One of the main of goals of the GigLog is to provide the knowhow and tools to make your jobs easier so that you can spend more time making gigs. To do this we’re developing a series of educational posts, which we will call the GigsbySeries. Each series will be focused on one topic that we think is important to members of the Electronic Dance Music industry. Topics will range from E-mail marketing – our first series – to venue management to finding new talent. We hope you find the content here helpful, and if you don’t be sure to let us know!
For this series we will focus on the art of E-mail marketing. Many of you may be asking why not social networking? The answer is that E-mail marketing today continues to be an extremely valuable tool in communicating with your fans. Jeremiah Owyang states that E-mail is “the first –and largest- social network.” He goes on to say that while Facebook has 300 million+ users, E-mail continues to have way more users. His example is Microsoft’s Hotmail which has 375million active accounts. Add to that Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook business accounts and all the other email services and you get a number that is much much larger than Facebook, Twitter and Myspace combined. More importantly, E-mail continues to be a great way to keep in touch with the people you are targeting.
Now that we agree on why E-mail marketing is important, we have to start thinking about a strategy. There’s a whole list of things to think about but first things first. Who are you trying to contact? This is also known as your audience. For example, if you’re an artist you’re most likely interested in creating an E-mail list of your fans. Once you’ve got your target audience figured out, you have to target them and get their contact information. Which brings us to today’s topic: E-mail List Building 101.
The key to building your list is to make it as easy as possible for the people you are targeting to sign up. Fortunately there are countless ways to do this both online and offline. To start you off, here’s a great list of 29 ways to collect E-mail addresses by Janine Popick who writes a marketing blog for Vertical Response. Many of these tactics may not be relevant to your audience so it’s important that you take some time to understand where the people you are targeting spend their time online and offline. For example, if you are a DJ and see that a lot of your fans are visiting your Myspace or Facebook page, you can place a simple E-mail list opt-in box. This is just an example and we are sure that you can come up with much more creative ways to collect email addresses. It’s extremely important though that you do this with an air of caution. The minute you come across as a spammer your reputation will take a serious credibility hit.
That’s about for list building. Below are some additional links to get the juices flowing.
Add Email opt-in form to your Facebook page
Building an Opt-In E-Mail list by Clickz
Building Your E-mail list by Entrepreneur.com
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Tags: email list building, email marketing, Event marketing, manager, Promoter, Promoting gigs, publicist, social networking