Why You Need To Use Email To Promote Music

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Countless blog posts will profess to you that they have the 8 ultimate solutions to building your fanbase, or the 5 top tips you need to grow your audience as a musician.

Invariably they will state the case for covering all the bases, surrounding yourself with a collection of motivated people, getting a street-team, booking gigs and hoping for the best or any number of other solutions. These may all be important factors, however...

Your music email marketing list or database is easily the single most important thing you should have up and running as a band, artist, label or DJ.

Why email?

How many people do you know who have shunned Facebook or removed themselves from Twitter because it’s no longer seen as useful, or because their feed is just full of nonsense? Cold emails about music still very much have their place.

How many people do you know who are actively trying to “get off Facebook” because they feel it’s a distraction?

Maybe a couple, maybe a few, maybe a handful. I’d bet it’s some though, right? I know plenty people who hate social media, and I know a huge number of artists who are desperate to spend less time blasting nonsense into the ether.

Even if it’s a small percentage, consider this: How many of those people have email addresses? Most of them? All of them?

More people have email addresses than social profiles.

1 billion people might be using Facebook but According to a Radicati Group study from January 2017, there are more than 3.7 billion email users worldwide.

So vs the biggest social network in the world, good old email still has more than 3 times the amount of users.

Reach

How often do we hear people complain about the fact that their post, update or tweet has been missed by their own fans, because an algorithm has changed, or because the fleeting nature of social media has left their update festering at the bottom of an infinite scroll?

Now, there’s an algorithm at play when you send an email to someone. The dreaded spam filter, but it’s a far more sensible and tangible obstacle than any social media calculation.

Spam filters are relatively predictable and are really designed to deliver the right email to people, so provided you can write a normal email which isn’t full of salesy nonsense or trigger-words that initiate a shift to the spam bucket, then you’re pretty much onto a winner.

Granted, you’re still up against other subject lines, you still have to handle image-loading and you can’t do fancy stuff like embed video or audio players, but you can encourage one of the most powerful actions someone can take on any form of communication — a mouse click or link visit.

Futureproof

For now, it seems like email is also future-proof.

A bold statement, but in the face of a changing social media landscape, it seems relatively resilient.

Social media comes and goes. MySpace came and went, Facebook has come but hung around (too long if you ask me). Twitter sees ups and downs and various other networks appear and disappear. Some just as quickly as they have appeared.

Through all of this email has remained. Most of these networks even rely on email themselves. It makes sense that it will persevere.

How to leverage it

This one is going to vary for everyone, but the most important thing is making sure that whenever anybody interacts with your music, you can encourage them to join your email list.

For me, this is a case of offering them a selection of freebies that are enticing enough that they ask themselves “why wouldn’t I sign up for this?”.

I offer my first EP, a bunch of remixes, downloads of my mixes, videos, project files and even sample and patch packs for other producers. All in return for an email address.

Then once you have the email address, it’s a case of deciding which types of emails to send to music fans. You should be respectful, but trying to build the relationship in an engaging, but friendly way. Autoresponders are a common way to do this, but to begin with, you could even just email everyone individually and say hello.

You’ll also want to build that relationship over time so that people hear from you relatively regularly, but get emails about relevant things.

If they have signed up with an interest in your music, you’ll want to let them know when you have new music for them to check.

You could take this much further, and segment your email list by location so that you can target people for particular gigs, or use it to arrange an appropriate tour. You could use it to recommend other artists, you could offer other assistance, or even look for one-to-one conversations with people.

Once you start to build a solid list of people who are somewhat engaged with you or your brand, then you’re in a position to feasibly monetise things.

Imagine you have 10,000 people on your list (which isn't too difficult to achieve) and you make a new album which you decide to release.

You email your list about it, and nothing else — you could feasibly expect 100 people to check it out and buy it, but probably a stack more — let’s say an engaged list would yield 500–1000 sales. That’s enough to fund the production of the physical album, or enough to put towards the next release allowing you to continue to produce, without having to worry about paying for PR, social media boosts, shows, press, blog submissions, channel promotions or anything else.

Get started now

If you don’t have an email list set up in some way, and if you’re not collecting emails when it comes to your music, you’re making one of the biggest mistakes you possibly can.

Sort it out now. Get it set up, and start collecting email addresses. You’ll not regret it in the slightest.

If you’re keen to find out how, or to know more, then I’ve actually put together a course which takes you through the entire process and includes things like auto-responder scripts to try as well as various other bits of information that will get you up and running in no time.

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This is a guest blog by a music producer DJ, designer and label owner Alex Cowles. Alex's music has featured in games, documentaries, short films and he has received national press and airplay. He has owned and run 3 record labels since 2008 and also writes and manages How To Self Release, a platform and set of courses to help people get their own music out there.

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