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Posts Tagged ‘Newsletter’
Challenge Week 7: How to Build Your Mailing List
The main goal for this week’s challenge: Take steps to start growing my mailing list.
I must admit, I have always been a bit shy when it comes to my mailing list. Some days are better than others. Sometimes, I’m in such a great mood that I’ll ask anyone if they want to be on my mailing list and they will usually say yes because I am genuinely enthusiastic about them signing up. I am confident that my newsletters are entertaining and worth reading, that I keep the reader in mind and that it’s not all about me, and that receiving a full album download in return for letting me email them once a month is a pretty good deal. Other days though, even if I have played a great set, I feel really hesitant to ask. I’ll put out the sign up sheet, knowing that at least one person always signs up on their own, but also knowing that I could rally way more people if I carried it around with me. New and old fans and friends always approach me after my set, why wouldn’t I offer for them to receive my newsletter and a free album download? They are obviously the ones who are seriously interested in my music. I did this once and signed up almost everyone in the room.
I don’t like walking around with a clipboard though; I feel too much like a charity canvasser. Having worked in retail and telemarketing in the past, my insides still tigten up in instinctual anticipation of backlash from people who don’t trust your intentions for using their personal information. As such, I don’t relish the thought of switching into my business hat immediately following a set, but at the same time I also want to make sure I am reaching out to everyone who wants to stay connected. If I don’t make this offer to them, I am doing them a disservice if they sincerely do want: my album, to know more about me, and when my next show is… right? These are the kinds of arguments that go back and forth in my head. Ultimately, it’s more of a mind game for me than it could ever be for my subscribers and I think that will be the biggest obstacle to overcome. The actual subscription and list building processes are quite easy. Ariel Hyatt illustrates this well in Chapter 7 of her book, Music Success in Nine Weeks.
Ariel proposes 6 strategies for bringing more people onto your mailing list. Adding friends and family is the first … and is exactly where I had apparently committed a major mailing list crime. As I explained in my Challenge Week 6 blog, my newsletter originated in the Netherlands when I moved there to study in 2003. It was a very informal letter home to my friends and family. When I revived it last year with the intention of sharing stories from my musical adventures, it didn’t occur to me that I should treat it any differently. This is a business, however, and as such I shouldn’t have just started emailing these newsletters to everyone in my contact list. This is especially true now that my endeavours have become much more focused and formal. It’s not just a mass email to friends anymore, though I still want it to maintain the undertones of camaraderie.
Bandzoogle, the site builder I use, has been very helpful for this week’s challenge. Not only does it host mailing and text message lists (Ariel recommends having both), but it has a function that automatically picks up the location of your mailing list members when they open your newsletter (one fewer awkward piece of information I have to ask people for, thank you Bandzoogle!). The intention for this function is to give you the option to target mailing campaigns to specific regions, that way you’re not sending Toronto show dates to people in London, for example. Fans don’t understand this when you ask them for their postal code though. They just think, “Why is she asking for my email address and postal code?”. This service provided a different purpose for me this week: figuring out who reads the newsletters and who doesn’t. The process of elimination was pretty simple, if the person has a location recorded next to their name that means they have read the newsletter at some point in time. I am choosing to assume that if my mailing list members have opened a newsletter, they are consenting to its receipt since they can clearly see that it is from me and the subject line says “Newsletter”. If they have not opened a newsletter (no location info) and were signed up on March 23 2010 (when I added my entire email contact list to my bandzoogle mailing list), I have removed them from the list and will send a personal email to their address explaining the situation and asking if they would like to be added back to the list. I had a lot of people on the list, so this process is going to take more than a week. As such, I’m going to continue picking away at it a few names each day until it is finished.
Two more of Ariel’s strategies work in tandem: creating a place on your email server for potential sign-ups (as you receive correspondence from new people, you put them in a folder or box) and then sending these new contacts an email approaching them with the idea of signing up for your newsletter during a scheduled time that your set for yourself to focus specifically on list building. If your fans are the most important building block for your career as an artist, then it makes sense to me that you should set aside time to focus solely on tasks that faciliate your communication with them.
Ariel mentions earlier in her book that you should offer an exclusive gift to people who subscribe to your website. I had already been giving a digital copy of my album to new mailing list members before starting the challenge, so this prompted me to reflect on what I am offering and how I can make it better. After the excitement I felt from learning that I could get the entire Isle of Thieves album for signing up to their mailing list, I didn’t want to give away just one track to my fans. It felt cheap. As an artist who wants everyone that wants her music to have it, I am more than happy to give a digital copy of an album (which doesn’t cost anything extra to make) to someone who connects with my songs. So, that was an easy decision. The album I currently have available was recorded before I took the vocal immersion course with Diana Yampolsky at The Royans School (where I work part time now) and was a collaboration of my first stabs at writing, recording in studio and producing songs. Knowing this, I would rather invest in connecting with fans now, giving away my album for free, while I’m growing as a songwriter so that when my music has matured and the next album comes out I will feel not only justified in asking them to buy it, but proud to. In the meantime, however, I did want a better quality representation of my singing ability out there, so I rented a good mic and re-recorded the vocals to a bunch of the songs. I’m working on the new mixes now, which will become an album giveaway that is exclusive to my newsletter listers.
The concept of a live show giveaway was the last big concept in Chapter 7. I like the idea of drawing an audience’s attention to the existence of your mailing address via a contest or giveaway. It provides a fun segue into asking for what you really want them to do: keep in touch by signing up for your newsletter. I will definitely use this strategy at our next show. I decided I wanted to introduce the newsletter to the audience before I even go on stage (they say a person needs to be presented with a product or service, on average, 7 times before they will buy), so I took the sign holders I bought on clearance when I still worked at Staples (one large one to be at the door when people come in and 10 small ones to sit on tables and/or bars around the venue), designed colourful signs that match my website branding, and had them printed off at Lyle Green’s Copy Centre “The Fine Print” in downtown Toronto (6 College St. to be exact). Lyle was one of my favourite customers when I worked at Staples, because he was always so nice, so I wanted to take my business to his business. When he learned about what I was doing, he gave me the posters for free … and with a blessing for good karma in my music business. Lyle is awesome. I hope the karma comes back to him.
[to protect my mailing list subscribers's personal information, I photoshopped the sign up sheet]
Challenge Week 6: Newsletters & Surveys
Original Blog Post
Read this Blog in 27 different languages
It was very timely that I would receive Ariel Hyatt‘s own newsletter during Challenge Week 6: Connecting With Fans Via Your Newsletter List & Conducting Surveys. Though I had been receiving her newsletters for months prior to starting the blog challenge (note: I learned about the contest via her newsletter), I read this one with new eyes after it arrived in my inbox while working through the exercises in Chapter 6. It’s not just Ariel’s newsletter anymore, it is a real life example of the plan and strategy she teaches. As such, I kept it close while evaluating and re-working the format of my newsletter this week.
Entitled “Where in the World is Meghan Sandiego?”, I started sending out a regular newsletter after I moved to the Netherlands to study Physiotherapy. I arrived in late spring so that I would have time to learn enough Dutch before school started in September, but knew practically no one. Regula, the one close friend I had there at the time was from Switzerland and she took off shortly after my arrival to spend her summer holidays back home with her family. Luckily for me she let me live in her apartment! In North America we take housing for granted, because land mass per capita is much greater -especially in Canada. The Netherlands is a small country with LOTS of people. Waiting lists for apartment buildings are sometimes years in length. So, when you get one, you don’t give it up when you move home for the summer; you sublet it or lend it to a friend like me instead! In fact, my friend was actually subletting from her friend who took a job wandering around the world as a travel guide.
In the beginning, knowing no one (and not knowing their language if I had known anyone) strengthened my desire to connect with people back home. Also, being a foreigner without a working visa forced me to operate on a very strict budget and since emailing was by far the most cost effective way to communicate simultaneously with a large number of people overseas, the newsletter was born. Expecting to be there for 4 years, my intention for the newsletter was to simply tell stories about the adventures I was engaging in while exploring a new country and to allow me to keep in touch with people I couldn’t afford to call long distance. It turned into something much bigger than I had expected. I loved writing those issues and took a lot of pride in my new found ability to write, what I thought were, witty stories. The stories started getting longer and friends started replying regularly to tell me how much they enjoyed the accounts and to ask for more details. I guess you could say I had ‘subscribers’ even back then.
In the first draft of this blog, I continued on to describe my summer in Utrecht and the development of my newsletter throughout my time in Europe. In an effort to stay on track with the week 6 challenge, however, I have posted that story on the newsletter page of my website as “origins of my newsletter” for those of you who are interested in hearing more about that adventure and how it relates to my music now.
It has been almost a year since reviving my newsletter and it has gone through many makeovers. From simple, long emails to web hosted, template-based PDF documents. Always content heavy, they have become more organized with a table of contents, hyperlinks and anchors to help readers navigate the body of the text. After reading Chapter 6, however, I realized that I need to start thinking of more direct ways of formatting the letter so that it is less cumbersome. Afterall, our methods of communication are extensions of ourselves, so if I’m becoming more focused as an artist and business person, then my newsletters need to reflect that as well.
Ariel breaks down the creative process of newsletter writing and development into three steps:
- Building rapport with your email list. The main idea here is to make some observations about your fan base, learn more about the things you have in common (other than your music) and to keep these themes in mind when writing your newsletter, so that your communicative efforts feel more connected than self-serving.
- Creating an engaging newsletter (greetings, guts & getting). For me, this means scaling back. Essentially, Ariel promotes having a 3 part newsletter: start with a personal intro (1), talk about what is developing musically (2), and then providing a call-to-action to encourage your readers to have an active role in what you are doing (3). My newsletter at present has 7 categories, all of which are important to me, but I think I have figured out a way to blend some of these things together more succinctly.
- Surveys (asking your fans what they want). Practically speaking, this is where you test the waters of your target market and find out what they are interested in buying from you before you spend a ton of money on duplicating Cds, silk screening T-Shirts, etc. Why spend a lot of money on a product you may not have a market for, right? Also, reaching out to your fans for feedback might stir up some new, unique ideas for merch that are way more interesting anyway.
To help develop rapport with one’s email list, Ariel recommends first taking a moment to reflect upon who your fans are. How old are they? What kinds of activities or elements of pop culture are they interested in? What parts of everyday life do you share in common? Basically, before you even start writing a communicative piece to them, you should already have an idea of who you are writing to. In this way, it’s like writing a letter to a friend rather than a group of distant consumers you fear imposing upon.
Building off of the increasingly popular concept of 1000 true fans, Ariel’s idea is to develop more meaningful connections with your mailing list through well planned, personal newsletters in order to unite your fanbase of customers and friends as customer-friends; people who want to support you and your career, not just because they love your music, but becaue they love you too. What an amazing and fullfilling business to be in.
My fan base is quite diverse. Yesterday, for instance, I received a photo greeting from two of my younger fans (6 and 11 years of age), worked on a film set with a twenty-something who was wearing my button, and spoke with a middle-aged gentleman who came to one of my recent shows and commented himself on how varied of a crowd I had brought out that night. In terms of target market, I see my music resonating most strongly with the 20-35 year old crowd. The more I play, however, the more I see that my style appeals to other markets as well and I need to keep that in mind, especially within the context of the newsletter (no legal reading age for access to this party).
From this assessment, I have decided that the language I use needs to be easily understood (neither too much slang, nor too much academic jargon), but shouldn’t dumb me down as a writer. When discussing market-specific topics, I think I should present them in ways that other markets can at least relate to even if they’re not interested in embracing the topic themself. For example, not everyone who uses email wants to use facebook. As such, they might not be able to relate to a statement of excitement surrounding the addition of a new calf to your FarmVille estate, but they might chuckle over it (instead of ignoring it) if you give a cursory description of what FarmVille is and why you like it so much… because now they have learned a little more about you … which is all they really wanted anyway.
I wanted my newsletter to be more visually striking, so I started by creating a header. Using Photoshop to mess around with one of the photos Tom Henheffer shot of me playing at The Horseshoe, I adjusted the colours to match my branding, filled in the header background with black and then inserted a text box with the name of my newsletter. I also felt compelled to have a pitch for the newsletter and placed that below the title of the newsletter. I uploaded the final image into my newsletter template and now it will appear in every newsletter I write without me having to re-insert the jpeg every time (thank you again, Bandzoogle!). I even created and inserted a few social networking buttons (a labourious task worthy of it’s own blog -which I will write after Challenge Week 9 in case anyone else wants to make their own).
When tackling the format for my content I decided to skip to step 3 (surveys) in order to help me decide, with my fans’ input, how to tackle step 2 (greeting, guts, getting). I have used SurveyMonkey (recommended by Ariel) in the past and have seen it work quite effectively for academic folks, as well as market researchers. For quick and simple questions with quick and simple answers, it is a great facilitator of data collection. For more reflective and collaborative questions, however, it is a bit impersonal. As such, it wasn’t the best tool for the questions I wanted to ask and, because I wanted to reach out in a personal way, I wanted my participants to know they were replying directly to me and not a robot on a third party collections agency’s website.
I set up 4 different email focus groups (a trick I learned in grad school) with a handful of my “truest” fans. For the purposes of this study, these “true fans” were selected based on their initiative to a) respond to my newsletters and/or b) share feedback with regards to my music and/or c) discuss ideas for the business side of my career. In the interest of keeping the committment brief for the participants, each group was posed only one question. Not only does this consideration improve my odds of receiving a response in a timely manner, but it also allows the participants to focus their attention more deeply on that one answer, rather than trying to rush through four or five different questions before they have to go attend to the questions and answers in their own careers and personal lives. I don’t know about you, but I rarely fill out those 20 question long BFF questionnaires that go around asking you to list your favourite ice cream flavour, etc. If somone asks me one question, however, I will almost certainly reply immediately; It’s one question. It’s easy. I’m happy to help.
The questions were:
Group 1: “Are my newsletters too long?”
(I know they’re long, but wasn’t sure if it was a bad thing)
Group 2: “Which 3 Categories/Topics do you enjoy reading the most?”
(In case I need to scale back from the seven I currently write in each newsletter)
Group 3: “Should I make it a full fledged choose-your-own-adventure style newsletter?”
(I currently use a hyperlink + anchor system so that readers can choose how they want to navigate the document. To see an example, check out my Jun-Uly 2010 Newsletter (didn’t quite get it out in time for June… merged into July. You’ll need a PDF reader to view it. I like Foxit, personally). Lately, however, I have been considering turning the newsletter into a narrative document and threw the idea out there for review)
Group 4: “Is there something missing from the newsletter or is there something you would like to see included in the newsletter?”
(I always just write what I want and/or think people will find interesting … but I never actually ask what they are interested in reading about)
I haven’t heard back from everyone yet, but so far from their feedback I have learned that my newsletters are indeed perceived to be long, but not necessarily too long, because they find my “ramblings” “entertaining” (it’s “true to [my]self”) and the hyperlink-anchor system allows them to pick through the parts that interest them the most when they only have time to skim. In other words, they appreciate not having to read the whole document to get the info they want and like being able to easily skip the stuff they’re not interested in. I also learned that there is no clear favourite in terms of categories or topics, but a more focused intro with a few key news highlights would polish the piece up a bit. Also, sometimes I provide more links to cool stuff (like videos, websites, etc.) than they have time to check out. Some find this disappointing and others feel this makes them “generic and then dilutes the value of [the links] as a whole”, so “less would be more” in this regard. Good to know!
In terms of pursuing the narrative approach, I learned that my readers “love” stories and the idea of a choose your own adventure style newsletter excites them. Inspired by the idea, they suggested including hidden videos or audio tracks that would have to be uncovered as part of the adventure. Coincidentally, one of the readers had just finished reading this article on the ‘game element’ of marketing and forwarded it to me as part of his response. They also want more pictures, which is something I can easily incorporate into story telling.
As a bonus, my focus group fans also revealed to me that I have inspired one of them to start playing bass, that my next album is anxiously awaited, and my friend’s little guy can almost pronounce the name of their family pet. I need to start doing this more often, even if only for the smiles
:)
So … how am I going to pull all of this together?
I could tell you right now, but I think you’d have more fun if you sign up for my monthly newsletter and have the First Ever Issue of the New “Where in the World is Meghan Sandiego?” sent directly to your inbox this Saturday, September 18th (Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge)
Also, a FREE digital copy of my album is emailed to you when you subscribe and you can unsubscribe at any time, no hassle, no questions asked and I will never sell, lend, or share your email address with anyone -ever!
(What?!) -I know, it’s crazy. Sign up now before you lose your mind ; )