Indie Music Marketer .com

Successful Mailing List Management

Written by Administrator

Sunday, 15 April 2007

Every band needs to actively grow and promote to their own mailing list if they want to make any money long term. Sadly, some don't even have one, others have one and either forget or don't bother to add people to it, and still others add people to it and then never promote to those people. This article will tell you the most effective ways of starting, growing, managing and promoting to your own mailing list.

WHY YOU NEED A MAILING LIST
You might be saying to yourself, "I'm a musician -- an artist -- why do I need to worry with a mailing list?" I've known and worked with many bands and musicians who simply show up at the bar for their time slot, play their gig, and then leave, never having interacted with fans or any other musicians there, never having worked to sell music or merchandise, and never having promoted their website or mailing list. And yet they expect to somehow magically get "discovered" or "hit it big" and start making tons of cash.

Real musicians know this isn't how it works.

Even if they eventually make it to the bigtime, real musicians get their start by producing good product and managing their business right, and part of that management is operating a quality mailing list.

So, what can a mailing list do for your band business? Many things:

Help you convince people to come to your shows
Help you promote new album releases and merchandise
Help you spread your own propaganda and promotional content
Help you keep records and demographics of your fan base, for marketing purposes
Help you continually drive traffic back to your website
Help to keep you in the minds of your fans, which generates and builds momentum

A mailing list can be a powerful tool, but it can be challenging to start and operate one successfully, and there are many pitfalls to be aware of. The information herein should help you avoid those pitfalls and develop your list to its full potential.

HOW TO START YOUR LIST
Here’s the good part: You really don’t need much to get started with your mailing list. There are a couple of different ways to gather mailing list signups, however, and what is best for you may be dependent on the kinds of locations/atmospheres in which you perform. Handing out index cards and asking people to put their name and email on it could be an easy place to start. You can also put a stack of lined paper on a clipboard and keep it at your merchandise table at concerts. If you want to get a little more professional, just create an MS Word document and make some columns and lines for “name”, “email”, and “zipcode”.

Personally, I’ve found that if you take a standard 8.5”x11” sheet of paper, put it on landscape orientation, and split it into fourths, you can then custom-design a signup card that you can have printed en masse and distribute on all the tables and countertops in your venue for people to easily notice and sign up on when you announce you mailing list from stage. They turn out to be nice postcard-sized leaflets that you can hand out to your listeners at a show and get them to sign their name on it. Another benefit of a postcard, as opposed to a stack of lined paper on a clipboard, is that people don’t have to wait in line at your merchandise booth to sign up — they can take it to their table, grab a pen, fill it out, and then drop it in a collection bucket back at your table when it’s convenient. Or you can just go around and collect them after the show.

Now, if the setting is right, there is also another option for gathering the information, and that is the concept of a mailing list sign up kiosk. I’ve seen these used successfully in the church/convention setting more than anything. You can have several cheap computers setup on small kiosk tables in lobbies, foyers, etc., and as people come in or leave, they can step up to one, fill in a web-like form, and click submit. A handy program that has a “kiosk” feature built-in is called Indie Band Manager, which I’ll discuss later in more detail.

I recommend keeping the amount of information you request pretty limited. Normally all you need is the name, email and zipcode of the listener. If you plan to be sending out postcards in the mail or sending text messages, you’ll need to add those fields as well. Be aware, when someone sees a card with tons of lines on it asking for all their personal information, they may get a little wary.

On the other hand, there are ways of getting around this, but still getting the information you want. For instance, if you ask for the person’s home phone, you can then take that information, type it into a site like WhitePages.com, and acquire the person’s home address through a reverse search.

I find that asking for name, email, zipcode, and home phone are the easy ways to acquire all the information you need about a person. Additionally, you could ask for cell phone, which you can then use to send text messages to the person. ONLY DO THIS IF THEY ARE AWARE THIS IS WHAT IT IS FOR, because they will almost always be charged each time you send a message. Then if you really focus a lot on snail mail postcards, you could think about adding the mailing address line as well. Generally, you’ll only need the street and house number, though, because you’ve already got the zipcode, which you can easily type into WhitePages.com or USPS.com and get the name of the corresponding city.

Don’t be afraid to promote your mailing list from the stage or even in person before or after your show. These people have already shown that they’ll come out to a show — all you need to do is get their information so they’ll know when to come to your show next time.

HOW TO STORE YOUR LIST
Now the difficult part: mailing list management. There are literally hundreds of options out there for you, so I’ll try to help narrow them down.

A lot of bands use a simple Excel spreadsheet, which is fine, but very limited. And just to get this out there: this is not what Excel is meant for at all. Microsoft has another program called Access that is designed more for mailing list management.

For simple management, you can keep your mailing list on something as simple as your Yahoo! Address Book, or other online portal’s equivalent service. This offers the benefits of being able to be accessed and updated from any computer in the world, but has some limitations as far as what fields you can fill in, notes you can keep on each contact, and also, Yahoo! Mail has bulk mail blockers in place, so that you can’t just send a blast to 500 people at once.

Another option, which is more of an all-in-one solution, is Ultra Entertainment’s Fan Management System, called “FMS” (ultraentertainment.com). This is not just a mailing list tool, so it can’t be compared side-by-side with the other options out there. FMS is an all-in-one, highly interactive website platform for musicians and record labels, where fans can sign up on your website and automatically be added to your mailing list, but you can also log in as an administrator from the back end and easily enter in all of your latest mailing list sign-ups from your last gig. This option is not really customizable at all, but it is pretty advanced as it is, so it may be just what you need. Be aware, their lowest-cost option is $50/month.

Another option, which I mentioned earlier, is the Indie Band Manager (indiebandmanager.com), which is something of an all-in-one software solution for band management, not just mailing list management. I highly recommend it for someone who needs basic mailing list management tools, and also for the other wonderful features the program boasts. I have a copy of this program myself.

For more advanced features, endless customization options, and for what I personally use, go with Filemaker Pro (filemaker.com). As of this writing, they also have a free template called the “business productivity kit” which gets you started in no time. The program I previously mentioned, Indie Band Manager, is actually a complex Filemaker runtime template, which is customized for bands. The drawback of just buying the Indie Band Manager template is that it doesn’t allow you to expand its features yourself and customize it to your specific needs the way an open-source template like “business productivity kit” does. But Filemaker can also cost an arm and a leg, so you’ll have to weigh your options.

Once you determine the best service for your needs and skill level, you’re ready to start using your mailing list to grow your income as a musician!

HOW TO USE YOUR MAILING LIST
Regardless of how you choose to store your mailing list information, you need to have some features, like being able to sort by city.

Unfortunately when most bands have an upcoming concert, they tend to just blast out an email to their whole mailing list, regardless of where their fans are located. THIS IS THE TOTALLY WRONG APPROACH!

Why should you worry about this? Because you want your fans to actually READ the emails they get from you. If they keep on receiving tourdate notifications from a city on the other side of the United States, they’re eventually going to just click “delete” when they receive your emails — or worse — click “Mark as SPAM”. You will have completely lost this person as a potential concert-attendee before you can even blink an eye.

Before you send out a blast to your list, sort it by City, State or Zipcode, and ONLY send it to the people within a short distance of your venue, usually no more than 10-15 minutes of driving, unless you’re a bigger draw in that city and people will actually schedule their lives around your show.

If your mailing list program doesn’t have the ability to sort and eliminate names this way, then an easy alternative is to just send out a bi-weekly or monthly email newsletter with a list of your next 5 or 10 shows, and hopefully at least one of those shows will be close enough to each recipient to be relevant to them.

Something you’ll have to decide initially is also whether or not you will be sending out HTML or Plain Text messages. Plain Text is more universal, but less eye-catching and less easy-to-read. Nevertheless, it is usually not as easily thrown in the trash or marked as SPAM because it can appear to be more like a personal email. Keep these things in mind when determining which way to go. Most people do have the ability to read HTML email, though not everyone.

If you follow some simple rules of email etiquette, you’ll be fine.

CONCLUSION
This article lays the framework for getting started with successful mailing list management. In forthcoming articles, we’ll discuss specific strategies and tools you can use to help you make the most of your list and to get the best cash returns for your investment of time.