Category: Email MarketingCategory: Email Marketing

Seven things your band could send to your email list after a big show:

1. Photos of setting up, playing, and hanging out afterwards.

2. A handful of the photos you took with fans, and the super cool people you met backstage, like that guy that wears yellow glasses and writes about heavy metal email newsletters (hey, that’s me!)

3. Talk about some of your favorite bands that played

4. Explain how you picked your set list (include a photo)

5. Send a store discount, and the code word is the second song title from your set

6. Ask people who saw you at the event to reply to your email with photos they took, or their favorite song of the night (this can be helpful for building segments)

7. Share a funny / weird / dangerous / scary story that happened

After all this, it’s a perfect time to mention your upcoming tour, or that EP you just released.

Not in a band? Talk about your upcoming photo shoots, upcoming designs you’re working on, courses you’re teaching, bicycles you’re building – whatever!

Had a conversation this weekend at Furnace Fest, about waiting to start sending a newsletter to a small list (about 10 people), which reminded me of this story:

Learn from Chris Spencer of Unsane, from an interview with Echoes and Dust:

“We played a show at CBGBs, we got offered a show with Sonic Youth and we got there to find out that we were playing the graveyard shift, which was actually after Sonic Youth … we had to go out and the place cleared out and we went on to like twelve people!”

Got ten people on your list? That’s enough.

Don’t wait for more people – level the room. Impress the people in front of you. Serve the people who signed up.

“Fortunately for us, Gerard Cosmos from Matador Records happened to still be there and offered us a record deal after that, so it actually really worked out.”

You never know who might be reading your newsletter, so don’t hold back.

Why else should you send to a smaller list?

Because you can make your mistakes now, and learn from them, with a much smaller impact.

If you mess up a link to 25 people, fix the link and send it again. Learn to double check that sort of stuff now, before you fuck up with 2,500 people.

Of the 90 bands playing Furnace Fest later this week:

• 46 bands have a website (51%)
• 23 bands don’t have a website, but use a “Link In Bio” service (25%)
• 36 bands have an email newsletter (40%)
• 21 bands have no website, and no email list, but most aren’t full-time bands anymore, so that makes sense.

(Here’s my Google Sheet with all the data – nerdy, I know)

Of the 36 bands with a newsletter, just three sent me a solid “Welcome Email,” while the others were plain confirmation emails.

As I wrote in ‘PUT YOUR WELCOME EMAIL TO WORK,’ your welcome email can help you make money:

1. A link to your store, maybe with a discount code
2. Your website, or the tour dates section
3. Your Patreon – some of your biggest fans might not even know you have one!
4. Your Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music pages
5. Your latest video on YouTube

Should you have a website? Probably.
Should you have an email list? Hell yes.

Both are pretty easy to set up these days,

As I wrote in ‘YOUR NEXT NEWSLETTER IS ALREADY WRITTEN,’ you can re-purpose your social media posts into weekly newsletters, especially since most of your followers don’t even see your content because of algorithms.

Add some more photos, a little bit of text, and you’ll make your fans who don’t spend six hours a day on social media very happy.

Draw some inspiration from the bands playing Furnace Fest this year; check out their websites, subscribe to some newsletters, and let’s make sure you’re reaching more of your fans in 2024.

Easiest platform to start building your email list? Substack.

Sign up, give it a name, upload a logo, add a tag line, and you’re done – now you’ve got a landing page.

It’s a start. It’s not forever. If you outgrow it, fine. Export your subscribers and go somewhere.

But compared to other offerings, I believe Substack to the be the easiest for anyone just starting out.

Ask some people to sign up now, and when you’re ready, you’ve got a few people on your list already.

Most of the creative people I talk to about starting newsletters say some variation of the following:

“I’m not that interesting.”

It’s along the lines of, “why would anyone care?” Or, “I don’t really do anything exciting.”

Then I look at their websites, and social media feeds and I have a good laugh.

Social media has us convinced that if we’re not going viral every other day, or our videos don’t get 100,000 views in the first four hours, we must be boring. Washed up. Nobody cares.

Yet these people I talk to are designers with a dreamy client list. Photographers who post breath taking photos. Musicians with amazing music and visuals. Editors, writers, builders, artists of all sorts, minds brimming with ideas, stories to keep you awake til the sun comes up…

But a throw-away social media post on a Tuesday night gets a few likes, and we let allow these platforms to feed us this idea that nobody cares.

Some songs will never see the light of day because they didn’t go viral on TikTok:

“You kind of live and die by overnight virality. That has now created a situation where qualified A&Rs with great ears, who are tenured, who are good with music and passionate about it, can’t really do their job the way they used to,” say Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic over at Rolling Stone.

See that?

TikTok has more sway over qualified A&R folks.

And social media has swayed artists everywhere into believing their work isn’t good enough.