Email vs SMS Marketing for Music Artists
Social media is useful for finding new fans but unreliable for retaining them due to changing algorithms and platform risks. Email and SMS marketing let you own your audience contact list and communicate directly on your terms.
By Andrew Southworth
Happy Monday!
Today we’re going to talk about email marketing and SMS marketing for music artists.
Social media can be great for finding new fans, but it isn’t the best place to retain fans. This is largely because you don’t own the social media platform and you can’t guarantee you have a way to reach out to your audience on them in the future.
Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have algorithms that determine who sees your posts. These algorithms change over time and can result in none of your posts being shown to your followers. The platforms can also go in and out of favorability over time and even shut down (Myspace, Vine), or get banned in your country (TikTok).
With someone’s email or phone number, you can contact them whenever you want (as long as they keep giving you permission to do so). Even if you have issues with your email / text provider you can simply take your list and move it over to another provider - you truly own it and can take backups of it.
Before we dive in just in case you haven’t heard these terms:
Email marketing: collecting fan’s email addresses and sending them emails / newsletters on a periodic basis
SMS marketing: collecting fan’s phone numbers and sending them text messages on a periodic basis
Email vs SMS marketing
My opinion is that you should take advantage of email marketing before you dive into SMS marketing. Many people want to skip email and feel like SMS marketing is more modern and is a better marketing channel than email (in certain ways it is), but it has plenty of downsides:
SMS is often 5-10X more expensive than email
SMS is often limited to 160 characters, but even if higher it’s still much shorter than email
People guard their phone number more tightly than their email
It’s hard to send SMS messages that aren’t annoying, with email you can send much more frequently
Overall it often can make sense to use both email marketing and SMS marketing, but for different purposes. For example, only using texts for tour announcements and contests and everything else via email. Additionally, many of the practices you learn from email marketing will help you with SMS marketing.
The art of writing and planning great marketing emails prepares you wonderfully for doing the same for text messages. This is important because with SMS it’s easy to annoy people and messages cost 5-10X more than email.
Yes, SMS open rates and click rates are much higher than email. But the unsubscribe rate is much higher as well, and you can’t send nearly as many SMS messages as you can emails. If you text your fans every week or multiple times per week, people will be annoyed, but you can easily do this with email without bothering anyone.
What do you contact people about?
A lot of people ask me “what do I even send to these people on my list?”. This will differ from artist to artist, but here are some examples:
Announcing new song releases and music videos
Show / tour dates
Behind the scenes content of your writing process
Giveaways / contests
New merch
Best practice is to try and give more than you ask for. Meaning, send more emails about new music and behind the scenes stuff than emails about merch. You don’t want your fans to feel like the only purpose of your email list is for you to sell them stuff.
This is why in my email marketing I rarely ever send a message that’s entirely focused on selling something. In this newsletter you’re reading right now i’ve hopefully been giving you helpful information, and if you’ve read this far you must be interested enough to have stuck around.
Now when I mention I have a software platform called MusicFunnels that not only lets you do email marketing, but also build your website, online store, create sales funnels and more…. and I mentioned I have a course called Fan Growth Machine in this same topic… you (hopefully) aren’t bothered by the sales pitch.
If all I did every week was ask you to buy something and never actually gave you any useful information you’d stop opening my emails and quickly unsubscribe from the list. This is what your fans will do if you only email them to ask them to buy something.
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Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:
My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads. Fan Growth Machine teaches you how to build a website, online store and grow your email list.
My ad agency. Forbid Media specializes in running Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify.
Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels is the best all-in-one platform for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels and build their mailing list.
1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or Alex Bochel here.
My Links:
🌍 MusicFunnels - Best website / store / funnels for music artists (get your 14-day FREE trial!)
💿 Partnered Projects - the best Spotify playlist service
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