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Social media is right now the most popular tool used by musicians to promote their music and engage with fans. But with the amount of competition and content distracting fans from keeping all their attention on you, it is becoming more and more difficult to boost organic reach on social media. Hence, you should also promote your music with email marketing as you need every way you can to get your music out to the public
You surely do need an email marketing campaign to directly connect with your fans on a personal level and promote your music one on one with them, thereby creating buzz for your music. A lot of artists would ask why they would even want to add an email marketing campaign to their music promotion strategy because they don’t know the benefits a successful email marketing campaign can do to their purses.
There are numerous reasons why it should be amongst your main music marketing strategies and I have listed some below;
Reasons Why You Should Promote Your Music With Email Marketing
Research has shown that email marketing is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined for music marketing. Hence, you should consider to promote your music with email marketing.
Email marketing lets you connect with a well-targeted audience. For someone to be willing to submit their emails to subscribe to your newsletters, then definitely, they are looking forward to hearing from you. With email marketing, you get to send engaging and promotional messages directly to the most attentive part of your fan base. You can stay directly in touch, sell music, merch, tickets, and more effectively and get them to take action. You get to effectively promote your music, announce new releases, tour dates, music videos, and other important information.
More so, you can further segment those on your email lists to a specific group of demographics depending on their stage in the fan funnel. People constantly check their emails and your messages are easily found, unlike social media where your contents disappear in the feed tabs.
To promote your music with email marketing, you need to understand how to create a successful email marketing campaign.
How To Create Your Email Marketing Campaign
The idea of creating and running an email marketing campaign may sound like a heavy task but honestly, once you get a hang of it, it isn’t as hard as you think it is. To promote your music with email marketing, you’re sure to get yourself right in front of your audience, hence it is worth every sweat you go through as the benefits are greater.
The following are the steps to promote your music with email marketing:
Choose The Right Email Marketing Service For You;
The very first step to promote your music with email marketing and setting up your email campaign is choosing the email marketing service you think works best for you.
Your usual personal email like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook wouldn’t cut it here. They lack the necessary features for running a successful campaign for example according to rules from regulatory bodies, you are always to give a subscriber an option to unsubscribe from your mailing list, a personal email account doesn’t have such feature.
Plus email marketing services give you a more enhanced experience, they allow you use pre-designed templates specifically meant for music promotion emails so you don’t have scratch to design them. If you decide to custom design your own template, you can with email builder tools by adding pictures or musical posters, taglines, call to actions (CTAs) and much more.
They also allow tracking and analytic features to enable you to view and measure the success of your campaigns. With these analytics, you gain insights on how well the campaigns are performing, what it is you are doing right or wrong so you can make some changes to the approach you use for the newsletters.
There are lots of these services out there, some are free while others aren’t, below are some selected few;
Create And Grow A Mailing List
Once you have chosen a service and signed up on it, the next step to promote your music using email marketing is to start growing your mailing list, this means collecting and gathering emails from your fans. For an email to be added to a mailing list, its owner would have to opt-in/subscribe to the newsletters.
There are different strategies you can use to collect email addresses;
Send requests to close friends;
You could start by sending requests to people you already know and you are familiar with by asking for their permissions to join your mailing list.
Add an Email sign up form to your website;
Using email sign-up forms is a quick way for your visitors to subscribe to your mailing list. These forms are easily embedded into your website so visitors can insert their email addresses and hit the subscribe button.
Guide;
- The email sign-up form should be kept simple. Make the form very easily to fill out as internet users usually wouldn’t engage in stressful activities. You should request a name and email address.
- Make sure the signup form can easily be seen by visitors. Make the form have a different contrast from the website so no one would miss it. Make sure they are placed in good spots or you could do a pop-up form.
- There should be a call to action. This could be a bold and clear subscribe button and ensure you tell your visitors exactly what they are subscribing to.
Offer incentives and gifts in return for email addresses;
You could offer your fans free music downloads, discounts on merch prices, exclusive access to content, or future access to pre-sales in return for their email addresses.
Use social media to grow your list;
You can leverage your social media presence and the great features of social platforms to direct your followers and fans to your website to sign up with their emails and subscribe to your mailing list. For one, Facebook offers a call to action button option for users to sign up. You could also include a link to your website or landing page in your social media bios.
You can also announce a contest or giveaway on social media and redirect them to your website where they’d have to fill in their email addresses to participate.
Contents Of Your Newsletter
The most important step to promote your music with email marketing is the contents of your newsletter as the contents could make or mar your audience database.
Define your goals and audience for your newsletter;
So the content of your newsletters depends on what you want to achieve with an email campaign and the segment of the audience you’re targeting for the emails.
Are you trying to engage with new fans, build loyalty with existing fans, or try to make more sales through emails? All your newsletters shouldn’t be selling something as this can overwhelm your readers and also keep it simple and short, internet users don’t have the patience to read such long copies.
Subject line;
The subject is one of the first things your subscribers are going to see when they receive your emails. Through your subject line, they can quickly in seconds, decide if they want to read your email or not. So your subject line should be attention-grabbing. Make them want to read what you have to say in your email. Make sure they are short and simple to read and understand. Through the subject, they should have an idea of what the email is about.
However, you should avoid click-baiting, make sure what you fill in as a subject is a 100% related to the contents of the email. You would piss people off if they see an interesting subject, open up the email to read more, and see that the contents of the email are completely different from the subject.
If you aren’t sure which subject line is best fitting; you could write down 4 subject lines and pick out the two most intriguing, share your email list into two segments and use the different subject line for each segment and see which performs best.
Call to Action (CTA)
Every email should contain a call to action to instruct your readers on what next to do. The call to action could be a button, hyperlink, or an image that links directly to where you’d want them to go like a website.
Design;
Beautiful visuals usually interest the readers. Use the right colors and fonts that do not overwhelm but create the right amount for an eye-catching presentation.
Most newsletter software service provides you with templates and ways to design yours. Other design software like Canva has very beautiful design templates you can pick from. But remember simplicity is key. The design shouldn’t take away all the attention from the important information you are trying to share.
Analytics;
Most newsletter services usually provide analytic tools to like open rate and click-through rate (clicking on your call to action). You should use this data weekly to analyze how well your newsletters are doing and what you should change or improve for a better performance.
Frequency of sending out Newsletters
The key is consistency. Decide how often you can send newsletters, it could be once a week or once a month as long as you keep to the schedule. However, you should avoid packing in so many emails in a week, this could overwhelm your readers and yourself as well cause in the long run, you could run out of content to send.
