Summary: In this Back to Basics episode of DAWCast: Music Entrepreneurship, David Andrew Wiebe discusses email marketing. Is email marketing still relevant? Should musicians be building their email list? How much of a priority should they place on it? Find out. Email Marketing For all intents and purposes, email marketing should come before social media in your marketing plan. One of the reasons for this is that email gives you a chance to send out call to actions. People expect to see promotional messages in their inbox, and are more receptive to them than if they were coming through other mediums, which means you can also be more direct with the messages you send to your audience. To manage your email list, you will likely want to use a tool like AWeber or MailChimp. You can manually organize a list all on your own, but it can take a lot of time and effort to keep it up-to-date. Fortunately, most email marketing platforms offer their services for free, or at least offer free versions of their software with a reduced feature set. You can upgrade to a paid subscription as your list grows, and as you require the use of more features. Make sure to get on a consistent schedule with your email campaigns. Weekly or bi-weekly messages are ideal, but even monthly messages can still be effective. Make sure you have something to say. "Nothing happened this week" is simply unacceptable. At the very least, write a blog post or take an Instagram photo and send it to your fans. Also make sure to collect email addresses on your website. Create a compelling opt-in offer that they can download once they are on your list. Credits: MUSIC: Beau Hall, “Sugar Rush” MUSIC: “Ecstatic”, David Andrew Wiebe © 2009 Listeners: Feel free to leave a comment below. Send your questions and comments to comments@daw-music.com. We will use them on the show! Help us spread the word about this podcast by leaving a positive rating and review in iTunes. Don’t forget to subscribe while you’re at it! Help us spread the word about this podcast by posting a tweet.
