Category: Email MarketingCategory: Email Marketing

I’ve been seeing some depressing posts from all sorts of creative folks lately, grieving about their miserable social media “reach.”

And it’s not just independent folks selling shirts, jewelry, and design services.

Earlier this year I wrote how Fear Factory posted about the 13th anniversary of ‘Mechanize’ to their 780,300 total followers, and around 6% of their fans saw it.

So just like major bands with massive social media followings, smaller creative folks can’t reach their full audience and they’re losing sales. They can’t reach new customers, and they can’t reach their existing customers.

AHEM.

So what’s our Social Media Escape Plan, friends?

It ain’t gonna get any easier to reach our fans on socials.

It’s only gonna get harder in 2023, so time to think about email newsletters again!

If social media imploded today, could you still reach your fans?

And if social media only let you reach 10% of your fans, what is the threshold of that reach to where it becomes not worth it?

Is it 8%? 5%? Do you even know how many fans you’re reaching on socials? Are you paying to reach your fans?

And if you have 5,000 followers on Twitter, or Instagram, and it just seems like the effort really isn’t worth it, are you really going to just walk away from them? Just put up a single post saying, “hey, make sure to follow on Spotify,” or whatever?

What’s your Social Media Escape Plan?

Because it was 144 days ago when Elon Musk took over Twitter, and it’s a miracle it’s still standing.

Meta is gonna fire 10,000 more people.

TikTok might get banned in the U.S.

These are platforms we rely on to reach our fans, and they’re completely out of our control.

If anything happens to these platforms, we lose the ability to reach our fans.

So get in the habit now of asking your fans to subscribe to your email newsletter, then build a content strategy today on how and when you’re going to reach your fans with an email newsletter.

Don’t wait until you lose contact with your fans to start thinking about this.

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.