Staying
in Touch with Your Fans
by Andre Calilhanna
Communicating with your
fans is one way to keep mindshare, pass along information, and energize
your fan base. Through web posts, journals, emails, blogs, and podcasts,
you can keep your fans abreast of what’s going on with you and
help build a story and history around your act.
Building a list
The most obvious thing you can do as a means of building a fan base
is to collect email addresses at gigs. It’s just smart marketing.
People out at a club are clearly your target market for show announcements,
and anyone who liked your show is likely to come back again. One word
of advice: it’s not the size of the list, but the quality. Don’t
coerce, steal names, or guilt people to sign up for your list just
to boost its size. Collect names from people who truly enjoyed your
show and build a list of real fans.
To help you acquire relevant and useful information from potential
fans, have a pre-printed mailing list form on a clipboard asking for
the specific information you want (don’t forget to attach a
pen). Ask for their first and last name and email address. Other information
that can be helpful includes city and state of residence and whether
or not they’d be interested in joining your street team. Asking
for songs they liked from your set, other bands they go to see, what
clubs they like, and a general “comments” section can
lend some insight as well.
Asking too many questions can put people off, though, so don’t
get carried away. Make sure you allow plenty of space to write, as
club goers are sometimes less than 100% sober by the time you get
to asking this info, and club lighting is not conducive to reading
and writing. Getting home to find pages of illegible scribble is frustrating,
so a gentle reminder to print large and legibly on the form is not
a bad idea. When inputting the info into your list manager program,
you can also tag the contact with the date and club at which you gathered
the information to further enable you to customize your mailings.
Be sure to include an email sign up field on your web site. You can
get creative with your online form if you have the technical savvy
(or know someone who does). MySpace users can also mine your friends
list for email names as well, but ALWAYS make sure to ask if the person
is okay with you adding them to your list.
There are plenty of computer programs available to maintain an email
list. FileMaker can help you do more than just manage an email list.
Claris Works and MS Works (PC) or Entourage (Mac) are email programs
that allow you to create and manage lists and email accounts. There
are also many monthly services available, including Host Baby and
the Musicians Atlas Online, that allow you to manage and collect contacts
as part of their service.
Maintaining your list
While building your base is certainly important, maintaining it becomes
more and more important as your list grows and becomes more complex.
It’s best to start the maintenance at the beginning, so as you
expand your list and your categories, the task doesn’t become
overwhelming. Tagging your contacts with labels like “New York,”
“Street Team,” “Crash Mansion,” and “April,
2007,” for example, will enable you to select by those criteria
when drafting an email for a future New York show.
To make your life a lot simpler, it’s best to rid your list
of any email addresses that have either gone bad or were wrong or
misspelled from the start. Otherwise, month to month, email to email,
you’ll find your mailbox filled with emails that didn’t
get delivered and you’ll have an inflated notion of how many
names you actually have. If you discover a bad address, you may want
to keep the contact in your file and label them “Inactive”
so you can try to acquire the correct address at a later date.
You must also always give the recipient the opportunity to opt out
of your emails, and make sure to remove them if they request to be
removed. That’s rule number one in email etiquette, and it’s
also the law.
Communicating with your list
The idea is to make sure your communication with your base is relevant
and timely. Sending your New York contacts information about your
show in Delaware is probably unnecessary, for example. The more times
you send someone irrelevant information, the more likely they’ll
stop reading your emails, and you lose the value of that name.
Gigs are the most obvious and probably the most recurring reason to
contact your list. If you have a gig, you need to broadcast the news
to your email list. Again, this is where using a program that allows
you to select parameters comes in handy. Tailoring the email blast
only to those fans in the city and environs of a show is a great approach.
And emailing fans once about a show is all that is necessary. Unless
there’s something special or some sort of major change to a
show, redundant emails are not likely to increase attendance, and
may even work against you.
That said, you may need to find other compelling reasons to email
your list, particularly those folks in regions you don’t play
often or who may have landed on your list via your web site and who
never get to see you live. Let them know when you’ve posted
a new MP3, or send them a clip of a tour journal or blog with a link
to your site where you have more.
Finding a voice is something that can also greatly benefit your emails.
There are many different approaches, but establishing your correspondence
as something worth reading is always in your favor. Does your music
have a political slant? Include links to articles or topics you feel
motivated by. Is there a sense of humor to your act? Make your emails
reflect that. Are you part of a group of performers or have affiliation
with other artists? Work that into your communications.
Making your correspondences a more personal outreach can help you
build a bond with the people on your list. But maybe that’s
not your style. Maybe you simply have too much information to convey.
Sending out a newsletter-style email may be the right way to go, with
details of your upcoming shows and other news from the road.
Whatever your angle, develop it and nurture it through your emails.
But more than anything, keep them compelling and relevant. That way
you’re sure to keep the majority of your list as subscribers
for years to come.
