4 Reasons Why Your Email List Is So Important

One of the most effective tools that any artist, band, engineer, musician, record label or person in the music business can have is an email list. Your email newsletter truly is the best way to keep people informed about what you're doing, but can also help you get work or sell more product or tickets. It's a targeted audience that's opted in and really wants to hear from you. Here's an excerpt from the new Social Media Promotion For Musicians book that outlines the 4 reasons why your email list is important.

"While the trend is to think that email is on the decline when it comes to communicating with friends, fans, clients and business associates as social networks like Facebook rise in popularity, it's a lot more important than you think when it comes to promotion. Here are four reasons why.

1. You control the message. Your email list is one of the most powerful tools you can have because you control the message, and if done well, it can feel a lot more personal than communicating via Facebook or Linkedin or any of the other popular networks. You control the information, the look, the marketing and the promotion in a way that’s not possible in any social network, since each social network has its own look and feel as well as a terms-of-service agreement that can limit what you can say and do.

2. Your message is consistent. Although the ability to control the message is important, being able to control the consistency of that message is even more so. For most artists and musicians today, the problem becomes how to effectively communicate with all of your "friends" and contacts across various networks, because social networks are a closed environment by nature. That means that you have a set of friends on Facebook, another set on Twitter, and a different set on another network like Pinterest or Instagram. As a result, the look and feel will be inconsistent because of the nature of the various networks. If you're not consistent in your presentation, you're not controlling the message.

3. It’s a memory prompt. One of the best things about a newsletter is that it reminds fans or former clients who you are. If a person hasn’t been following you on a social network and therefore doesn’t see any of your regular posts, that newsletter in their email box jogs their memory and reminds them you’re around. It doesn’t take long to drift from the public consciousness, and an email prevents that from happening. 

4. You can measure its effectiveness. One thing that email can provide that social networks don’t do nearly as well is sophisticated measurement. With email we know when a newsletter was opened, if it was opened more than once (even if it's reopened again a year later), how long it was read, if any of the links were clicked, and if it was passed along to anyone else, among many other measurements. Obviously your personal email app on your computer can't do these things, and it can't easily reach out to thousands of people as well. That's why you need a service like Constant Contact, WhatCounts, or iContact, all of which also have the added convenience of constantly cleaning the list of bounces and outdated addresses."

You can read more more excerpts from Social Media Promotion For Musicians and other books on the excerpts page at bobbyowsinski.com.

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