3 Email Marketing Tips For Musicians

It’s a fresh week, a new day, a new opportunity to start talking to your fans and getting them motivated by your music. In today’s video we talk about 3 email marketing tactics that are causing stellar results in my business and the business of my clients. It’s about 11 minutes long and I strongly recommend taking notes (notepad or iPad) and then implementing them into your email marketing.

The video has also been transcribed for those that like to read instead of watch.

Video Transcription: 3 Email Marketing Tips For Musicians

Hey what’s going on, Greg with Gen Y Rock Stars here, and it’s been awhile, so, I wanted to get on the whiteboard, and I wanted to talk to you guys about some things that have been, working, in our business. And I wanted to get right down to it because, we’ve been away for a little while, and, we’ve been working really hard with a lot of different clients and a lot of different niches, inside the music industry and outside the music industry, and today I wanted to talk about some, fun times, with email, and talk about, some email marketing strategies, that have been working really well, for people, and producing some great results, which creates, fun times.

So we all like fricken’ fun times, right?

That’s why we’re in this, that’s why we’re musicians, to be rock stars, to have good times, of, you know, throwing TV’s out the window, and whatever, other, crap you do, when you’re, a rock star, right? So, let’s start off, there’s going to be three, key things that we’re going to be talking about here today, that, are going to help your email marketing, and, these are going to be things you’re doing when you’re, collecting data, and when you’re sending messages to your fans.

So the first one is the data, that you’re collecting.

And, if you’ve been following Gen Y Rock Stars for any amount of time, you remember, the New Music Economy, the NME Blueprint, BandWPThemes, any of our products that we have here or just been reading the newsletter, you typically see us talking about squeeze pages, landing pages, lead capture pages, whatever you want to call them. Where, fans come, into your, sales funnel, they come to your website, page, whatever it is, your Facebook page, and you say, “hey, let me give you some free music, some free stuff, and just give me your name and email address.

Name and email address.

And it’s always, everything always talk about, name, and email address. And, what I want to tell you is, the value of a fan increases, by every piece of data that you can get out of them. And, what I mean by that, is the first tier, and the minim level should be, that name, and email address. So the name and the email is still the most vital, because that’s that’s like the bare minim, and that’s what people are willing to, you know, give you, and, you know, maybe they’ll give you their work email, their personal email, you know, a secondary they set up to  just sign up for newsletters, whatever the case is, but you get a name and an email, so now you can personalize your email, saying, “hey, first name, what’s going on”, when you get the email address you can stay in constant communication with them, you can monitor open rates and things like that. So. But that’s, that’s like, bare minim, right?

But the value of your fan increases, the more data that you can get out of them.

Tier two, is going to be getting a mobile phone number. And I say mobile because you can do so much more, with, a mobile phone. So, just a couple things we’ve been experimenting with, and again it depends on your genre, it depends on your niche, since you’re in the music industry, but, we’re working with a lot of corporate bands, you know, people who are looking to do weddings, corporate gigs, bar mitzvahs, parties, things like that, and getting this mobile number, allows you to do certain things.

You can text message blast them, we’re experimenting with, call centers, we’re experimenting with, calling all your leads, you know, things like that, like “hey we just played your event last week, or last month or last year, whenever it was, you know, is there anyone else having a party, do you know anyone else who might like a band, things like that”.

So we’ve been experimenting a lot with that, with actually going out and calling these people. Oh, revolutionary, right?

Using the telephone, to actually pick it up and call people and it’s been working with great results especially for the bands, in the covering niche, and, you know, the corporate wedding niche, things like that, it’s been really really good. And you know, also you have, uh, venue, if you’re getting venue information, like the name, email address, of like, booking agents, things like that, getting that phone nber, really really big. And then text message marketing, that’s a must. You know, being able to send messages, to your fans, like hey, we have a new alb out today, click here to buy it, maybe it’s a mobile link, a mobile download, or ring tone, or whatever it is, or you’re sending people to a show, hey we got a show tonight, you know, texting out, doing blasts that way, mobile phone.

So increases the value, over just the name and the email, now you get the phone number, now you have, multiple, channels of communication to get in touch with them, alright?

And then, the third level, is actually getting an address.

Now, this can do a good nber of things for you by getting the address. Well, one is, now you know where they live. So you can start to segment them by, city. So when you send out an email, just sending to people who live in, Austin Texas, if you’re getting ready for South-by-Southwest, which is coming up, you know, just, getting people that live in Austin, say, “hey, come to our showcase, or come to our show, maybe it’s for pizza, cause we’re not playing a showcase, we’re just crashing Southwest-by-Southwest”.

So the address is really big for segmentation. But the second thing it’s good for is, direct, mail. Whoa! Another crazy idea, right? Direct mail.

So, sending postcards, sending, you know, if you have fliers like clubflyers.com throwing a stamp on all of them saying to people, saying hey we’ve got a new album out. If you have, you know, ten thousand fans in your database, and you could send them all thirty-seven cent stamps, buy our ten dollar album and you get a really good conversion rate, that could be really really huge.

Again, going back to the corporate world, if your, wedding band is getting, ten thousand dollars a wedding and you can send out ten thousand postcards for thirty-seven hundred bucks and you get two weddings out of it, that’s a hell of a good return right there. So, direct mail, really really big and again, it increases the value over just having the name and email address, you can only do so much with that, and email marketing is huge, it’s what I, base my whole entire business around, and the business of all our clients. So this is big, it’s it’s a, nber one thing.

But now what other information can you get out of that, can you get that mobile phone number, start sending them text messages. And then if you actually pick up the phone and call them, that’s, that’s even crazier, right? And then if you can send them direct mail, if you can segment them by where they live, really really big. So this is tip number one, is your data. And how much data you can extract from your fans, because it’s really important, and it increases the value, of your fan. Alright?

So let let’s move right along cause we’ve got a lot to cover. So, number two is subject lines in your email.

So when you’re sending your email you gotta send a subject line, right? And, we’ve been experimenting with so many subject lines, we’re going to go over a ton of different stuff and show you some real live results and stuff, not today, but in the future, we’re going to really really break this down. But today, what I want to talk to you about is is one thing that’s been working, more than anything else. This is not something you could send, every single email, but it’s something you could send every, once in a while.

And the, open rates that we’re getting are nearly double what our regular open rates are, and this is for our clients, this is for other niches that are not music related, or make-money-online related and, what this thing is, the mysterious around it, is curiosity.

And I hope I spelled that right cause I am on camera and you guys are going to call my ass out on it, alright.

Curiosity, and what I mean by curiosity is, curious? See, I did that little like, tonality thing in my voice, where I kinda added that question mark, that implied question mark. Well, sending emails with, a question mark at the end of them, if you actually create curiosity, will cause people to open emails. Because people, by nature, are curious people.

You hear people having a conversation over here and you’re like, what’s going on? It’s that curiosity, you want to know what’s going on. So, something, you know, that that might work is, last show – question mark. You know, maybe obviously it’s probably not your last show as a musician, but maybe it’s the last show of the month. Maybe it’s the last show that you’re going to play a certain song. The last show that you’re offering, you know, two-for-one t-shirts or, or, whatever it is. But there’s so many things you do there, you know, add that curiosity, it’s that, mmh?

Or the dot dot dot. You know, so, you know, is it going to happen? Dot dot dot. Is what going to happen, it’s that curiosity factor. I feel that a question mark works better than the dot dot dot, but you have to have a really good, something that’s intriguing. And it’s almost like it’s a statement, but you just throw a question mark on the end of it for curiosity. So, last show, you know you could just say, last show. But if you say, ‘last show?’ It’s that tonality. And, in email that tonality is displayed through punctuation, which is that question mark. So, try curiosity out and just watch your open rates, maybe split-test it, do one, where it’s just last show, period, and then one where it’s last show, question mark. And see which one, gets a better response in open rate, again, this has been testing out really really well for us, and I think it’s going to test out really really for you, but again, results may vary, your, results aren’t typical, blah blah blah, legal mbo-jbo.

Alright, last thing guys, for today, in this video, is, testing.

And, what we want to talk about with testing and I always tell you to test things, whether you’re, we just talked about testing subject lines, or, I mean, we want to test everything. You want to test different regions, markets, whatever, but today I want to talk about testing, your CTA, your call to action.

And this is something again, we’re experimenting with a lot of different niches, a lot of different bands, a lot of different businesses, to see what kinda calls to actions people are actually clicking on, you know, and and taking and doing something with.

So today the call to action I want you to test out, I want you to send two different emails, to fifty percent of your list, and then to the other fifty percent of your list, and I want you to send, one where it’s, where you don’t, where you go, http://whateveryourlinkis.com. And you just have that, right in the email.

So you’re like, hey we got a new, t-shirt out, this week, it’s really cool. And then, put http://link.com. Whatever your link is to your t-shirt.

And then I want you to send, to the other fifty percent of the list, hey, we got a new t-shirt out, click here, to check it out.

Alright, now, there’s a couple of things you could do, with the link part. You can use something like a bit.ly link, so if you’re sending someone to a weird affiliate link, maybe to Amazon, or to clickbank, or, uh, iTunes has a really long, you know, where it’s like, itunes.com, slash one two eight seven question mark, dot asp dot php, whatever, , that looks really long and scammy. So maybe you want to try a bit.ly link, and maybe you want to try a custom bit.ly link, so it’s like, bit.ly/coolstuff, whatever, you know, your product is.

So experiment with that, or if you have your own URL, experiment with that. So, uh, http://www.stumpp.com/t-shirts. The trust that people have with actually seeing the link, we have seen to be really really responsive, in what people click on, because, when you just say click here, even though you’re telling them what to do they don’t know what they’re clicking on. And people have this fear, of, when they don’t know what they’re clicking on, to click on it.

So, by, by having the link here, if it’s non-conspicuous, might help your click through rate. So you’re looking for two different things, you’re looking for your open rate, which is your subject lines, because if your subject line sucks people are not going to open it, but, if a hundred people open it and only three people click, it doesn’t matter. So split-test this. You know, see, which people click on the link, see which people click on the other one. And then in the next email, hopefully you’ll get some more people clicking on the links and buying, you know, your cd’s, t-shirts, whatever it is.

Thanks for watching, I had a cool time making this video. It’s been a little while since I’ve been able to do this and and talk to the music crowd and I’m going to get back on my game, I promise, because there’s just, there’s just so much to talk about, and teach, and work with you guys and hear about what you’re doing, in your own businesses, and and it’s really exciting stuff and it’s a really exciting time in the music industry, really exciting time in the internet marketing world, so lots of cool stuff coming. Hope you enjoyed these three tips, let me know what you think, in the comments below, if you have follow-up questions, if you try this stuff, let me know what your open rates are, and your click through rates are, and let’s see if we can’t, help, make them stronger, better, kick more ass, and uh, I hope you had, fun times, with emails. We’ll talk to you later, peace out.

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Hope you guys enjoyed this little video and the tips and please shoot over any questions or comments in the comments below. Looking forward to seeing your results.

-Greg

P.S. Shout out to AGL Brand Clothing. They have some really nice gear for a positive lifestyle. Grab a t-shirt today, right now everything is 40% off using the coupon code BLOWOUT.

Tags: email marketing, greg rollett, Music Marketing, Video