One of a musician’s biggest objectives, besides creating amazing music, is to build connections with their audience. The sales funnel is often used for business scenarios such as retail, restaurants, and professional services, but it absolutely applies to a musician’s success as well.
You must:
Attract people to your music
Convert them into fans
Engage with your fanbase
Sell your music and products
Sustain your fan connections into the future
There are many tools available to help you attract fans and nurture deep relationships, such as social media and digital marketing for musicians. In this guide, we’ll focus on one of the most cost-effective and powerful of them all: email marketing for musicians.
The use of emails to promote a business rose in prominence in the 1990s due to increased public access to the internet. Each of these pieces of so-called electronic mail gave marketers the opportunity to build brand awareness, collect more leads, develop stronger relationships, and drive more engagement with the subscribers on their email lists.
These various functions are essential for musicians because your success is more predicated on relationships than other businesses. If your fans see you as a singular source of entertainment and inspiration, they’ll stick with you. But with millions of other artists out there competing for their ears and wallets, you’ve got to develop a distinct presence in their lives.
Email marketing allows you to not only connect on this all-important personal level, but also to develop a community. It’s empowering for fans to know that there are other people around the world who share an interest in your music, because we all want to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
Check out this welcome message that Metallica sends to anyone who signs up for their email list. Right up top is an energetic photo of the band and their fans, followed by “Welcome! You are the newest Fifth Member of the Metallica Family!” and the promise of exclusive content, free downloads, special promotions, ticket presales, and a community forum.
What fan wouldn’t want to be part of something like that? It’s the chance to get VIP treatment from a band you love, while also joining up with the larger family of fans to ask questions, share ideas, and geek out on the topics you’re passionate about.
Think of your multi-channel marketing efforts as a song that incorporates various instrumental and vocal tracks to tell a singular story. This means that your social media, digital advertising, and streaming platforms all serve crucial roles. And they’ll be elevated by your email campaigns, since email is such a universal channel that can bridge gaps between different fans.
Let’s take a closer look at four key benefits of email marketing:
When it comes to marketing, there’s truth in the adage that it takes money to make money. At the same time, you still need to be careful with your hard-earned dollars.
Email marketing for musicians is ideal because it can bring in so much money and has such a low price tag. The average ROI for email marketing is $36 for every dollar you spend, which easily beats the returns you’d see from display ads, radio spots, and other types of marketing.
Another factor beyond the ROI is the difficulty of execution. Fortunately, email marketing shines in this regard as well. When you use a platform like Twilio SendGrid, you’ll get easy access to professional templates, campaign schedulers, and autoresponders. Just choose your template, place the content where you want it to go, and you can have your emails hitting your fans’ inboxes in no time.
There are even AI tools now that can help write your subject lines and body copy, which was basically the last element of email marketing that still gave some people fits. With these modern tools doing most of the heavy lifting, your campaigns will bring less hassles and stress.
New communication channels like WhatsApp and Google Wave are rising up (and sometimes sinking back down) all the time. Yet email holds strong as a premier channel of communication.
Research shows that there are about 4.26 billion email users worldwide. And that number is projected to continue creeping closer to five billion in the next few years. So using email marketing connects you with a worldwide audience of highly engaged users.
When you put display ads into market, you usually have no idea where those ads are going to appear on the internet. And when you share posts on X or Facebook, there’s a limit to the number of characters you can include in the messaging.
Email isn’t constrained in these ways, so you can choose the perfect number of words and not need to worry about where the message might appear online. This freedom allows you to be authentically yourself and have more control over your campaigns.
There are plenty of other benefits you’ll experience from email marketing. The more you experiment with new ideas and refine your tactics, the more you’ll be rewarded for your efforts.
It’s time to review the basic steps to getting your emails ready for the world. Even though you’re probably anxious to launch these campaigns, it’s important to lay the proper groundwork. Otherwise, it’s like showing up for a gig with bandmates who have never practiced the songs on the setlist.
You’ve got to have recipients before you can have a campaign. Start with a lead magnet that will build excitement, such as a new song download or some studio outtakes that they can’t find anywhere else. You can promote the offer on social media and other channels, then direct them to the lead form where you’ll collect their email address.
Be sure to clearly explain the value of your email list. Beyond the lead magnet you’re offering, tell fans about the ongoing benefits of being a subscriber. Successful bands often promise things like contests, exclusive content, ticket presales, and access to community forums.
As your subscriber list grows, your focus should narrow. This means that you begin segmenting your fans into groups with similar demographics, motivations, and pain points. You’ll then be able to send targeted messages that will connect on a more emotional level and generate stronger responses.
It’s true that some messages will be relevant to your entire audience. But weaving more personalization into your messages always builds stronger relationships with your fans and brings more dynamic results.
Now that you know who you’re communicating with, you’re ready to start thinking about what you want to tell them. Start by identifying your most important goals, then develop the strategies that will get you there.
Your goals will serve as guiding stars throughout the campaign, while your strategies evolve to best deliver the best experience for fans and the optimal results for you.
In the past, it took a team of experts to build out and execute an effective email campaign. But as mentioned earlier, a user-friendly email platform can streamline the work and make it possible for you to go solo if that’s what you want.
First, choose the template that best aligns with your brand and objectives. Then drag and drop some eye-catching imagery. Your subject lines, headlines, body copy, and calls to action then follow. NOTE: Always make sure someone tests all the links and reviews the message for errors before sending it out the door.
The beauty of email automation is that you can schedule messages in advance and then move on to other tasks. You can also create drip campaigns that automatically send messages when someone takes a certain action. For example, when a Metallica fan submits their information on the lead form on the band’s website, they instantly receive the welcome email we saw earlier (it’s not like James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich monitor the signup list and manually firing off emails as new fans join up).
As you learn more about your audience, you’ll identify the optimal cadence, times, and days of the week for your emails. This data then informs your decisions as you refine the schedule to best meet the needs of your fans.
Speaking of learning about your audience, it’s imperative that you have a system for gathering data from email campaigns. Here are some of the key metrics you should be analyzing:
Open rate
Click-through rate
Click-to-open rate
Conversion rate
Total active subscribers
Deliverability rate
Bounce rate
Spam complaint rate
Unsubscribe rate
For maximum impact, continually refine your campaigns based on new learnings from your data. You can then correlate these results with business objectives such as music sales, merch sales, and ticket sales to see how well your email campaigns are supporting your overall goals.
As a musical artist, you probably didn’t get into the industry with the dream of managing email campaigns and reviewing metrics reports. The good news is that a reliable platform frees up more of your tims so you can focus on developing your craft and creating songs that demand attention.
For example, Twilio SendGrid has an exciting array of email templates and automation tools. And once emails are scheduled, our platform will handle the delivery for you and then track the crucial metrics throughout your campaign.
Create a free account today and experience how much better your marketing (and your musical pursuits) can be with an assist from Twilio SendGrid.
