Category: sethwCategory: sethw

My birthday just passed (I turned 46 this year, thank you), and because of the joys of email marketing I got a few celebratory emails from some brands I subscribe to.

In fairness, I won’t show off the birthday email from a client, but here’s an email from another label in the same genre:

Nothing fancy, but it works. Direct, simple, the colors are on brand – bravo!

Compare that with birthday email from my bank. They’re in the business of literally HOLDING ONTO EVERYONE’S MONEY, and I get dumb stock image:

If ANYONE should know what my interests are, it’s the one business who sees every damn penny I spend month after month. Instead I get no direct benefit – no discount, no exclusive offer, nothing.

All of this to say – if you have permission to send someone email marketing messages (very important), and you have their birthday info, sending someone an email on their special day can do two things: make the person feel good (it’s their birthday), and make a sale.

Yes, of course the second one is self-serving, but we all got rent to pay. And if they’re subscribed to your email updates in the first place, it’s not like it’s some egregious affront to their inbox.

Things you could send your fans on their birthday:

• Discounts on shirts, music, or other goodies
• Free shipping on select items, or at a lower than usual price point
• Special video performance, or message – make a new one every year
• Discount codes or guest list for upcoming shows

Hey – they’re your fans, you know what would resonate with them better than I would! Reply to this email and I’ll bounce some ideas around with you.

As part of my ongoing research in the world of heavy metal email, I buy albums from various record labels, (edit – and opt-in for future emails), just to see their email flow after I put in that order.

A handful send me a receipt for my order. That’s expected.
Then they never send me another email. That makes me sad.

The person most likely to buy from you is someone who bought from you before.

And if you know who bought a [THRASH ALBUM] then you know who to send an email to when you have a new [THRASH ALBUM] coming out in two months.

You own the store. You see the people who buy cassettes. Or shirts. You see it all, just like Amazon, but without being too creepy.

Make an email that features the things you sell, send them to people who buy those things, and make some money.

It sure is tempting to keep shoveling coal on the social media fire, then burn some more dollars to promote those posts in hopes that your followers actually see them.

Or, you could send an email to the 10,000 people you have on your email list every Friday and sell a bunch of records every month.

Yes – if you JUST make it BUY BUY BUY, that’‘ll get old. Everyone does that.

But chances are your bands posted videos this week. And songs. And got some cool playlist adds. Cool press.

The same stuff that you’re Tweeting that 70% of your followers aren’t even seeing.

Put it in an email every week.

Yes – EVERY. WEEK.

Try it.

Will a few people un-subsribe? Oh, you bet they will.

But the 98% of people who don’t? What about them? Those are YOUR PEOPLE.

I’ve said this for years – people actually watch shows like STORAGE WARS, which is people bidding on junk and then seeing who “wins” at the end.

You’re a record label, a band, a photographer, a designer, a podcaster – you’ve got stories to tell and much better products to sell.

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I mean, these emails write themselves:

Social media algorithms limit who sees your new album pre-order, single, merch drop, ticket sale, or whatever else you’re trying to promote. Send emails to people who sign up and they’ll see your stuff.

No band signs up for social media and says, “eh, I’ll Tweet once a month, I don’t want to be too spammy.”

Then eight times a day they’ll post tour posters, YouTube links, and whatever else that capture on their smart phone.

Okay, you might not want to send eight emails a day to your fans, but you should probably send more than once a month.

See, the problem is we all get 14 emails everyday from companies and we get mad.

Don’t do that and you’re gold. It’s a low bar, but you can manage that.

But if you send BUY BUY BUY to your fans once a week that’s gonna get old real quick.

If you send a weekly email of the photos that usually post on Instagram (that most of your fans don’t see), or the song snippets you post on Twitter (that most of your fans don’t see), or the tour posters on Facebook (THAT MOST OF YOUR FANS DON’T SEE), then you’re not just coming off as a desperate retailer, or a needy politician.

You’re sharing what you do with people who probably don’t see your stuff anyways! There’s nothing spammy about that at all.

“Do the dance on socials, drive people to your email list, then regularly connect with your fans with stories, photos, exclusive looks, and the occasional link to a record or photo print,” from my post SELL YOUR DAMN JOURNEY

Pop star Olivia Rodrigo included this photo in her recent email (with a hand written note):

I mean, that’s an Instagram photo basically, right? And with algorithms, maybe 20% of her fans would see it anyways.

And not all of her fans follow on Instagram.

And someday she might get randomly locked out of her account, because that’s what Instagram does!

Start an email list. Yes, in 2022.

It’s your most direct connection to your fans. Your supporters. Your customers.

Building your entire brand on social media is like building a house on quicksand – someday it’s all gonna fall down.

HASHTAGS = SHIT*

Good thread. I’ve about had it with social media these days (if you couldn’t tell), and it’s why I’m so adamant about moving your social media audience to your email list as fast as you can.

* All hail Slipknot

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“I’m not supporting myself entirely with Substack by any means, but it earns plenty for me to feel great about investing so much time into it.”

If you missed it last week, I interviewed Ryan J. Downey of the Stream N’ Destroy newsletter, which is in the top 20 music newsletters on Substack.

Other interviews I’ve done:

”A lot of people will tell me that they can’t keep up, and the newsletter helps them do that,” from my talk with artist / musician Joan Pope.

“The whole time I’m doing that, I’m back to thinking ‘what will our fans like?’ Which is exactly the head space I want to be in,” says Professor Pizza of Axe Slasher, on writing newsletters for his fans. Read it here.

“Email list is good for the real diehards, especially when it comes to new releases and big announcements like shows,” said Jeff Gretz of Zao.

RIP, TAYLOR HAWKINS

Absolutely horrible news to wake up to on a Saturday. Hug your friends, support the bands you love, turn up the music this weekend

Ryan J. Downey is a reporter, podcaster, writer, manager, and a million other things, and still finds time to publish his Stream N’ Destroy newsletter a few times a week – and it’s one of the Top 25 Top 20 (as of Sunday, March 20, 2022) music newsletters on Substack!

Why Substack, instead of something like Mailchimp?

Joe Escalante told me about Substack in November 2019. I liked the functionality, business model, and simplicity of the platform. Substack was far from ubiquitous at the time. In fact, it was new enough that my initial rush of subscriptions earned me a phone call from the CEO. I’m sure Stream N’ Destroy is small potatoes for them now, but I took that as another positive sign, encouraging me to continue down this path. I’m not supporting myself entirely with Substack by any means, but it earns plenty for me to feel great about investing so much time into it.

I was on MySpace in 2003; Facebook in 2005; Twitter in 2007; I’d like to think my early adoption of Substack is actually providing a great return.

The feedback (questions, suggestions, support) I receive from people is fantastic. They haven’t converted to the Substack comment section, but I suspect that’s because most of my readers are prominent figures (band members, managers, agents, label staffers, etc.) who don’t necessarily want to chat about this data in a public space. They just email me.

I enjoy finding new sources of data, organizing what’s relevant, and knowing that I’m making something that directly helps people I like and respect to put their art out there in the most effective and efficient ways possible.

In 2013 you planned to retire the email. Can you speak a bit to the work of just doing something like this for years? There’s up and downs, of course. What stuck with you, to keep doing doing this?

I sat at a dinner table with about a dozen colleagues after a show in 2013 when someone mentioned “Downey’s Scans email.” I made an offhanded comment about how I planned to retire it as it became harder to justify putting so much time into something I wasn’t sure meant anything to anyone else. A loud protest erupted around the table. People told me stories about how and why the weekly emails were of value to them. The positive reinforcement from that dinner propelled the newsletter for another six years.

Shortly afterward I moved the newsletter to Constant Contact (a platform similar to Mailchimp), primarily to give it a more “polished” look with a few graphics and space for a small amount of advertising. Over time, the metrics that matter multiplied. I changed the name from “A Few Scans…” to “Stream N’ Destroy” in recognition of the dominance of digital service providers like Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora over traditional retail sales and physical media.

Social media, YouTube, concert attendance, merchandising — my goal is to gather all of the relevant numbers and distill them into something easy to read, saving my subscribers the considerable time and effort involved in tracking all of that down on a regular basis. Moving to Constant Contact and selling a small amount of advertising was a great and necessary step. But as the newsletter continued to expand – in readership, content, and frequency – that ad revenue no longer covered the time invested into the posts.

With the holidays approaching in 2019 I decided to “flip the switch” with monetization. (I set the weekly subscription rate to the bare minimum the platform allowed.)

I prepared myself for a flood of indifference, or even scorn, but I was pleasantly relieved by the outpouring of support from longtime subscribers. That encouraged me to continue this thing indefinitely, to work harder at it, and to constantly evolve and expand it to meet the needs of the folks who depend upon it.

You said, “I prepared myself for a flood of indifference, or even scorn;” where do you think that comes from?

A handful of people I know, myself included, sort of scoff that we could be compensated for this “thing we do,” without realizing, oh wait, “I know what I’m talking about, this might be of value to someone, so here’s a price tag.” How long was the debate with yourself about the move towards monetizing?

It’s probably left over from my experience in the punk and hardcore scene, where the spirit of the DIY/counterculture values is often coming from the right place, but the practice is messy and complicated. I did have one colleague/friend tell me I should never sell advertising for the newsletter, let alone subscriptions, as I should “do it for the love.” This same friend is a record executive with millions of albums sold by bands he personally A&R’d and handled. I wouldn’t expect him to do that for free and the more I thought about it, I shouldn’t work for free, either.

I run a Danzig fan account, This Day In Danzig, with close to 30k followers on Instagram. That is a labor of love. I’m happy to continue doing that for free. The newsletter, however, is fairly labor-intensive to put together and provides a unique service to some great people who have told me they rely upon it for various reasons.

(Keep in mind, I DID write these emails up for free for many years.)

I suppose the internal debate was in stages. First, whether to sell a small amount of advertising and later, whether or not to offer subscriptions.

Thankfully, the response to both measures was overwhelmingly positive.

You also said, “I’m not supporting myself entirely with Substack by any means.”

I see this a lot, among artists who believe their “one thing” should pay all the bills, and if it doesn’t they’re not really a photographer, or artist, or musician… that they aren’t really “doing it.”

Can you elaborate on this “multiple income streams” thing, a bit? It sounds very BUSINESS-like but man, if we can’t pay the rent it’s hard to be this artist person in the first place. Like, you do several things, just like a lot of people that work in music.

You make an excellent point! The last full-time job I had was with MTV News and that ended in July 2004 (though I continued to freelance for them for another decade after that). I do believe in the adage “jack of all trades, master of none” but as with many things, it’s about balance. I like having a handful of things happening both in terms of personal fulfillment creatively and from a practical standpoint. I have a couple of colleagues who are now executives at MTV who started before I did. But dozens more were swept away during layoffs and reorganizations of many kinds.

In 2022 I’m aiming to get more out of fewer things, but I can’t imagine being married to a single “thing.” I abandoned that notion that something wasn’t “real” if it wasn’t my “one thing” a long time ago. I mean, as a teenager, I was playing in a hardcore band, publishing a fanzine, putting on shows, working with Anti-Racist Action, going to school, and doing restaurant jobs part time.

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As Ryan says, “Stream N’ Destroy is tailored to hard rock, metal, and punk(ish) music and culture, delivering relevant data about streaming, sales, concert attendance, and social media, distilled it into easy-to-read metrics for industry professionals.” If that’s your thing, you need to subscribe!

What I love about Stream N’ Destroy is it’s not Ryan’s “main thing.” He could have started a newsletter about all the interviews he’s done, or talked about the bands he’s managed, but instead he covers topics and trends that are helpful to those in the heavy music orbit.

Hit reply or contact me at seth@socialmediaescape.club – absolutely here to talk about all things email marketing for your creative projects!

A few years back I sent out a company-wide email for a client. After I hit send, a few emails came in.

I spelled the company’s name wrong in the FROM field.

I didn’t get fired, chewed out, no one unsubscribed. Life went on.

Was I bummed? Absolutely.

But it’s a learning experience. Every show you play, ever release you put out, and every email you send – each time there’s the possibility of royally fucking up.

And fucking up is how we get better.

If you’re a photographer, you tried some different settings, then learned what to use under different conditions.

If you’re a designer, you might be more happy with your recent work than the first few pieces you delivered.

Tattoo artists, producers, guitarists, song writers, editors – we are all where we’re at right now by learning from our earlier work and the mistakes we made.

I bring this up because I keep hearing about this fear of UNSUBSCRIBES.

Unless you’re losing DOZENS of subscribers per email, don’t sweat it.

Stop fretting over the eight people that unsubscribed, and pay attention to the 100+ that clicked a link to your new offering.

“Unsubscribes are not personal, but they’re beneficial to both the subscriber and you. If someone doesn’t want to be on your email list, you don’t want them there. Having people on your list who don’t actually want to be there is guaranteed to damage your deliverability, ultimately hurting your ability to reach those people who do want to be on your list,” says Alyssa Dulin at ConvertKit.

If people ain’t opening your email, that can damage your “deliverability.” Enough damage, and your emails might end up in SPAM folders, or the Promotions tab in GMail.

Don’t worry about unsubscribes. Let ‘em go.

Don’t worry about unfollows on Twitter or Facebook.

Don’t figure out – find out what works for you and your fans.

It’s a never-ending discovery, and you’ll get there quicker if you just keep your head down and keep in touch with your fans directly via you email list.

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YOU STILL DON’T HAVE AN EMAIL LIST?

Algorithms limit your reach. Platforms can suspend your account at any time. Make sure you’re able to reach your fans directly with an email list!

Your 2022 is going to be a bloodbath if you rely 100% on socials to keep in touch with your fans. Especially if you lose access to any of your social accounts.

It pains me that so many bands, brands, artists, and creative individuals are losing touch with their audience. If you’re lucky you’re reaching 5% of your fans.