As a musician, connecting with your audience and building a dedicated fan base is crucial for success. While social media and streaming platforms offer excellent opportunities for exposure, there’s one powerful tool that often gets overlooked: email marketing. This comprehensive guide will touch upon the need for email marketing for musicians, and break down the necessary steps to begin your very first email campaign.
Why email marketing for musicians?
You might be wondering, is email marketing even all that necessary? Why not just stick to social media and traditional marketing strategies? And to that, we respond, there actually are quite a few compelling reasons to consider email marketing for musicians. Here are a few.
Form an authentic connection and communication with your audience
The tendency to keep things short and snappy in many forms of marketing sometimes comes at the cost of removing ‘substance’ from your message.
The longform nature of email marketing copy means you can express yourself more fully and more authentically to your fans. Be it telling a story, talking about your feelings regarding an upcoming tour or release, you can be sure your audience will be listening.
Nobody knows the power of coming across as authentic better than singer-songwriter Lorde, who, via her carefully curated and intimate, personal emails sent out to thousands of fans, has been able to make them feel like a “close and personal friend” has written to them. Lorde’s emails include updates from her life and music, lots of pictures of herself, and curiosities she finds on nature walks, like this strange bioluminescent seaweed.
“Best thing seen this year – bioluminescence activated by the movement of the waves. does anyone know what kind of seaweed this is? Where my biologist SCsWWTS at?)” – Lorde’s caption in her email. Source: Ensemble
Social media trends go in and out of fashion, but email is consistent
Trends on social media change drastically weekly, or even daily. Not only can it get tiring to stay on top of these dynamic trends, it’s also easy to get ‘left behind’, and for your marketing to get stale if you rely solely on social media.
Email marketing, on the other hand, is a relatively stable form of marketing. You can rely on it to stay consistent over a longer period of time.
Drive traffic to other platforms
Email can be a great jumping off point to drive traffic to other platforms, such as social media or your website. It’s also useful to plug in links to your music on various streaming platforms.
So, now that you have some reasons to consider email marketing, how do you do efficient email marketing for musicians? Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you out.
Step-by-step email marketing for musicians
Follow these steps to ensure your next email marketing campaign goes smoothly.
1. Build a mailing list
Building a curated mailing list is the most important first step for anyone who’s looking to get serious about their email marketing.
This applies to you as a musician, since an ideal musician email list will consist primarily of people who are actually interested in listening to your music, buying your merch, and attending your gigs.
This is where a signup form and lead magnets come in.
Use your website or social media channels to publicize your signup form–a form used to collect email addresses to populate your mailing list.
Global music phenomenon Taylor Swift’s website has a signup form embedded at the bottom of her website.
To incentivize people to sign up, use lead magnets. These are free products, services, or discounts you offer in exchange for getting people’s email addresses. For you as a musician, this could look like an exclusive song, a live version of a song, or special behind-the-scenes footage.
This article contains some more exciting lead magnet ideas you can use.
2. Prepare your emails
Now that you have your mailing list all prepped with an enthusiastic, engaged, and (hopefully) responsive community, the next step is to prep the emails you’re going to send.
There are various types of emails you can send. The most common email that you will want to send initially is a welcome email.
A good welcome email will always thank the recipients for signing up, deliver on any promises (such as lead magnets), request them to do something (such as sharing the signup link further), and tell them what they can expect going forward.
Other types of emails you should look into are ones detailing album pre-sale/sale information, tour dates, updates on new music or merch, and regular newsletters keeping fans in the know.
Here’s a short, but impactful email from the RnB sensation, The Weeknd, which focuses on announcing new merch.
3. Set up your first campaign
Decided which email you’re going to send? Now it’s time to set up your first campaign.
The first thing to do is to choose an email marketing platform that works for you. There are multiple options out there for you to choose from, such as PosterMyWall’s all-in-one email marketing platform which lets you select from a wide range of music email templates, edit your drafts, send out campaigns, and measure performance.
After you’ve picked a suitable email marketing platform, it’s now time to create a jazzy email marketing template. Here are some example music email templates you can look at for inspiration, or edit directly.
These music promo email templates show the possible kinds of content to include in your email, such as pictures, links to tickets, details about upcoming events, and links to streaming services and social media.
The last thing in setting up your first email campaign is to perfect your copy, including your subject lines and preview. After all, what good is a perfectly written email that doesn’t even get opened? Here are 6 tips for subject lines and preview text that promise higher open rates.
4. Measure results
After your campaign is successfully sent out, your work still isn’t done.
Keeping an eye on your campaign performance is an extremely important part of email marketing for bands and other musicians, not just because it will keep you updated on the success (or lack thereof) of a particular campaign, but also because measuring results will give you valuable insight into what’s working and what needs improvement.
Here’s a list of metrics you need to watch out for:
- Email open rate: This is the percentage of people who actually open your email
- Click-through rate: This is the percentage of people who click the link(s) in your email
- Bounce rate: This is the percentage of emails for a particular campaign that ‘bounced’, or did not reach the intended recipients’ inbox
- Unsubscribe rate: This is the percentage of people who unsubscribed from future emails
As is probably evident, you want the open and click-through rates to be as high and the bounce and unsubscribe rates to be as low as possible. There are a number of ways you can achieve this, and the main one is to constantly keep updating your mailing list(s) to ensure you only have people who are interested in receiving, opening, and reading emails from you.
Here’s an article that elaborates further on must-track email metrics.
Start your email marketing campaign
By now you might be feeling more inclined towards giving email marketing a shot, and might even be feeling confident enough to start your very first campaign. The first step forward is designing a signup form template.
Try it out and let us know what this new addition to your music marketing plan turns out for you!
