How to put together the perfect email campaign
Email marketing is often slightly overlooked by artists on their way to the top. With social media having truly taken over, email-marketing campaigns can be left neglected by artists despite the huge level of potential they offer. Email campaigns are one of the most effective ways to reach your audience quickly, offering a unique opportunity to connect with fans. They can be used to advertise new releases, new merchandise, or to sell more tickets for shows. Like all marketing methods, email marketing holds an abundance of potential, if executed effectively. We’ve taken a look at how to craft the perfect email marketing campaign.
Personalisation
Make sure your email is fully personalised towards the recipient. Include their name in order to really make a connection and appear more authentic. Personalising your emails will give the recipients the impression that you care about their support personally and that you are aiming to make a connection. Emails with no kind of personalisation come across as simply advertising with no personal touch whatsoever. When an email begins to look like an advert, the reader immediately switches off and stops paying attention. Nobody likes to read adverts, this is why the advertising industry has had to shift to make their campaigns more covert and authentic. As well as including the recipient’s first name in your emails, another option for personalisation that works well is sending your subscriber an email to wish them a happy birthday. In emails like this you may wish to include a discount link to something you are selling in order to convert the email into a sale.
Optimisation
Another factor to watch out for is creating an email that is completely optimised to encourage a higher open rate. Without enticing readers with your email subject and first sentence, it is unlikely that they will open the email at all. Everyone you contact will likely have an inbox filled with emails from other artists, you must make sure to provide more exciting content than the rest in order to encourage your recipient to open the email. Make the subject of the email clear immediately so that the reader does not need to read an essay of text in order to find out the purpose of the mail. Like social media, email advertising should be geared towards recipients having a short attention span and being likely to lose interest in seconds without being persuaded to keep reading.
Set your goal
In order to make sure your reader is able to easily establish the subject of your email, you must first ensure that you have yourself determined the goal of your email. You must decide what exactly you hope to achieve by sending out the campaign, whether your goal is to sell more show tickets or increase streams on a brand new single. As well as having a clear goal, it is important to make sure that your readers can undertake the desired action easily. If your goal is to sell more show tickets, make the link to purchase tickets very clear and easy to locate. If you aim to increase streams, add a clear link to the track in question so that readers can effortlessly click through.
Address readers individually
When writing the text of your email, focus on speaking specifically to one person rather than a crowd. Make sure that your email is completely personal in order to really connect with the recipient. The personal approach will go a long way in securing a positive outcome and will give your recipient the impression that you care a great deal about their personal experience. Being more conversational and friendly in the text of your email also allows fans to feel more connected to you, which will undoubtedly make them more likely to complete the desired action.
Timing
There are also smaller details to keep in mind such as the time of day that you send your email. Make sure to send it at the time of day that the majority of your audience are likely to open it, for promotional emails from artists, 7PM-10PM is the ideal time as most people will not be working and will be in relaxation mode. Subject line is also an important feature that should be completely optimised before sending the email campaign. The right subject line can make the difference between a positive and a negative campaign result.
Analytics
After you have completed your email campaign, it is then important to go back and have a look at the success rate. When striving to improve your campaigns, it is imperative to learn from your previous successes and failures in order to move forward in a positive manner. There are many statistics to consider including open rate and click-throughs. These two statistics are the ones that provide the most insight into the effectiveness of your campaign. If you suffer from a low open rate, your email was not fully optimised or had an ineffective subject line. If the click-through rate suffered, it is more likely to be the content of the email itself that was not up to scratch.
As with all campaigns, you must look back at previous statistics in order to improve and move forward. When completed effectively, email campaigns can be massively beneficial in generating interest, increasing purchases and building publicity. Putting together an email campaign may be more time consuming than a simple social media post, but an effective email campaign can offer limitless rewards.