This week’s chapter is about growing your email list. Last week we created it and now Ariel has some great tips for adding names too it. She recommends that you reach out to your friends and family. This was the first thing that I did when I started my email list 6 years ago. My approach was to just add them with a simple unsubscribe link in the email which should always be present and tell them that they can opt out should they choose to. Make sure that you craft your subject line well. I use Sean Michael Imler AKA Rhythma Newsletter. If you don’t do this, chances are that they’ll delete the email as spam since it likely will not be coming from an address they already have in their address book. That being said, also request that they add the return address to their address book so that their ISP won’t flag you as spam.
Another recommendation is to create a folder especially for potential inclusions to your email list. I really like this idea because I’m always getting email from people but never really think of them as email list candidates. When you sell CDs or downloads from CDBaby, they capture the email address of the buyer, so that’s another source for your email list which is a great source because they’ve already expressed interest in your music. Never just add them without their consent though.
The item that I’ve recently put into action is offering a free download if a visitor at my web site signs up on my email list. It took me a little while to build this and tho I would’ve liked to do it with a uniquely encrypted password, that was more effort than I wanted to put into it so I opted to send the url to the user in the confirmation email. I can’t say that I’ve gotten any bites on this yet but my page views haven’t gone up THAT much since I’ve been working on this book’s plan.
And on that point, something you should absolutely do is to get Google Analytics going on your site so that you can track page visits. It’s really easy to hook up and it will tell you if you’re plans are fruitful. To be honest, I think that Ariel should put this in her book, maybe near the front of the book. This should go in a section about “measuring success” because you need a way to track that what you’ve done is actually producing success by comparing it to what you already have.
There are a couple of other recommendations that she’s suggested like starting a text message list and trading email lists with another band. I think the former might work if you have an audience that’s on the go and relies on their phones a lot. This won’t work if your audience is still in the 90’s. Someone told me about 2 years ago that texting was the new email list. I personally haven’t seen that but I am on a couple friend’s text message lists and I’m not crazy about getting them. I kinda want to use my texting for conversations, not announcements. A site that gives tools for collecting numbers for texting lists is BroadTexter. I should be hooking this up this week so that I’m not criticizing without actual experience.
The trading of lists I’ve always found a little weird because email is already so impacted with spam and other business promotion communications that I haven’t wanted to try getting email addresses that way. I like the opt-in approach but maybe the right opportunity hasn’t presented itself, and maybe I haven’t been looking at myself as a business. These are things I should cogitate on.
The gem here is actually scheduling time to do email list promotion and not waiting for people to find your list. This is something I’m working into my schedule. I’m not sure how email lists rank against Twitter, Facebook and MySpace work but I’d be curious to hear about other people’s experiences with these other networks and their successes with them by comparison. Could it be the email lists are too last decade?
