open rate is between 80% and 90%. It’s nice to know that I can reach my subscribers when I have news to share and new products available. I think one of the reasons is because the email template that I use is pleasant to read on phone screens, and things are segmented so people can easily skim emails for the info they want.  

Do you track email performance through metrics like opens and clicks, or do you focus more on conversions such as purchases, sign-ups, and community interaction?

I check open and click rates to see if things are resonating. When I was doing more fine art and only had an audience for that, I had nice conversion rates for new art sales. But I’ve been quieter with new art because of books for several years, and can feel that the art collectors aren’t as active as they used to be. Now that my kids are growing up and I'm starting to have more time for art again, I am thinking of new ways to step it up and wake my collectors back up. 

I check new signups before I send a newsletter and adjust contact data if needed. It’s encouraging to see, after events, that there are new sign-ups and people wanting to hear about my work.   

How do you see your email marketing evolving as your creative business grows?

I have gotten to be more sophisticated over the years and use a few different landing pages to capture different audiences.

In the future, I need to improve automations for new subscribers and create stronger lead magnets to capture them. I’d also like to segment my email list more effectively and send more targeted emails to art collectors vs parents and educators. It’s all a work in progress, and I improve little by little. 

What advice would you give to other creatives considering EmailOctopus and generally email marketing?

Email lists are something that you can control, in contrast to social media, where you are at the mercy of algorithms and luck. I’d say everyone should start one at the beginning, because in a saturated world, it’s a way to communicate directly with our followers.

I’d say be your authentic self in your emails, and create a schedule that works for you that isn’t stressing you out.