SAYING HELLO, SUBSTACK NOTES, AND MORE

This newsletter began because I’ve been ranting about email marketing for bands for awhile now… ahem… the above image is from 2014.

Rather than keep shoveling my thoughts and ideas onto social media, only for them to wash away within minutes with all the other hot takes, gossip, and drama, I started this HEAVY METAL EMAIL newsletter in 2021.

Social media networks come and go, but you’ll still need an email to sign up for the next one, and so will all your fans.

Yes, your fans check their email.

Don’t take it from me – take it from Laura Kidd. She’s been working on her email list since 2009 and says having an email list is one of the major reasons why she can work on music full time (I’m in it, too!):

So if you’re tired of the social media rat-race, you’re in the right place.

To get caught up, here are my most popular posts as of late:

• “Get ready to shell out $20/mo to reach maybe 15% of your audience,” from ‘THE SOCIAL MEDIA PAY-TO-PLAY ERA STARTS NOW.’
• Metallica, Iron Maiden, Slipknot, Testament, Black Sabbath, Metal Blade Records, Nuclear Blast Records and more all have “Legacy Blue Checkmarks” on Twitter, and Elon Musk said “those are the ones that are truly corrupt.”
• I interviewed Matt DeBenedictis, Manager of Compliance at Mailchimp who said, “just because you’ve got 20,000 addresses, that doesn’t mean that’s 20,000 addresses that want to hear from you today.” This is a good one to read if you’re dusting off your email list from 10 years ago!
• In my post “CASSETTES & EMAIL MARKETING WILL OUTLIVE EVERY SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM,” I wrote “if your posting on social media multiple times per week for just 5-10% of your fans to see, you should probably “repurpose your social media posts” and put them into a weekly email newsletter.”

If you’ve got any questions about starting a newsletter in 2023 for your band, label, photography biz, design firm, radio show, whatever (this ain’t just for metal heads) – shoot me an email: seth@socialmediaescape.club

Also, I published my first note on Substack Notes:

Notes is a new space on Substack for writers to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. This will definitely be where I share that sort of stuff, rather than Twitter.

HOW TO JOIN

Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to HEAVY METAL EMAIL, you’ll automatically see my notes.