Category: Email MarketingCategory: Email Marketing

The people you want to reach already have an email address – they use it every day when they order vinyl and concert tickets and sign up for streaming music services.

Those people don’t let those emails get lost in their inbox. They are emails they seek out because they would be missed if they never showed up.

Just like your art, products, and services, you’d be missed if you didn’t show up.

Like Seth Godin wrote in 2018:

You can spam people, yell a lot, interrupt our day. You can create a scene, engage in a scandal and bully others. Your brand or your personality can be the one that we’d all prefer never to hear from again soon.

Or…

You could be the one we’d miss if you were gone.

Send emails that your fans would miss if you stopped sending them.

For an email campaign to work, it’s gotta get opened – hello, subject lines.

The subject line is what your fan sees in their inbox, along with all the other subject lines from everything else they get everyday.

There’s two good ways to figure out if your subject lines are working:

1. A/B testing, which means sending two versions of the same email to a subset of your email list with different subject lines, then measuring the performance of each. You can do this with services like Mailchimp, but not Substack.
2. Check older emails and see which ones got opened more.

If you only send three emails a year, though, this won’t work.

It’d be like playing three songs at a show every night. Gonna be hard to nail down what’s actually landing with your audience.

But, really?

Regardless of subject line, the best opened email is one that people expect and really want.

Take for instance 

Stream N’ Destroy from our friend Ryan J. Downey:

If you’re not familiar with Stream N’ Destroy, ehh.. those subject lines aren’t too thrilling, right?

But guess what?

It doesn’t matter, because people who subscribe (music industry folks in the metal and hard rock world) know what they’re getting when Stream N’ Destroy shows up in their inbox.

These are some recent emails from Trivium:

Notice they don’t just say “tour news,” or “updates!” These are clear and concise, and I bet they have a great open rate.

Basically, if no one is opening your email, take a step back and think – are you sending anything that’s really exciting?

Start with the subject line. Does it sing?

From there, would your fans sneak off the job to read your email in the bathroom?

If not, how do you get there?

That’s how to get people opening your emails.

Understand that you’re not just what you’re selling (an album, artwork, photography, attendance figures), you’re a fucking star.

Coca Cola commercials are more interesting than a 2L bottle of sugar water.
A live show is more interesting than a CD mock up.
Your Twitch stream is more interesting than a shirt.

There is no shortage of vinyl records or songs to stream on Spotify or podcasts to listen to.

But there’s only one of you.

Give yourself a break; you’re just one person.

From ‘Publishers move past seeing social media platforms as traffic drivers,’ over at Digiday:

“The Washington Post has about 16 people on its social team, which is split into two sub teams: its Instagram team and its ‘core social’ team, which focuses on all the other platforms.”

Maybe you don’t need 16 people, but you could probably use one full time person doing your socials, right?

This morning Embedded sent out ‘Promotional labor,’ which is well worth the read.

Over the past five years, social media platforms have demanded more and more work from their users in order fulfill the promise of keeping connected. If you want your followers to see you on Instagram, you can’t just post a picture, you have to make a video. And if you want them to see the video, you need to produce, shoot, and edit it with some level of skill. And even then, if you’re not catering to a specific trend, the video still might flop—so you try again, and add “comment five times, go live for five minutes” to your growing list of unpaid tasks required for the basic privilege of being seen. 

More work for the chance of reaching your audience sounds horrible, and not a great investment.

Get your social media audience on your email list while you still can. Here’s a very basic plan on how to do that.

Go easy on yourself. You’re just one person, and your magic is probably mostly wrapped up in the main thing you do, like making art, playing bass, or releasing records.

That’s why you have a fanbase in the first place.

Hey, so it’s been 500 days since I launched HEAVY METAL EMAIL, and here’s some things I learned along the way about running a very niche email newsletter.

➡️ I got more sign ups from Substack than all of the social media networks put together. Lots of people subscribe to various newsletters on Substack, which makes it easy for them to subscribe.

➡️ I mostly stopped promoting HEAVY METAL EMAIL on social media months ago, and stopped the LINKINBIO dance.

Now I use the extra time to write better newsletters – take care of the people in front of you, and stop chasing MORE subscribers / fans.

Hone you craft, learn new skills, build better.

➡️ One of my most popular posts was my interview with Matt DeBenedictis, Manager of Compliance at Mailchimp.

Think of all the different people you could collaborate with in your orbit.

Not just because they’ll share it with all their social followers (and reach like 5% of their audience, bah!) – but because you’re making something awesome together, and that good energy flows in places that aren’t controlled by algorithms.

I hit 250 subscribers around December 24th, 2022 (and wrote about it here), so in the last 74 days I grew HEAVY METAL EMAIL by 58 subscribers, mostly without social media.

I get it – the allure of social media is real. But here in 2023 we’re all spending multiple hours a day on these platforms already.

What’s next? More hours?

That’s the only thing these platforms are interested in – keeping you hooked on what they offer so they can mine your data and show you more ads.

I’ve been saying it for years – it will never get easier to reach your fans on social media. It was hard last year, it’ll be harder this year. Best of luck in 2024.

Get a website, build an email list, and develop a real connection with your fans.

I was sick last week, so it’s taking me a minute to get back into the swing of things around here.

From ‘Leaving Social Media?’ by Lachrista Greco:

“My lit agent advises I keep the account active and I understand why. But I also know there was a time before social media. There was a time when none of us relied on this shit. There was a time before the tornado of “content creation” and “influencers” and “doomscrolling.”

Yes, “there was a time when none of us relied on this shit.”

I started my first music blog in 2001, five years before Twitter showed up (it was called Twttr back then).

Dillinger Escape Plan didn’t go viral on a social media platform, they just put on such an insane show that people had to talk about them. The old-school viral, I guess.

Music blogs, record stores, local venues, groups of friends, email lists – those things worked, and they still do.

It’s getting harder to say the same about social media.