From the course: Social Media Promotion for Musicians, Artists, and Engineers

Mailing list marketing strategies

From the course: Social Media Promotion for Musicians, Artists, and Engineers

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Mailing list marketing strategies

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- [Narrator] While it may be popular to think that the use of email is declining in favor of social networks, the fact is that email is still a huge part of our every day lives. The problem is that we get so much of it that an email and newsletter may have a hard time rising above the rest of the email noise. That said, the data shows that people do check their mail and it's still important to them. It's up to you to send it. While the trend is to think that email is on a decline when it comes to communicating with friends, fans, clients and business associates as social networks like Facebook rise in popularity, it's a lot more important than you think when it comes to promotion. Here are four reasons why. Your email list is one of the most powerful tools that you can have because you control the message. If done well, it can feel a lot more personal than communicating via Facebook or Twitter or any of the other popular networks. You also control the information, the look, the marketing and the promotion in a way that's not possible in any social network. Since each social network has it's own look and feel, as well as a terms of service agreement that can limit what you can say and do. Your message is consistent. Although the ability to control the message is important, being able to control the consistency of that message is even more so. For most artists and musicians today, the problem becomes how to effectively communicate with all of your friends and contacts across various networks, because social networks are a closed environment by nature. That means you have a set of friends on Facebook and another set on Twitter, and maybe another on a network like the new Myspace. The look and feel will be inconsistent because of the nature of the various networks. If you're not consistent in your presentation, you're not controlling the message. One of the best things about a newsletter is that it reminds fans and former clients who you are. If a person hasn't been following you on a social network and therefore doesn't see any of your regular posts, that newsletter in their mailbox jogs their memory and reminds them you're around. Doesn't take long to drift from the public consciousness. And an email prevents that from happening. One thing the email can provide that social networks don't do as well is sophisticated measurement of when it was opened, if it was opened more than once, how long it was read, if any of the links were clicked and if it was passed along to anyone else, among many other measurements. Obviously, your personal email app on your computer can't do these things and it can't easily reach out to thousands of people as well. That's why you need a service like Constant Contact, WhatCounts or iContact. All of which have the added convenience of constantly cleaning the list of balances and outdated addresses. We'll look at these features more closely in another video.

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