INF GLOBAL.COM: BAND EMAIL STRATEGY BY

Key Concept: Sending emails to your fans has a lot more to do with science than it has to do with art.

As digital strategy geeks, we subscribe to a ton of artist email lists. We do this because we want to see what others are doing and also because we want to regularly put ourselves in the role of the fan, reading things and experiencing things as a fan would. Unfortunately, 90% of the band emails we receive aren’t effective…and actually, many of them cause us to find the “unsubscribe” link after only a few emails from the artist.

Moreover, if you are an artist or you are in a band and you confidently think your fan emails are good and effective, I would like to ask you how you know this is the case. How do you know you are successful? Are you assuming your emails work because people come out to your shows and because the fans you encounter mention that they like your emails? I would like to politely challenge your confidence and proclaim that if you’re not actually tracking, analyzing and optimizing your emails, based on real response data – than you truly have no idea if you are successful with your emails or not. But don’t worry…. you’re not alone.

We’ve learned that most artists have no idea how to send an effective email to their fans and almost no one is taking a scientific approach, looking at tangible and measurable results to improve what they’re doing. This experience has prompted us at Pet Marmoset to take a closer look at our clients and the artists we work with in a wide variety of capacities. And as embarrassing as it may be, we found that we’ve been doing a terrible job of helping and informing the artists we work with as to what the should be doing to succeed with email marketing. As such, we’ve decided to dedicate this essay to “Band Email Strategy 101″ – explaining the very basics that every artist should be doing, packaged together into 8 easy steps.

The bottom line is that connecting with fans is a crucial endeavor for bands and artists alike. It’s something that should never be taken lightly, and when done correctly, it should play a central role in growing a fan base and engaging a community or a tribe around the artist. While trends prove that social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LastFM are on the rise for fan engagement and interaction, I challenge anyone who would lead you to believe that email is a dead medium. In fact, depending on the demographic of your fans, I would argue that email continues to stand strong as the leading fan communication channel for most artists.

Okay, before we get started, we want to throw out a few questions to get your wheels turning…

Do you keep and maintain your fan email list in your Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail account (or something similar)?
Is the only time you send emails to your fans is to let them know about an upcoming show?
Do your fan emails generally go something like this, “Hey Everyone! We’re playing a show tonight. We’ll be a (insert venue name) at (insert performance time) and it’s going to be a fun time! Please come out and check out our show. Thanks! (insert band name)?
Have you never sent an email to your fans or do you only send out a fan email once or twice a year?
Have you been “doing what you do” (recording music, playing shows, playing in bands, etc) for more than a year or two and your email list is less than 100 people?
Is there nobody on your team regularly reviewing the analytics and results of the emails you send and working to improve the results for future emails you plan to send?

If you answered yes to one or more of the above questions, then you definitely need some help with your fan emails. Thankfully, you’re in the right place. Follow the guidelines below and you’ll soon find a significantly increased effectiveness and success rate with the emails you send… and you will likely grow your list significantly.

Whatever you do, don’t ever write your email without first taking a minute or two to sketch out a quick outline. And better yet, don’t write an email when you are rushed, at work, or when you find yourself in a panic the day before a show when you just realized that you forgot to send an email out. Trust me that your email will be ten times more successful if you simply slow down, give yourself some time, and create a brief and simple bulleted outline first, before you get too deep with writing the actual email.

What should your outline look like? Your outline should focus on these three things:

The greeting and opening 1-2 sentences must be highly compelling. Many recipients will only read the subject line and the first couple of lines of the body of your email, so make these count and try to include your call-to-action.

What is a “call-to-action”? With regard to sending an email to fans, a call-to-action is the desired action you are asking of your fans and readers, supported by the core message and objectives of your email. Examples include inviting them to come to your upcoming show or inviting them to buy a ticket, downloading a free song, making a purchase in your webstore, exploring your new website, becoming a fan on your Facebook page, following you on Twitter, etc. A call-to-action can be free to your fans or it can require a commitment of time and/or money. Honestly, a call-to-action can be just about anything you want it to be.

One easy to read and easy to understand call-to-action, above the fold. One of the biggest problems I often see in band emails is multiple call-to-actions (ie: upcoming show AND a new song AND a record release AND a new press review AND a new video, etc) or the call-to-actions are buried at the bottom of a long, wordy email. You should really work hard to only have one call-to-action in a single email. While it’s great that you have so much going on that you want to tell your fans about… you should keep a list of everything you want to announce and either save the news for future emails or use your other communication channels (ie: blog, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc) to get the word out. Simplicity is crucial and keeping your emails brief with only one call-to-action is a must.

When I say to keep your call-to-action “above the fold”, I mean to keep it in the top half of your copy or email. Do not place your call-to-action at the bottom of your email or even in the lower half. Most of your fans won’t read the whole email, so it’s critical to get to the point as early as you can.

Keep it brief. Although it’s implied in the two above bullet points, brevity is the key to success. As you know from opening and reading all of the email that you receive on a daily basis, your window opportunity is miniscule at best. You may only have about 5 seconds or less of someone’s time to convey your message and hopefully get them to click on something or take the appropriate action. Try your best to write no more than two paragraphs, along with one clickable image and some bulleted info with links is ideal. If you really need to say more, three brief paragraphs is the absolute maximum amount of text that should be in one email.

Please note that if you have more to say, but you feel too constrained by these guidelines, you can post more information on your website or your blog or your Facebook page and then simply provide a link or two in your email that invites your readers to “go here for more information.”

Okay, now that your draft outline is complete and has been edited and refined, it’s time to starting working up the actual email, step-by-step.

While all recipients read the Subject line, a minority (10 to 40 percent) of emails are actually opened. Knowing who the email is from is of foremost importance. As such, always make sure your email clearly comes from a clear and legitimate band email address(ie: name@yourbandname.com or band@yourbandname.com) – not a random @yahoo.com or @gmail.com or @hotmail.com account. And as a general rule, first names, such as “johnny@thedimes.com” are better than group, band or company names, such as “band@thedimes.com” or “info@thedimes.com”.

When considering what to write for your Subject Line, consider this question: does the email appear to be relevant to the person I’m sending it to? Or better yet, ask yourself: why would someone care about this email I’m sending out? As such, having a strategic,specific and relevant subject line should not go overlooked. This element of a band email is one of the easiest to test and can have a significant impact on the overall results. Is it something that makes one want to open and read more? Can the reader quickly and easily understand the objective of the email while only reading the subject line?

An example of an effective email subject that we recently used for The Dimes went like this:

Subject: “DIMES NEWS! Free song attached + Show this Friday Night at Doug Fir!“

Take note that without actually opening the email, the recipient can quickly and instantly gather from the subject line alone who the email is from, what the call-to-action is, and what to expect to read about in the email. And yes, I already broke one of my own rules by having two call-to-actions. Honestly, if an artist could attach (direct download link) a free song to every email, I think every email would be more effective. As such, if one of your calls-to-action is a free song download, I’m okay with two calls-to-action. One should also keep in mind that it’s a general rule of thumb in email marketing is to keep your subject line to 50 characters or less.

Something you want to consider is that many email programs today will display the first few lines of your email in a preview pane. In addition to Outlook, Entrourage and Mac Mail users, this is also true for many Gmail, BlackBerry, and iPhone users. Important questions to consider when developing your Subject line and first two lines of your email:

Is your call-to-action and/or the first two lines of your email clearly visible from an email Inbox without opening the email or scrolling? Do you have alt tags for your images in case some recipients have images turned off? (Note: Alt tags are the text image description that readers see in the place of images if images are blocked or are turned off from view).
Is the preview pane going to show an image or text? This is important to know as many web-based email systems now default to turn images off and will only display the placeholder text. Making sure that your header or email format will allow for clearly visible text and not simply images will increase your chances for reads and conversions.
When viewing your subject line amidst a full email Inbox, does your Subject line and email preview make your message stand out from the others? Consider using some compelling language, all caps on one important key word, and other tweaks to the Subject line that may make your message stand out. (See The Dimes example above)

As I explained above, the first two lines of the body of your email are the most important. This is what many readers see first in a preview pane, it’s what they read first when they open the email, and it’s ultimately what hooks them to continue reading. I cannot emphasize this enough. While the first two lines require a crucial hook and appeal to the reader, don’t forget that the whole email is important. Here’s a quick guideline for writing an effective body of your email:

Hook your reader with the first two lines. Enough said.
Know your audience and speak to them like you know them – like you would speak to a friend or a family member. Don’t make it sound like it’s a broadcast message to thousands of people. Today’s fans and consumers have learned to turn-off to broadcast messages. Instead, take some care into making your message sound more intimate, more familial, entertaining, and inviting. Create something that puts soft, warm, and fuzzy feelings into the tummy of the reader. Note: This is where many artists I know push back and tell me that “it’s not my personality to sound soft, warm and fuzzy” and “it’s just doesn’t feel natural or sincere to write emails like this.” My response is this: You’re not writing just any email here. This is special and should be treated differently than what you would normally do. Remember – what you’re doing here is working to build a tribe of believers – a fan base that you are ultimately inspiring and leading, and hopefully will help build your career and evangelize your music out to the masses. If you play it bland and straight and feel that it just doesn’t work for you to write a compelling, warm and fuzzy email such as this, you might as well stop reading now and go back to checking the play count on your Myspace page.
Be concise. Be concise. Be concise. Yes, once in a blue moon, I believe it can be valuable to tell a story and write something a little longer that might appeal to the hearts and souls of your fans – maybe tell the story behind a special song or something intimate like that. But the best place for longer stories are on your website and blog. A website or blog is a place where fans go, when they want to, to explore deeper and to get more information. These days, email simply isn’t the best place for anything other than a concise, brief message and call-to-action. Your email copy should consist of simple words, short phrases and paragraphs of only 1-3 short sentences.
Use a compelling image that communicates the core message of the email. For instance, if you are giving away a free song, make the image a clickable link to a direct download of the free song…and don’t send the reader to another site to get the download. If you are announcing a new video, take a screen shot of the video and make it a clickable link to a streaming video player on your website. If you are announcing an upcoming show, your image could be the show poster, which links to more info about the show on your website. Don’t use more than one image in the body of your email. One image allows the reader to quickly focus on your key message and hopefully answer your call-to-action. More than one image can confuse the reader and dilute what you’re trying to do.
Lead your readers to a clear call-to-action. Ask yourself, what is it that you really want your readers to do? If you want them to buy something or know something, you’ve got to clearly communicate that with them, and most importantly, you’ve got to ask the question. Making your reader search for the next step or if you assume they’ll go to your website or the venue website or wherever you want them to go, you’ll encounter a serious pitfall that many overlook. Often times, a clear and compelling graphic image is ideal for a call-to-action. Whenever possible, always work to find ways to drive your readers back to your website – either to your store page, to your show listings page, or to some place where there is a clear and visible offer. If you want to drive them to your blog so you can share more information, make sure that you have an offer on the sidebar or somewhere that is clear and obvious.
Give your fans something they can be excited about. Regularly producing compelling dynamic content is a wonderful way to engage and excite your fans. In this area, you are only limited by your imagination and your available resources. Viral videos, free songs, free tickets to shows, limited offers, and opportunities that can create a sense of scarcity or urgency can often be very effective. Regularly producing dynamic content like DIY videos, podcasts, releasing rare demos and b-sides, organizing a meet-up with fans, and other enticing offers are wonderful ways to increase the response and effectiveness of your emails to fans.
Don’t underestimate the power of “P.S.”. I know it seems silly and you won’t find many email marketers preaching about including a P.S. at the end of your email…but trust me, it works. If you have something funny or witty to say, or if you want to remind folks about your webstore or the new 12′ vinyl that just went on sale – the P.S. is the place to do it. Always keep the P.S. to one sentence.

Too many artists send emails and then never know how many people actually received them, who opened them, who clicked on what, how many conversions-to-sale you had, or how many hard bounces you had. Truly, drafting and sending an email to your list is only half of the work. Understanding how effective it was, and why it was or wasn’t effective is the other half. As you move forward and continue to send more emails in the future, understanding and optimizing your emails based on your response data is the most important component to success.

What are analytics? Email analytics are the detailed statistics about the performance and effectiveness of your email. Common terms and phrases used in email and web analytics include:

Number of views (emails opened)
Total clicks
Unique clicks
Click-through-rate (total clicks divided by total number of emails opened)
Traffic to your website and/or offer pages
Conversions-to-sales
Unsubscribes
Hard bounces

In addition to these basic statistics (and much, much more), you can see who specifically read the emails (ie: which email addresses took action), what links were clicked and how many clicks each link received, when the emails were actually opened, where each person clicking is physically located, and so on and so fourth. It’s pretty amazing the degree of depth and detail you can really dig and analyze with email analytics.

Then, once you’ve captured relevant data and have spent some time looking at it… the next objective is learning from the information, making some assumptions and conclusions from the data and analysis, and then tweaking, changing, and optimizing your approach to designing, crafting and drafting an email, so you can ultimately improve your results and effectiveness as you send more emails in the future.

One important consideration that should not go overlooked is that of frequency and consistency. You cannot send a couple emails a year and expect to be effective. While the specific degree of frequency is completely dependent on the artist or band and what they’re comprehensive strategy and objectives are, the key is to be consistent with what you’re doing. As a general rule, we recommend that every band should send out an email to their fans no less than once every 4-6 weeks. While we have heard some success stories about artists sending a weekly email, we wouldn’t recommend doing something that often. Typically, sending one email a week to your fans is too much and will overwhelm people. A good approach would be to be in touch with your fans and work to understand what works best for them. Regardless of what they tell you to your face, the analytics will tell you if you are failing or succeeding. Most importantly, whatever you decide is a good frequency for you – make sure you do it and make sure you are consistent. Infrequent fan emails and inconstancy will result in lackluster results.

Note: If you are feeling overwhelmed or if you are exhausted reading all of this, you can stop here and come back to this later. The core basics of writing a successful fan email are above. The rest of this dives a little bit deeper into the details…

Believe it or not, there are multi-volume books and guides written about email marketing. And quite honestly, there is a lot more every band and artist should know about email marketing before delving too deep. For instance, there are a lot of design considerations (ie: make sure you’re sending HTML emails), design guidelines, best practices, spam laws and regulations, and a whole lot more. Honestly, our recommendations regarding email design are to keep things relatively simply and in HTML code.

Whatever you do, don’t try embedding Flash or JavaScript or videos or even CSS. Less is more and when it comes to email marketing, and simple is better than fancy. Don’t attach images, mp3′s, posters, or ANYTHING to your emails. Instead of attaching things, always host the object somewhere and provide a link to it.

Having a visually compelling, graphically driven, yet simple HTML email design is important. We suggest using a basic template and customizing it with your brand, images, and content. A simple graphic header banner is nice, so people immediately recognize your name and brand. We also recommend using a sidebar to communicate other basic info, such as upcoming shows, links to your social media sites, a small banner that links to your webstore, etc. If you can position these tastefully and subtly in a sidebar, then it’s less information that you’ll need to cram into the body of your email. Many email marketing platforms provide free templates that are easy to use and design. I like the ones at MailChimp.com.

If you are interested in checking out some very basic, yet effective email designs, check out or subscribe to:

The Drone newsletter at www.the-drone.com/magazine/category/blog/
The Dimes email list at www.thedimes.com
Logan Lynn’s email list at www.loganlynnmusic.com
The Dandy Warhols’ email list at www.dandywarhols.com

In the wild world or email marketing, there are also long lists of things that you definitely should NOT do. While you can find these lists all over the web, here’s a short list of some basics:

Using bright red fonts, or going crazy with colors, styles, and formatting.
Yelling with lots of exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
YELLING WITH ALL CAPS!!!!
Using spammy words, like “mortgage, viagra, etc.”
Saying, “free” or “click here!” or “click here now!” or “act now!” or “limited time!”

Spam filters are getting really smart these days… In fact, some of them are too smart for their own good, and if you use the wrong words, colors, tons of exclamation points, lots of all caps, and things like that – you will end-up in a lot of spam filters and junk in-boxes and you’ll probably never even know it. So the bottom line is to be careful, don’t be spammy or cheesy with how you write your emails, and be aware of what not to do. There are lots of lists available on the internet, giving you more insight as to what specific words you should avoid using in your emails, so you can avoid getting caught in spam filters.

Be careful and be aware that whenever you send out a fan email, you are under the guidelines, regulations and laws of the applicable government agencies. The United States federal CAN-SPAM Act became law on January 1, 2004. According to their website, the FTC says that if you violate the law, you could be fined $11,000 for each offense (multiply $11,000 times the number of people on your recipient list). ISPs around the country have already successfully sued spammers for millions and millions of dollars under this new law. If you are sending out fan emails (ie: commercial email), be aware that you can’t do whatever you want. There are best practices, guidelines, and laws available on the internet to help you ensure that you’re doing things the right way.

Fortunately, we’re not merely speculating and guessing about what to do and how to do it. At Pet Marmoset, we’re actually grinding it out. We are physically in the trenches with more than eight years of experience, executing email marketing campaigns for bands and artists of all shapes and sizes, ranging from smaller bands with less than 100 email subscribers, to established record labels and more major bands who have around 40,000 subscribers. We plan, strategize, and execute email campaigns every week and are up to our eyeballs in data and analytics, constantly learning and optimizing what we do and how we do it. We also utilize and work closely with email marketing platforms and providers like Topspin Media, Fanmail, ExactTarget, Constant Contact, MailChimp, FanBridge, Vertical Response and others. The good news is that we’re immersed in this business and are constantly testing and working new approaches and campaigns. The challenge is that there’s always something new to learn and as fans and consumers continue to evolve, so must we and the way we do things.

Thank you for reading this and please, keep in touch and let us know what kind of impact this has on your fan email endeavors. If you have questions or would like help navigating email marketing, please contact us and let us know how we can help. You can contact Ryan at ryan@petmarmoset.com or you can use the contact page on this site.

…Yes, this is my call-to-action, buried at the very bottom of a super long essay.