10 Tips For Email Marketing Your Music To Your Fans
How can you really keep in touch with your fan base, especially when they want you too…send them an email. Email marketing is not dead. Your family, friends, and fans who want to hear about what new in your music career and life want for you reach out an touch them with great current info to keep them up to date. Here are a my top 10 tips for creating a great email marketing campaigns.
1. Make sure your content is current. When you send that email out, make sure it does not refer to comething that happened 2 months ago in the news unless it has something to do with what your talking about today. Your readers don’t want “late” information.
2. Know the “vibe” of you emails and what you want them to do for you. Do you want the emails you send out focused on getting people to buy your latest download, or do you want to drive them to your website or both. Make sure whatever direction you decide, you convey that in your email message and make it easy for your readers to follow…like a link back to your site or an embedded buy button that takes them to the purchase page on your cdbaby.com page.
3. Make sure they also know its you all the time. Everytime one of your readers opens your email they should see the same logo for your music company or your band’s name, in the same place. You should make it easy for your fans to know who you are verytime, plus, you start really making name for yourself when your emails are designed this way. You “branding” your image in your readers minds.
4. Create a subject Lines that get them to open the email. What you right in the subject line is probably the most important part of your email campaign. It’s got to pop and appeal to the reader’s emotions and inspire curiosity. You can follow my lead by offering Secrets, Tips, and Tactics, or Little Known Stratetigies for…as some examples of lsubject lead ins for your campaigns.
5. Tell them right away What you want them to Do. You don’t want your message to get lost in the body of the email. Put it at the very top of the email, maybe in the subtitle. You might to say, “Download the band’s new song ‘YourSong’ now being offered as a ringtone.” Make sure you include the links to right pages.
6. Really be you, not the business. Make your emails personal. Your friends and fans want to feel that they really are special and have a connection with you on a personal level. I think that’s why Oprah is so huge around the world. From the start, she could relate to her audience AND she would share her personal experiences and struggles. Marketers have found that with personability comes a higher rate of emails being opened. Don’t be scared to let your hair down a bit. People feel comfortable with others who know they are only human. If you can, send your email that are addressed to the person’s name…Hi Jennifer…you know what I mean…it makes it even more personable.
7. Write mostly text…not too many images, but make it pretty. You want your emails to load quickly. Too many images, flash, video, etc…can slow down the loading of your email. Many people nowadays don’t have the patience for emails that load slowly. They will just click off of it and move to the next email and your email is lost forever.
8. Be consistent, follow-up but don’t bug. This is such a touchy area. Some marketers say that you have to have a frequency campaign before any viewers actually make a purchase on your site or after watching commercials or seeing ads. Supposedly, a fan needs to hear from you or see an ad at least 5 times before they may buy something. If they do, make sure you follow with a personal thank note email. Maybe send an email once a week for 12 weeks at first, then slow it down to once a month, if you have your campaign set up on auto-pilot.
9. Repeat the types of emails you find get opened. If you find that a certain type of email always gets opened every time you send it out, create more emails set up in that same fashion. Many email managers give you the ability to measure your results and see how many on your list actually opened the emails.
10. Track ‘em. Email marketing managers like Constant Contact and Aweber have email tracking so you can figure out what your fans like to read about. You can try to hone in on what works and what doesn’t by changing the subject headlines, or the format of the newsletter itself. You can also see if sending an email out Monday night is better than Wednesday morning, so can see when your emails are more than likely to get opened.
Much success to you in your email marketing adventures!
