Category: Email MarketingCategory: Email Marketing

In conversations I’ve had in recent months, folks are reluctant to start (or re-start) sending newsletters. After all, social media is the big new thing. Email newsletters are the lame old thing.

“Our insistence that it be guaranteed to work almost ensures that it won’t.

Forcing something to be big makes it small.”

The above is from Seth Godin and his post, ‘The paradox of big.’

You expect to send one email to a years-old list and have it magically lead to $4000 in sales.

You doubt that’ll happen, so why even bother?

But knowing you can post a Tweet and see it reach 100 people, and 4 people like it, all within 10 minutes – well, that just feels better.

So if you believe email is old and not worth the time, no amount of metrics or percentages will convince you it’s worth the time.

Hit that unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email then.

Then just keep shoveling your photos and stories and “assets” into the social media hamster wheel, and be grateful for the 2% of your followers that might see it.

“On our @Buffer account, we reach about 2 percent of our followers on average with each tweet.”

Buffer is a tool I’ve used for years for scheduling social media posts for multiple clients. The company has been around since 2010, and they know a thing or two about social media.

So even Buffer is only reaching about 2% of their followers on Twitter (as of 2014, I’m sure that number is smaller today), and they’re professionals. I just checked my own account (@sethw) and I’m just over 3% for the last 28 days.

Basically that means 97% of my followers never saw a Tweet from me in the last month. That’s about 2,500 out of 2,599 people that didn’t see me post about this newsletter, my Goodnight, Metal Friend mixes, or me posting links to bands I like on Bandcamp.

Read the ‘Tweet reach percentage’ section of ‘How to Use Twitter Analytics: 15 Simple-to-Find Stats to Help You Tweet Better’ from Buffer for more info.

SO, here’s your FOUR THE WEEKEND homework:

1. Look up your monthly impressions on your social media accounts. Divide by the # of followers you’ve got. If it’s better than 5% you’re a legend (but it still means 95% of your fans are missing out).
2. Check your own engagement rates – that’s how many of the people who see your posts actually “engage” with your content via likes / shares / replies. Read ‘Your guide to social media engagement rates’ from Adobe for insight on that.
3. Thanksgiving is coming up, and a lot of people could use help. Donate to your nearest food bank if you can.
4. Figure out a loose engagement rate from your favorite bands / brands / shops / media outlets. Just take the number of LIKES and RTs, add in the comments, then divide all that by the number of followers they have. This won’t be 100% accurate, but it’s fun to see a ballpark number and compare it to your own efforts.

SMART THINGS FROM SMART PEOPLE:

“Patreon creators … are forced to build their audiences on other platforms and then drive them over to Patreon.”

This from ‘Why Patreon is struggling’ from Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter. I had a Patreon for my heavy metal trivia on Twitter project years ago (@skulltoaster), and found I had to spend a lot of time linking my audience to a site I didn’t own or control.

“Your daily disruption is proportional to the level of attention you give to email, messaging apps, SMS.”

Love this from Richard Allardice from ‘Not right now. But maybe later.’ I do my best to dive into my biggest, most high-value work task first thing in the morning before checking email.

“Time is finite and shouldn’t be dictated by others or how you believe others to perceive you.”

From ‘The case for caring less’ over at VOX, which reminds me of this from artist Dakota Cates of Wizard of Barge:

Be known as someone who values their time!

GOOD TWEETS:

Either way, seems like big changes coming to Twitter, a social media network where we can’t export our followers. Start getting your audience to subscribe to your email list before the whole thing implodes!

The above is mostly true (I think you need to post your story to FB from IG for this to work), but still – INCLUDE LINKS. Fuck the algorithms. If only 10 people see your post at least they’ll have a link to click!

It’s true. We need everything to slow down, please.

Are you worried about all the extra time you’ll have to devote to writing an email newsletter?

Well, good news, because you already wrote it.

Using my Goodnight, Metal Friend dark ambient mix project as an example (hey, I do other stuff besides work), and you can see how I could re-use the images and text from my social media posts (Instagram and Twitter) and just copy & paste them into a newsletter format.

This can be done super easily with Substack or Mailchimp.

Remember, not everyone who follows you on social media will see every post. Hell, people who subscribe to your email newsletter won’t open every email, either.

Re-purposing the content you’ve already posted means less time thinking about your next email newsletter, and gives you a jump on the creative process.

Once you have everything copied and pasted into your newsletter, you can make expand on some of your ideas, or include some other photos that you didn’t share on socials.

Now you’re offering exclusive bits and pieces to your fans!

SMART THINGS FROM SMART PEOPLE:

“ If you want to get people to subscribe to your newsletter, it helps to be able to tell them exactly what they’re getting…”

This is from a nerdy internet culture writer on Substack (Max Read), but still applies to what you’re doing, so give it some thought. Don’t sell your email list as “signing up for updates!” Tell people they’re getting behind the scenes photos, tales from the road, and all the stuff you’re already shoveling onto social media!

This from Cody Cook-Parrott who writes the Monday Monday newsletter. The above is so true, though – no one says “there’s too many people on social media,” right?

GOOD TWEETS:

This from Christina Warren, regarding news sites forking their content over to places like Apple News, but this applies to your art and magic and the relationship you have with your fans! Hard to own the relationship with your fans when Apple / Amazon / YouTube / Twitch / Facebook have all the data!

Interesting thread here, and interesting to see how people in this thread don’t find new music.

In the last installment of FOUR THE WEEKEND (‘SAFEGUARD YOUR SOCIALS’), I suggested that you get your “landing page” set up so your fans can easily sign up for your newsletter.

If you’re using MailChimp, your landing page can look like this:

In MailChimp, you go to Audience > Sign Up Forms > Form Builder. From here (below) you’ll find (1) the link that you’d post to socials to get people to sign up, and (2) you’ll be able to add your own logo.

If you use Substack, your sign up page would look like this:

If you have a website (which you should, it’s 2022 for fucks sake), you can make a separate page just for email sign ups, like Irist does here:

Make it super simple for your fans to sign up, and don’t be afraid to post the link on your social media accounts a few times a month – while you still can!

Here are your FOUR THE WEEKEND tasks:

1. I dare you to post your newsletter sign-up link to socials just once this weekend, and email me a link to the post (seth@heavymetal.email). I will pick one person at random and literally send them $10 Bandcamp gift card to someone who does this by 12:01am on Monday (Oct 17, 2022). Do it, you cowards.
2. Find three bands and sign up for their email newsletter. Take note of the sign up full process, from signing up, to confirmation, to (hopefully) getting the welcome email.
3. If you have a birthday coming up, sign up for Metal Bandcamp Gift Club. Yeah, that’s another project of mine, but you’ll get to see an interesting use of the welcome email in the process.
4. Close your laptop and get the heck outside.

QUICK BITS:

“On a good week I’m sending out the newsletter around 8PM, but tonight I’m just drafting this part at 9PM while chugging a yerba mate that will hopefully give me the energy to make it to the finish line.”

From the Sorry State Records newsletter (thanks, Matt M. for the tip), which is a beast of an email newsletter, but just goes to show how in depth you can get with your fans.

“At a bare minimum, you’d need to publish at least one substantial newsletter per week for at least 50 weeks. Consistency is the main engine for growth, especially since you’ll learn what appeals to audiences as you grow.”

If you post to your socials a few times a week, you can certainly send out one newsletter every Friday. (via Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter)

“Streaming put fandom on hiatus. Scenes represent an opportunity to reforge fandom for the modern era, an incubator for artist careers. In short, an antidote to the song economy.”

From ‘Time to jump off the algorithm highway’ by Mark Mulligan

GOOD TWEETS:

Back in the 90s I could afford a bass, amp, a financed a Nissan Sentra wagon, and gas was barely $1.20/gallon, all while making around $8/hr. It was a lot easier back then to zip around to shows five hours away with your pals.

This seemed to be the conversation on Twitter this past week. Sigh.

Blogs and websites ain’t going anywhere.

There are 1,000 moving parts in our world of music and design and art, and not one person has the map. If they did, they’d be rich beyond measure.

Let’s detour our “email marketing thing” away from the analytics and the stats for a minute (it’s October, after all), and surrender to the magic 🎃

I started working with photographer Gino DePinto in 2009 when I was running Noisecreep. Back then he was an intern with AOL Music. This dude toured with Korn and Sevendust when he was in a band called Dragpipe back in the day.

Dude is the sweetest, most humble, driven guy I know.

That was his magic.

Eventually Gino wasn’t an intern anymore, and these days he’s a hot shot Senior Photographer / Creative Specialist at Yahoo.

Yes, he takes great photos, but his MAGIC propelled him to where he is today.

Every band, artist, and celebrity we had come into that office, he put them at ease, got them laughing, and that made everyone’s jobs a million times easier.

What’s this got to do with your music, or your art?

Well, we’re all capable of our own magic, and that’s (hopefully) how we get places.

Jobs. Tours. Gigs. All that stuff.

It’s our relationships with the people we meet, in and around our particular path of our own heavy metal adventure.

This isn’t about open rates, impressions, CTAs, or any of the tech-hacks that anyone might try to sell you.

This isn’t about what camera you use, or plugin, or what school you went to.

This is about the magic of your music, which deserve much more love than whatever the fuck Apple Music is doing here:

This is about treating music videos as something valuable and sacred instead of a rectangle covered with pre-roll ads, and surrounded by algorithmically served distractions.

I get it, yes, you gotta be in those places, but you deserve more.

You can build your own magical kingdom with your art and music and design as the main attraction.

Set up a website, and have a dedicated page for every music video. Include the hand-written notes, the behind the scenes photos, the video bloopers, or whatever it is that aligns with your artistic direction.

And (ahem) include links for people to buy a shirt or cassette.

We think nothing of feeding the social media networks with all the behind the scenes magic, right? You can still do that, but don’t give it all to Twitter or Instagram.

Put those magical items on your own website, where it will serve and uplift everything you’re doing.

“Yeah, but Seth, no one goes to our website,” you say.

Well, what reason do they have to visit these days? Have you compared your site and what it’s offering to the thousands of photos you’ve uploaded to Instagram over the years? To the thousands of words and wit that you dumped on Twitter and Facebook for a decade?

Again I’m sharing this Tweet, because it should be our battle cry over the next few months heading into 2023:

It will be a rough year if all you’ve got is a seldom-updated Twitter account and DSPs with outdated band photos.

So share who you are in your space, with your own branding, with your our sense of style.

Do it on your socials, and lead your fans to your website, and your newsletter (so you can keep in touch).

Put your finest gems and photos and stories on your website. Go deeper, connect, and surround your work with the care and love it deserves.

QUICK BITS:

“Keep ignoring feedback and life will keep teaching you the same lesson.”

From Atomic Habits author James Clear, from a recent 3-2-1 newsletter.

“There’s this tendency within the media industry to simply publish a piece of content, blast it out to all of your channels, and then move on to producing the next piece of content. The underlying theory is that those within your audience who are actually interested in the content will click on it and consume it.

That logic is heavily flawed.

From ‘Are you doing enough to recycle your evergreen content?’ Most of your fans don’t know about your older music, your online store, or your background. Don’t keep that shit a secret.

“As soon as you send something out into the virtual world, you’re sort of sitting on pins and needles waiting for a response. That alone—that kind of expectancy—is a state of hyperarousal. How will people respond to this? When will they respond? What will they say?”

From ‘The High Cost of Living Your Life Online’ at Wired (via Mimi).

GOOD TWEETS:

You make videos and art and music and magic – hey, so does AI now, too! This very minute, right now, what are you making that a computer can’t?

People are busy, and even your most devoted fans are gonna miss your last minute promo.

The year is winding down, so let’s get ready for more “touching base” and “wrap up” meetings!

In bummer news from earlier this week; the band Elder had their Facebook account hacked:

A commenter asked if they had Two-Factor Authentication turned on, and the band said they did, but an “external ad account that was hacked that had admin privileges did not have it enabled.”

🚨 Got an external ad account hooked up to your socials? Check your shit! 🚨

As I wrote last year (from ‘WHAT’S YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA LOCK OUT PLAN?):

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.

That means if you have 3,000 followers, 150 of them will see your next post.

So heck yes, being able to tell one social media audience that another social media channel has been hijacked is good and all, but these are still rented spaces, and you’re reaching a fraction of your audience, so most of your fans will still be in dark.

So here we go, here are your FOUR THE WEEKEND tasks:

1. Double check and make sure you set up 2FA for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, and just about every other service that is critical to your operation.
2. Start an email list, or dust off your old one.
3. Figure out the URL that you can post on socials that’ll let people subscribe to your email list (also called a “landing page”).
4. Buy this damn Elder record, for real.

QUICK BITS:

“Just because digital marketing is largely fleeting, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t sweat the details when it comes to copywriting, design, conversion, and automation.

It’s the old “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” adage.”

From Andrew Donovan’s newsletter ‘Thanks For Unsubscribing.’

“So I started doing long-form stuff, and like any other YouTube person who’s been at this for a while will tell you, sometimes it does well, and the algorithm, for whatever reason, turned in my favor around three years in, and I got like 40,000 subscribers in the course of two months, and I hit 100,000 subscribers. That was super cool. Then it slowed down for a while…”

Neat interview with the Samurai Guitarist about his journey to a million subscribers.

GOOD TWEETS:

Does the Oreo cookies social team just Tweet out, “hey, we’re available at your local Target?” Heck no! Meanwhile, rock and roll is 10,000 times more awesome than junk food and we’re just posting links to streaming services.

If you won’t listen to me, listen to Vince from Metal Blade.