Email the people what they want
I spend a lot of time thinking about emails and getting people’s attention. I think about the right subject line for an email, the right text within the email, and I try to balance all of those choices with what marketing people might describe as branding or positioning constraints. Albeit, in the context of a simple correspondence designed to introduce more people to music I’ve been making.
The first principle of music marketing (for me): Give someone something in every email.
Usually I mean a song. As in the case of the email I sent out yesterday, I mean two songs (demos, really). But there always needs to be something special that gives people a reason to open it and enjoy it and not unsubscribe.
If, for whatever reason, I can’t include a song or two , I will at least include a pretty picture of something. But primarily, I’m interested in giving people that same pretty picture with an image embedded as a link into it. Also, I have future ideas of creating images like a treasure map and having lots of weird and strange links embedded, many different song ideas and other little websites hidden in the pixels.
The other thing I spend a lot of time mulling over and considering is the subject line. Because that’s the primary tool that gets people to open the email (of course). For awhile I was trying to use standardized subjects to imply some sort of larger mechanized branding effort. The feeling of timeless impenetrability. But people are immune to that sort of obvious corporate branding at this point and that means they don’t tend to listen or pay attention when they’re inundated with it. So now I’m using more casual open-ended subjects. This is also in sync with a general movement towards more transparent honesty, across the internet, across the music industry and with me personally.
It’s exhausting to try and pretend I’m part of some monolithic music consortium and it creates constriction around creativity where there needn’t be any.
Final thing to consider, is timing. Both the frequency of how and when you email and, importantly, what time of day. I tend to do one email a month because I’m afraid of bothering people. I get weekly emails from some companies and tend to ignore them. But I also worry that once a month is too infrequent and I lose people’s attention. Still, I’d rather stray on less intrusive than more and make each email more of an event.
The other side of timing is time of day. Again, no easy answer here. For awhile I was doing 11AM and I’m still a believer in that because most people are at their desks. But they also might be in the middle of whatever they’re doing and not in the mood to click around an email and listen to some tunes. So then I move towards later afternoon, around 4:30, because you assume people are winding down their day and ready to daydream a little bit. But then I also worry that it’s right before people leave work and once it gets lost in their clutter of emails they won’t get back to it after it’s buried in a flood of post-work correspondence. So no obvious answer. Best to rely on data.
Funny thing is: the email that got the best response so far was sent out after five the week before Labor Day and was a reminder for the September 1st gig at Rockwood. Sending it out AFTER doesn’t make sense to me at all, I don’t care what the data says. Plus it’s too late for all my fans in Europe, of which I think there are more than three, for example, but possibly not.
Something to think about. Onwards.
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