Build Your Fan Email List | Wendy Day

Hi guys, how are you today? Digital marketing is so important for us in the music business, and still, out of all of the digital marketing that we can do, the most effective marketing is email marketing. And most artists don't use it, and I'm not quite sure why. Maybe because collecting email addresses is work, very much so. Um, but the thing about email marketing is it comes into your potential fans' email box. Like, it comes to them instead of depending on them to go to it. And what I mean by that is, if you're using Facebook and Instagram and Twitter to reach your potential fans and engage with them— and of course you should be, everybody should be— um, the thing is if they're not on those platforms when you're trying to reach them, your message doesn't reach them, and that's a little bit problematic. With email, it goes into their inbox, and research has shown us that email marketing is the most effective way to reach people with your message. Um, obviously it's got to be catchy enough to get them to open it that's a whole other issue. Um, but you should spend a little time learning about email and marketing. Um, at the very least, you should be collecting email addresses and setting up a monthly newsletter to update your fans on what's going on with your career, where you're performing, any background information on you. There are a few artists that I see monthly in my inbox that are doing this pretty well, and they're artists who aren't famous yet, and yet I still look forward to receiving their information from them on a regular basis. Um, if you feel like you're too new to send something out monthly, like you don't really have enough to talk about, then at least do it quarterly. When I started Rap Coalition, um, I made sure that I sent stuff out quarterly to keep people informed about what we're doing and what we're working on. So in building your list, you're starting from, from zero, and it's always hard to start from zero. Um, one of the best ways as an artist to build your list other than in person when you're engaging with somebody and they really seem to like who you are and what you have to say. You can ask them for your email address, you can ask them, and you should tell them it's for your newsletter. You should ask them, but you can use social media and even your website to capture email addresses by offering them something, whether it is an exclusive song that you haven't released anyplace else. You offer to give them that song in exchange for their email address. Or if you've got a video that's about to drop, you might want to offer it as an exclusive treat for somebody that's willing to give you their email address. And you could do that maybe for a week before you drop it, you know, to everybody. That way there's incentive for people to join your mailing list. And if they don't want to stay on your mailing list, or if you spam them, um, they can always opt out. So most people that sign up for lists aren't afraid to do so anymore because they know that if the content isn't interesting to them, they can always either just skip over it and not open it they can unsubscribe from your mailing list. Inside of your newsletter, once you do capture enough email addresses— oh, and, and I use a landing page by a company called LeadPages, leadpages.net. They've made it really easy to design pages, landing pages. A landing page is that page that kinda pops up on your website before people can root around, and it says, hey, sign up for my newsletter, and it gives you a place to put your name and your email address, and then you press send, and then automatically an autoresponder goes out to that person to confirm that they actually signed up for the email list, and they have to click that to say yes, and then their email address automatically goes into whatever email service you utilize. I use MailChimp. They seem to be the easiest for me. I used to use Constant Contact. They got a little pricey for me over the years. Once my mailing list got above 10,000, it got really expensive to use Constant Contact, so I switched to MailChimp. They were, they're a little more affordable. There's also, um, Mad Mimi. They offer a great mailing list. Um, there's a couple out there. If you, if you do the research, you'll find out the one that's best for you and the one that's most affordable for you. Um, for one of my clients, I set up his, um, email, um, his, uh, program through a company called SumoMe. Um, SumoMe also does a great job in, um, helping you set up landing pages. They offer, uh, drag-and-drop, um, design layouts so that you can build your own. Um, LeadPages does as well. I like LeadPages. I'm happy with them. Um, I tried SumoMe, um, for a client just to see if it was better. Um, it's different and it's great. They offer a lot of different services, so you might want to research them as well. In building your mailing list. But you gotta get into that mindset of always gathering email addresses, you know. And it's, and it's hard, you know. There are times where I'll speak live and I'll forget, I forget to mention to people to sign up for my email list. And it's really easy to sign up for my email list. All you have to do is text Wendy Day as all one word to 44222 and you automatically get added to to my email list. But I don't always remember to, to tell people to do that, you know. I don't always remember to gather email addresses. And as an artist, you've got to always be in that mindset. And I think that's probably the hardest part of email marketing. For me, it's, it's relatively easy because I write blogs, I write blog posts, right? So it When I'm sending out my newsletter, all I have to do is go to my blog and pick whatever article I wrote that month that I feel, um, is the most important, or the one that got the most reads or responses or comments, and I'll include that in my newsletter. So it automatically gives me product. As an artist, you're going to want to include news about yourself, um, maybe tell a story about something that's important to you. The more topical you can make your newsletter, the better chance of having it opened. I know in November I received a lot of newsletters that talked about the election and artists' reaction to Trump winning the election. This, this month I've received a lot of comments from artists about how they celebrate the holidays, whether they travel, um, whether they spend it with their families, whether they go home, whether they have people come to their house depending on, you know, where they're located and what their schedule is. You know, a lot of artists perform a lot around the holidays, so, um, in January I'm sure I'm gonna hear a lot of— well, hear, you know, read a lot of stories, uh, of artists and how they spent their New Year's Eve, especially if they were performing. Um, but email marketing is a great way to reach your marketplace, and it's something no one can ever take away from you. If Twitter and Instagram and Facebook were to all shut down tomorrow, how would you reach your fan base? And if you've got your email list set up, you wouldn't care about them being shut down. Not that they're gonna be shut down, I mean, that's kind of ridiculous. But the point is that with the email list, you control how and when you reach people, and you can do A/B testing. There's a lot of different things once you start to study this and you get really deep into email marketing. There are a lot of different things that you can test to see, you know, which emails get opened faster or better or stronger. Um, you can change your layouts and send half of your list one type of layout, half of your list another type of layout. Um, you can segment your list. You can gather— like, I gather my list based on artists. I gather my list based on producers. I have a separate list for people that have read my book and signed up for my mailing list through that. I've got a mailing list for people that have purchased the contact lists that we offer at WrapDash Resources. Um, so I've already got my list segmented. I kind of know what the interests are of the people that have signed up for those different email lists, right? Um, and it just makes it easier for me to direct my newsletter towards those people. I change the opening statement, but the rest of the newsletter is all the same for everybody. So, um, that's my little spiel on email marketing. Um, I can't teach you how to do it. You're gonna have to go in and teach yourself. There is a ton of information about how to do it. Um, and then whoever you choose to be your email Provider Service. They have a ton of frequently asked questions videos. They, inside of their website, will basically teach you how to do it. So, um, go check it out, learn a little bit about it, see if it's right for you. I have not met an artist yet that, um, building a newsletter wasn't right for them.. It just gives you access to your fans, and you can tell by your open rate what content people prefer to receive from you. And you can even use your email list as feedback. You know, you can ask people to— you can give them 3 songs to listen to and ask them to tell you what song they like best. So it gives you an opportunity to be in direct contact with your fans and get feedback directly from them so that you know which songs to put money behind and which songs maybe not. And you can test it by the video, you can test it by the song. There's a lot of different things that you can do with your email list once you start building it. And when I did it, I just Googled "build email list" and I just started reading everything online that I could. And I quickly learned, you know, who was bullshit and fluff and who was more serious. And the people that were teaching how to do it that were more serious, I still follow today. I've had an email list since the '90s, but I still follow the people that are great at it because they'll often find new tricks of the trade that they release to their email list., and then I can utilize those, um, things immediately and be kind of on the cutting edge with my newsletter when in reality I'm not great at that, but it kind of makes it look like I am. So, um, having said that, um, it's a lot of work. You may want to put a team member on that. Um, I use a virtual assistant to help me with mine. Just because it's very time-consuming for me to build a newsletter. It's much better for me to have an assistant in the Philippines or wherever design it, put it together, and then ship it out to folks through my Mailchimp account. So I hope this was helpful. Start building your email, your email list. The first 100 names are the hardest for you to get because when you're starting, you're gonna, you're gonna count like, oh, I have 2 people, oh, I have 5, like you really kind of pay attention. I'm at a point with my email list that I don't even know how many people are on the different lists. I just know that they're there and I know that I use them. But the first 100 are probably the hardest. So make sure whatever you do live that you've got a clipboard with you to have people sign up. I use my iPad. I take my iPad everywhere and there's an app for that so that I can just hand my iPad to somebody when I'm talking to them and have them enter their email address, and then it goes right into my Mailchimp account. And then I stipulate which email list it goes to once I leave the event, once I get back home. So hope that was helpful. Email list— research it, Google it, and do some studying, and you'll see that it can really benefit you. Okay, y'all, take care. Thanks for tuning in.