Bowles’s blog offers 5 ways to improve your email marketing:

1. Integrating Email With Social Media

-Using a blog to highlight content from an e-newsletter once or twice a month, inviting readers to download the full content via a landing page. Which reminds me, click on the blog homepage to get the full “Is Email Endangered?” white paper.

- Leveraging social media to offer different ways to interact with the subscriber– twitter feed promotions, rss feeds and a monthly newsletter

2. Focusing on Engaging Subscribers

-Personalize subject lines

-Incentivize click-throughs

-Make it as easy as possible for an email to be shared on social networks and forwarded

3. Re-engaging Inactive Subscribers

-Incentivize and create reasons to open the email ex, free trials or whitepapers

-create sense of urgency around an ending subscription

-segment inactive subscribers and cut back on the frequency of communications

4. Creating Viral Campaigns

-Instead of generic terms like “forward to a friend”, tailor them to a specific email/campaign (Ex. “Forward these tips for building credit to a colleague”)

-Make content available to everyone and easy to forward

-Vary the placement of share this links

5. A/B Testing and Optimizing Landing Pages

-Use this testing to find out the best response and layout for an email

I highly recommend that you read this article and utilize these tactics! We have found these techniques invaluable.

I don’t have the time.
And neither do you.
That’s what your unwanted e-mails are, solicitations.

Check out the full post here>>

The thing that sucks about most marketers is that they think too much like marketers… like solicitors. They have a very hard time stepping away from themselves long enough to ask their audience/client/customer/ticket buyer/fans, “why is that important to you?” and “what are your needs”. Most marketers are only concerned with their own needs… their own point of view and what is important to THEM.

I had a interesting conversation over lunch with a gentleman in the music industry who didn’t understand why permission marketing was important.. or how it worked. The question he raised was, “if cost were not an issue, why shouldn’t promoters send as many emails as possible, to as many people as possible, as often as possible?”

And he has a point… after all, if I throw enough shit at the wall, certainly something will stick.

However, email marketing is NOT permission marketing. Email is just the vehicle… a very efficient vehicle, but just a vehicle none the less. The value is not in the email, but in the PERMISSION… that somebody cares what you are saying and is looking forward to it.

The problem with just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks… is that the people who might have once cared and once gave you permission are likely to get hit along the way.

And once those people go away and block you out… they almost never come back.

Some of my highlights from Connections included hanging out with Morgan Stewart and talking about the convergence of email, social and mobile marketing, discovering some advanced data marketing strategies from my new friend Ami Packard from Expedia and presenting our Roadrunner Records Social Profile story in the entertainment and media showcase with our friend, Lauren Kufta, New Media Coordinator at Roadrunner Records. In addition, our team member Josiah Kaiser spoke at the Developer’s Track on the evolution of Live Capture and Mobile Automation.

Wow, what a week!

One of the things which really struck me was how far behind the music industry (in general) is on the sophistication spectrum from other industries.  There are organizations who really push the envelope, but, generally, the music industry is 2-5 years behind on direct email, SMS, voice and social strategies and implementation.

Yup, the music industry missed the boat.

And the travesty of it is that the music industry has the asset which every other industry covets… they have fans. They have people who actually care! Best Buy dreams of having the type of loyalty which is baked into the music industry.

Why is the industry behind the sophistication spectrum? Here is my take…

The Music Industry is Spoiled. - Or, at least, it has been. Because of the fan asset they haven’t been driven to innovate, strategize and do the work around really owning and engaging the life cycle of the fan until recently.

Who’s Job Is It? – In every other industry it is the MARKETER’S JOB to be in charge of customer acquisition, retention and growth. In the music industry it used to be the label’s job.  . .  that is what they do. . .  they sell. Now days? Well, now days, it is anybody’s guess. Is it the manager, the drummer, the label, the distributor, or the publicist? Who knows? Consequently, nobody has developed the skills and competency to do it well.

Bright Shiny Objects! - There has been fascination over the last decade for the music industry to run after the latest and greatest bright shiny object. Ring Tones, Mobile Fan Clubs, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Reverb Nation and Topspin have all be heralded as the savior of the music business. These are all amazing and fascinating pieces to the fan engagement tool set. . . but they don’t constitute a holistic, strategic long-term-strategy for fan-relationship-management(FRM). They  don’t account for not learning the very basics of permission-based marketing.

Who Owns the Fan? – I find it fascinating that Artists have been writing into their riders that they also get a copy of the concert ticket buyer manifest complete with customer email address. It is fascinating because it places the value on the list, rather on than on the subscriber. It suggests that permission is sharable. . . that the promoter, artist and ticketing company should all be able to contact somebody just because the have access to the same database. . . without any real permission process. Yes, the music industry spams the fans more than any other industry out there.

There have been big moves across the major labels and promoters to initiate broad CRM based strategies and solutions and the managers and artists are certainly getting more savvy. It will be interesting to see how it plays out over the next few years and we certainly will be trying to be one of the leaders in the mix.

Below is the sophistication spectrum which we use to work with clients on understanding where they are and what their goals in revenue can be.

If you would like a more complete understanding of this chart visit the link below:

The Sophistication Matrix

A full copy of our slide deck is available for download here.

We are really looking forward to what the future holds here.

So, I took a look at one of her emails and talked with her about their audience and engagement process and came up with the following points that are relevant for all email marketers, even those of us concentrating in music media marketing.

Full disclosure: My friend and the company she works for are not FanMail clients and are not associated with FanMail or ExactTarget.

The first thing I did was look at the email for design and content best practices.  In terms of design, it was flawless: coherent and non-distracting themes, organized content areas, even bookmarks for easy navigation. As for the content, well, there is not a lot that can be done to jazz up new court interpretations of hiring standards or how federal workers’ compensation regulations have changed. I mean this is a human resources newsletter, not a concert promoters‘ show calendar or a record label’s new artist announcement.  The main thing that I pointed out here was to break up the copy with an image now and then to keep things interesting to the eye.

The second thing I looked at was the list. Who is on it? What kind of communication would this qualify as? While some of the subscribers are clients, the primary purpose of the newsletter is to keep HR industry professionals informed and up-to-date. This means that this would qualify as a B2B (business-to-business) send instead of a B2C (business-to-customer) send.  Typically, one would expect to get above average open rates on a B2B send, definitely not the 12-13% that she was seeing. That’s when I noticed that a large number of the subscribers were employees of the company–wait, I’ve seen something like this before! I asked her how many of her coworkers read their emails on their blackberry. Most, if not all, she surmised, because the company provides them with blackberries. Many people only read the text version of email on their smart phones, or don’t load the images at least. This means that they don’t get counted as an open because open tracking requires images to be loaded from the email server.  When we compared click-through rates to open rates, this point was further proved. According to their click-tracking one would expect an open rate of around 40-50%, which indicates that many more emails are being opened then the numbers show.

The final point I raised was the ESP being used. As I have noted before, sending emails on an ESP with a less than stellar sender reputation is like throwing emails away, or at least into the junk-mail folder which is basically the same thing.  With communication and effective engagement being the cornerstone of successful fan relationship management and fan marketing, our clients (whether they are festival and events promoters or small independent artists) would be losing money if we did not provide them with the absolute best in deliverability, even if the cost of services was less because the drop in revenue due to poor deliverability would far outweigh the savings. So my suggestion here was to get a deliverability report from their ESP and to also set up a bunch of test accounts across several domains (gmail, hotmail/live, yahoo, etc.) and test if the emails are making it to the inbox or the junk folder.

As with all metrics, open rates are only a small snap-shot, they do not tell the whole story. However, they do give a good first impression of the effectiveness of a send.  The three things to consider when trying to improve this number are design/content of the email itself, the quality and composition of the subscriber list, and the deliverability of the email which is based upon sender IP reputation.  By keeping an eye on these factors, it is possible to see open rates that many of us dream about. So keep working and improving and tuning your processes and let’s get as many people opening your emails as possible.

Anyway, while I am away, I wanted to leave you with a little food for thought. The ESPC (Email Sender & Provider Coalition) has a Best Practices Guide available on there website that is a must read for anyone in music media marketing and digital marketing in general.  In addition to the Best Practices Guide, their website is full of interesting articles and documents that are worth a good look.

So, while you are patiently waiting for the last of the cold weather to go on back north and for spring to come, why not snuggle up close to your special someone with a bottle of wine and the latest in Best Practices? Ah, it’s like a scene right out of Shakespeare.

Oh, and before I forget, if you happen to be attending SXSW, check out our lunch symposium on the Fan-Centric Future.

While pouring over the numbers from 2008, I started to notice some very interesting trends that are quite pertinent for those of us in Fan Relationship Management.  I can’t go into all of them here, but I will let you know that FanMail’s 2008 Music Industry Email Marketing and Fan CRM Benchmark Report is available now (contact me or David to find out how to get a customized report and analysis of your business).

The thing that I found that I absolutely had to share though has to do with subscriber engagement frequency and open rates.

Did you know that subscribers that receive email newsletters and updates at least once a month have open rates that can average as high as eighty percent? That is amazing.  However, as soon as a subscriber receives more than twenty newsletters in a single year, their open rate drops to below fifty percent!  So, concert promoters, record labels and artist managers, listen up.  It is very important to stay engaged with your fans, but do not over do it or the consequences could be severe.  Aim for an engagement rate of about every three to four weeks, and please, do not pester your fans with an announcement every time a drummer buys a new set of sticks or the guitarist changes their strings.

Okay, that ends my rant, back to the workshop for me.  I have a lot to do to get ready for SXSW if I am going to have time hang-out with all of you in Austin. Cheers!