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Email marketing is something which businesses do in many and various ways with varying degrees of success. Getting people to sign up to your email list, preventing email systems from labelling your email as spam, let alone getting people to read your emails are all steps that need fine tuning on an ongoing basis. With statistics showing a $45.65 return on every $1 spent on email marketing in 2008 it is extremely important that it really is a powerful way of growing business.

So why not see how others do it? I decided on a group of businesses that require regular contact to announce new products, their recent activities and to remind their fickle customers about them. Musicians. From new music, to tour announcements and just general promotion - email marketing should be very important to this industry.

The first step - shaking hands
To start the survey I took the top 15 artists on the Australian music charts and headed to their websites. Their website is a primary area for getting signups to their email marketing so a link or form should be obvious to find and use. So here’s 5 lessons on email marketing from the music industry.

Lesson 1 - Make sure your website works

Not a great way to get signups. Viewed in Internet Explorer the website shows properly.

Apparently Christina Aguelira has sold enough music and has decided not to worry about selling to new customers. This warning ‘you need Flash version 8′ is a stumbling block to people getting in to her site and signing up to her email list. Let people access your site - even if they can’t see all your ‘awesome’ features and tricks.

Lesson 2 - Make sure your signup page works

Make sure your website works - a small hiccup from Pink was fixed.

Pink’s website works - in fact the ’signup’ link is quite easy to see as a part of what seems to be the main navigation. However signing up for Pink’s email list wasn’t so easy - when I went to click on the form it told me that her ’signup’ page didn’t exist.
Woops! This is a big problem for someone like Pink, who is doing 14 shows in Sydney alone in the coming weeks. 14 shows! That’s a lot of people who might want to visit her website and might want to continue hearing about what she’s working on and releasing.
Luckily for her - the problem was sorted and the website seems fixed now.

Lesson 3 - Let people find your signup page easily

An easy to find sign-up link on the front page of the Il Divo site.

One way to maximise the amount of people signing up to your list is to allow people to find the signup form easily. Il Divo does this well - in the menu area they have a link to “sign-up for updates” which is just the kind of thing to help grow your list. Hiding it down the bottom of your site, or calling it something not obvious will make it hard for people to find.

Lesson 4 - Follow up with an email. Quickly

My inbox shows just 7 responses from 15 signups and 2 emails since then.

Of the 15 musicians I signed up to - I received 7 welcome/confirmation emails. That’s just under half and if I wasn’t taking notes I wouldn’t remember who I signed up to - and neither would your subscribers if you have the same policy. A sure fire way of helping people remember that they signed up to your email list (and to add you to their email safe list) is to send them an email straight away. Asking them to confirm their subscription will vastly reduce unsubscriber rates too - only 3 of the musicians I signed up for asked me to confirm the subscription: Nickelback, Lady Gaga and Snow Patrol. That’s a paltry 20%. People who really want to hear your message will confirm their email, and if you’ve sent it straight away they will more likely act upon it and keep reading your later emails.

Lesson 5 - Be regular, include news

Beyonce's email provides news.

Since signing up 2.5 weeks ago I have received emails from a single musician. Beyonce (my favourite American female singer with the name Beyonce - of all of them she is by far the best) has sent me two emails, both included news about things being ‘available now’ or ‘recently released’. In other words she’s sent news. Ensure you have newsworthy content and keep it regular. Rob and I send this email monthly, we don’t have enough to tell you weekly or bi-weekly so each 8th of the month we hopefully present you with something of value that is relevant to you. Do the same for your customers - increase read rates by making it predictable and lower unsubscribe rates by presenting something relevant.

My conclusion

These simple pieces of advice will go a long way to helping you grow if applied to your business. It’s easy for people with the right knowledge to set up for your business and it can be left to operate automatically. All you need to do is provide the news and send it regularly.

A Word To The Kings of Leon

Dear Kings of Leon,
I don’t know if you realise this but Sony BMG is not doing the best they can for you - in fact they’re doing a horrible job considering you are paying them for their expert help. Have you seen the mailing list signup page for your website lately? Here’s a picture I snapped of it earlier.

Kings of Leon subscribe page. Nice effort Sony BMG.

Since you guys are so popular right now and all over the radio - I’m sure you would like to keep selling to people once stations have stopped playing you. Give me (Andrew) a call: +61 0414 674 271 and I’ll set something up for you that will actually work, trust me it’s not that hard.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Analysis, Email Success. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.