Ten Tips To Greater Sales on GospelReggae.com: PART 4 (E-mail List)
Jan. 18, 2010 - 4. MAKE YOUR LIST AND CHECK IT TWICE (Build an E-mail List):
It may sound old school in the age of Twitter and FaceBook, but people still check their e-mail daily and there is tremendous promotional potential in mass-mailers. In fact, an e-mail list is still one of the most effective (and free) promotional tools out there.
I started collecting e-mail addresses years ago and currently have 15,647 through my website and another 16,147 through ReverbNation. It pays off to take the time to build your list. There is nothing like letting 30,000 people know about your new album with one click!
Some artists like Sherwin Gardner, Lynette White and Jadee have been taking advantage of this recently, but others have yet to tap into it's potential.
What can an e-mail list accomplish? It keeps your fans up to date (so that they stay your fans), it mobilizes your core audience (for concerts and album releases) and most important of all, it gives you the prayer support necessary to continue on with a fruitful ministry.
Don't have a list? Sure you do. Copy all the e-mails from the address books of all your e-mail accounts and paste them into a WORD file and put each address on it's own line separated with a comma and a space. Delete the duplicates and drop it back into your address book as a group/list. You gotta start somewhere so start today! You may be surprised just how may addresses you already have.
Just make sure that when you send out a mailer to BCC the list/group otherwise you may vex a lot of people and give everybody else your list. And from here on out, collect as many addresses as you can. Keep in mind that they will change often as people delete accounts in order to avoid spam. Speaking of SPAM, always give people the option of being removed from your list.
Artists like Dominic Balli manage their e-mail list through ReverbNation. They are awesome and have a great design and a lot of cool tools that are designed specifically for the independent artist such as yourself. For more on this visit: http://www.reverbnation.com/
Other tools such as Yahoo Group, Google Group, or Ning are free but lack tracking and measuring capabilities unique to ReverbNation.
Concerts are by far the best place to collect e-mail addresses. A clipboard at your merch table is a good start. Always announce your list from stage. I recorded an artist last week that sends a team of volunteers out into the audience at their shows with small slips of paper collecting e-mail addresses. They've collected over 10,000 so far! I applaud their ingenuity. Get creative and be proactive! Start today!
For more info on how to write an effective newsletter, how to get people to sign up for your mailing list at shows and how to create and manage a street team, click on the link below:
http://www.indieguide.com/category/view/Mailing_Lists
Blessings in Christ,
Mark Mohr
http://www.GospelReggae.com
