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By John Dawes
Promotional Emails
The biggest mistake most artists make is they email everyone on their list with the same uninteresting gig announcements over and over again. The end result is their list becomes stale and unresponsive. All the while, their efforts should have been focused on using email as a tracking and recruitment tool instead of just as a broadcast tool. Let's explore a slightly different approach to enhancing your email list in more detail. All it takes is a small change in the way you collect email addresses and how you enhance your list to target subscribers. Building an Enhanced Email ListIt is no longer effective enough to place your email address as a link on your web site or collect email addresses at shows. You need to collect more information from fans to track where they are coming from so that you can send unique email messages to those nearby the areas you perform.
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Ideally you want to contact people that are within a ten to twenty-mile radius of any upcoming performances with your events calendar. Or if you don't perform in a dense enough area, send out at the state or province level. For example, don't waste time emailing fans in Florida or overseas not likely to travel to your shows in California. The Best Information to CollectThe importance of setting your "sphere of influence" for each performance is that you will reach the largest number of people most likely to attend shows. This is not a bad position to be in since eighty percent of independent artists' CD sales are during shows. (See Three Tips For Promoting Websites Offline.) Additionally, the venues you play in will see that you can attract paying customers into their establishment. This will give you more negotiating power in getting back into the door, while getting paid what you want, the next time you're in town.Depending on how far from your home market you perform, collect either of the following pieces of information:
- Full Name, City, State, Zip Code, Email
- First Name, City, State, Email
- First Name, City, Email
NOTE:
The farther from your home market, the more information you should collect. All pieces of information are optional, except Email. Let subscribers know that your policy is to keep email announcements to a minimum and that is why you need their personal information. Otherwise, if they only provide an email address they will receive every announcement that you send. This makes perfectly clear what your intentions are with their information and shows respect for their privacy.
In my new audio book with Tim Sweeney, Using Email Effectively as an Artist or Songwriter, we discuss the clues you may be sending to industry professionals that cause them to ignore you for future consideration every time. Plus, I talk about what you can do to keep your email list from becoming unresponsive, how to break your list apart to make it many times more effective and what information to collect from fans to generate more CD sales and draw them out to shows more often.In first my book, The Complete Guide to Internet Promotion for Musicians, Artists & Songwriters, I devote an entire chapter to more email tactics that will make your messages more effective. Learn when to email, how to write more engaging messages, how often you should be emailing your contact list based on your goals, and what the most effective message bodies look like.
Be sure to pick up a copy at our web site MusicHosting.net or if you want to learn more about our email tools that can automate the techniques I've outlined for you today, review our web design section.
Conclusion:
By collecting important demographic information about your fans you can more effectively target subscribers that will come out to shows. The key is to "graduate" or split your list into meaningful segments, instead of broadcasting unto the masses. Fans that are abroad will not be bothered by emails with events that are not in their areas.
John Dawes
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About John Dawes
John Dawes is the founder and president of MusicHosting.net, a Taco Truffles Media company specializing in web hosting and design of artist web sites which have become the industry standard. John has consulted hundreds of artists and record companies, and developed several educational music business web sites. He is co-author of The Complete Guide to Internet Promotion for Musicians, Artists & Songwriters with Tim Sweeney, and has written and spoken extensively on the subject of online music business.
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