Category: InterviewCategory: Interview

Today we’ve got an interview with Matt DeBenedictis, Manager of Compliance at Mailchimp, and it’s gonna be a tremendous resource for developing your Social Media Escape Plan.

Matt is the guy who helps stops shady behavior and spam activity on the Mailchimp platform, and he’s got good advice on how to make sure you stay out of trouble (and out of the Promotions tab) with your email newsletters!

Seth Werkheiser: So what the heck is “compliance?”

Matt DeBenedictis: In compliance we work to make sure that users are following our terms of use and acceptable use policy. That also means making sure if people are doing things they shouldn’t; is it malicious, or is it unintentional? 

If it’s unintentional, we work to rehab that user, so they can get the best marketing they can. And if it is malicious, we make sure that they are gone and can’t do it again. And we work with an engineering team to build tools to stop further malicious things when we see patterns.

Being in the email marketing world, and knowing how lucrative that can be for bad actors, my goodness. Your game has to be eight steps ahead of what they’re doing.

Yes. Especially when Mailchimp has a high deliverability. So we are very sought after by malicious actors.

Speaking of deliverability, a common thing I hear from folks reluctant to get back to doing newsletters is, “why bother sending an email if they all just go to spam anyway?” Where does that mindset come from?

So, an email would go into spam would go for a couple of reasons. 

One is the reputation of your sending. For instance, your sending domain. If that’s not well, it’s gonna end up in the spam folder. 

If people are not engaged with it, it can end up in the spam folder, too. For instance, Gmail is actually extremely volatile in that department, where if they see that most people are not engaged with it, not opening it, they’ll start filtering those into the promotions folder or spam folder or something like that. And that’s definitely a factor.

If you’ve had a lot of unsubscribes, a lot of bounces, that basically comes into your sending reputation as well. 

So improving your engagement, improving that is kind of key with placement. As well as adding that little thing in the footer of like, “hey, put us on your safe sender list.”

People’s address domains, too. Some can be a little more aggressive than others. The spam filters, the colleges edu domains are extremely aggressive. So that’s kind of a factor as well. 

But that’s also why you want to make sure that you’re sending bulk emails through a sender that’s got a very high deliverability rate, because that also helps out a lot, and Mailchimp is really good with that.

I hear a lot of, “when I used to send my email we had a 10% open rate.” Well, gee, why is it 10%?! Like, it seems like no one wants to open it, so you gotta work on that.

Right. Yeah. Why is that? Look at your unsubscribes, your lack of opens. They all tell the story. Follow what that story is, and ask yourself why, what are people signing up for? Are they signing up for the announcements of tours? Are they signing up for very unique personalized content? 

You’ve shined a light on them before and it’s a very good example; Pissed Jeans, they’ve got one of the best email newsletters around.

It’s their voice! Every bit of that band’s personality drips through that email.

Fans follow on different formats. For instance, there’s some bands I follow their news through email, and others that I mainly just follow on like Instagram or things like that. It depends what their content is. And also, what is it that I’m really following for? Is it a band that I constantly want to know what’s going on? Or is it a band that I’m just waiting for their announcement of like, their next album on vinyl so I can get it before everyone else does?

Making things exclusive is also a thing that’s helpful. Unwed Sailor has done that a lot recently really by putting out like, “okay, we’re gonna give you a link to our new song like a week before it streams out.” That helps drive fans to then be engaged with the newsletter.

I wanna really know about emails from Bandcamp, there’s a lot of sites out there that will say, “Hey, export your email list from Bandcamp and put it in Mailchimp and send it out. That’s okay, right?

So specifically speaking of Bandcamp, yes.

Let me circle back to that; you gotta read the terms of use with the platform that you’re using. For instance, Amazon. If you read their terms of use and you’re a vendor on there selling products, you don’t have any rights to the emails of anyone who makes a purchase.

But with Bandcamp you do, they actually have one of my favorite terms of use. They avoid some of the data controller language and go like, this is the part for fans, this is the part for bands. And it’s worded wonderfully.

I actually pulled it up to kind of look and it’s basically like, yes, but you gotta make sure that when you send people emails and you’ll comply with email marketing laws and the mechanisms by which a recipient can unsubscribe. And don’t sell your data essentially to any parties. Sure.

So off of Bandcamp, yes. Because it all comes down to permission and where that permission from the email came from. With Bandcamp, it’s purchases or if you do a signup.

There’s the opt-in like “join this band’s newsletter.”

And that’s the key. As long as you’ve got that checkbox that establishes permission for that email, and that will make it good to go. 

The only wary thing is if a band has had a Bandcamp up, and let’s say you’ve had it up for like five years, and you’ve never sent an email. Some of that permission will have gone stale, in the sense of, you send an email to someone and they’d be like, “I don’t know what this is from.” 

And kind of industry wise, 12 months to 24 months is what you should look at for, how long email permission can last. Anything beyond that it’s probably best to kind of junk those older ones. It’s just not worth it because then you get into the what I was saying about, you know, you’re gonna have a lot of bounces, a lot of unsubscribes, or possibly even someone reaching out and reporting abuse, which can cause your domain to just be completely blocked, and you don’t want that.

I never thought of that past a year or 24 months kind of a thing. That makes a lot of sense.

So with Bandcamp, yeah, you can totally export those addresses out and send to ’em. You know, purchases alone can establish a type of permission as well. But you want to be on the the game about that.

A recommendation with that, so you see how people respond to that, when you upload it into Mailchimp, add tags that the signup source was Bandcamp. If you start to see some higher unsubscribes, they might need some different type of content, or you might need to create a welcome automation to kind of bring them into it. 

Actually, right before we hopped on this call, I got an email from a punk rock label out of the UK, that I bought something off Bandcamp like six months ago. Okay, I had to think for a second, and I was like, “oh yeah, I bought the first High Vis LP off of this label.” And it was like, okay, yeah. Cool. And I ended up checking out the other stuff they had for the holiday sale.

That’s a thing of beauty when that works like that.

Here’s a softball question for you: why shouldn’t a band buy an email list?

Because those are people who have not given direct permission. They are a third party. They’ve gotten it from a third party, and historically it always creates high unsubscribes, high bounce rates, and the most important; high abuse rates, because people are like, “I didn’t ever sign up for this.” And if you’re a band, what does that gain you? That’s like the equivalent of going into a private party and throwing flyers for your show and then running out.

Should unsubscribes be taken so personally? I know folks that send to thousands of people and then they fret over two unsubscribes or something like that. It’s like, I mean, yeah, it’s a bummer. But like two isn’t a giant enormous number…

You gotta kind of see what that story is, what those unsubscribes are telling. There are many incidents of people who, uh, have reached out to unsubscribes because they take it personally, emailing them specifically and uh, that brings up a lot of privacy laws. Factor too because unsubscribes are supposed to be honored and especially if you’re dealing with an address in the EU, even more so.

Someone I know worked with a client that had like 10,000 unsubscribes over the years, and the client was like, “can’t we send an email to all the people that unsubscribed like a welcome back email?” 

My friend there was like, “no, we can absolutely not do this.” 

That is a violation of the US CAN-SPAM laws.

You cannot email an unsubscribe once someone has unsubscribed. That’s a very serious thing that can lead to fines in the thousands.

I would imagine anyone that has sent to 20,000 unsubscribed emails there would be some repercussions.

Yes. It is not good. And that will destroy your sending domain and then people don’t get to see your emails, and that’s kind of the point.

Yeah. Don’t engage in dumb behavior and people will see your emails then.

And the way to avoid that is to keep the audience engaged. Start looking at who’s not opening over time, and then sending them different types of content that’s really tailored towards them, to try re-engagement campaigns essentially. And focus on those. And then as well with that, looking at people who have not engaged over a long time and it’s like, well this whole batch of addresses has not opened a campaign in the last two years. Just get rid of those addresses. It’s just dead weight.

Send emails that people want. If you’re sending something a lot of people want to read and they open the emails, it will probably stay in their inbox, right?

Oh yeah. Without a doubt. If someone’s been engaged in opening, they can go through multiple times, most of the time depending on who their domain is, yeah, and not have it then start to get filtered. It takes a lot of inaction.

So like, if I signed up for your email list because I wanted updates from your band, and all you send is vinyl updates, I’m not gonna do anything with that, because I don’t even own a record player. 

Look at the severity of things. People might unsubscribe because you send out four newsletters a month.

Right, right.

And that’s not what people want. Or you know, depending on how candid you are on social media, they might.

You can kind of link that into your unsubscribed stories as well. Like, you find a connection.

I have heard stories of different bands who like, you know, their one member is very vocal on Twitter, to a point where it kind of annoys fans, and then they see kind of less engagement. People might still be wanting to check out and buy their records and stuff, but they’re like, yeah, I don’t want to hear from them on a personal level.

At the same time though, again, it’s about managing expectations. Tegan and Sarah put together an email newsletter, I don’t know if you saw that, but like, they send like two or three a week, because their fans are like, “I want everything Tegan and Sara.” So they get away with that. Whereas bands that haven’t built that relationship, it wouldn’t make sense for them to send something every week.

Yeah. Billy Corgan has said this before, but bands have a contract with their fans, and you don’t know what that contract is.

It’s true.

Eventually you come to an understanding with each other of what that contract is. The band can buck that and do the opposite of it, but right. In the end they’ll end up losing fans cuz the fans had a certain expectation.

Right. Or you might end up with a 10% open rate.

Do bands come to you at all, like, “hey, I’m having problems” or this or that?

There’s been bands, there’s been record labels that I have come across my way in the compliance department because they had issues. We’ve worked to help them out. I can definitely say personally, I’ve worked with a few record labels that hadn’t touched their list in like six years and then they’re like, “okay, we’re doing a bunch of vinyl reissues, we want to start getting active again.” And it’s like, okay, let’s talk about your audience management, and how to make sure you don’t have an issue.

That’s great, and I think one of the biggest takeaways from this is that old list or those old emails and stuff like, that you can’t just like dust it off and go zero to 60 with it.

Yeah.

Just because you’ve got 20,000 addresses, that doesn’t mean that’s 20,000 addresses that want to hear from you today.

And these days bands, labels, whoever can set up a landing page or have a thing on their website for people to sign up. They’re getting the permission from that. That’s pretty much the golden way to do it.

Yeah. It’s finding the voice that you need with your fans and making sure to maintain your data.

And consistency, too. If you’re only sending out an email once a year, again, that goes back to your email’s age and stuff like that. So you gotta kind of hit it every now and again.

Exactly. You gotta make sure people are engaged in knowing of the brand, or they will forget why they even cared.

Linda Bloomfield started #OpportunityTuesday on Twitter in January of 2018, which is a weekly round up of paying gigs for creative folks in the UK.

What caught my eye was a Tweet (here) saying she’s moving Opportunity Tuesday to a newsletter format, so I reached out to understand her move from a social media network to an email list, which I think can be super helpful for lots of us!

I guess my first question is how long have you been doing Opportunity Tuesday? And is that how you built up to 16.5K followers on Twitter? That number of followers is no joke.

Linda Bloomfield: I posted the first thread back in January 2018 – can’t quite believe it’s been that long! I think I maybe had about 1,000 followers at that time, and I was working in an arts centre in London. I was constantly being emailed opportunities to “pass on to my network,” and started to question who that really was? And did it seem fair that people only had access to a lot of these opportunities if they were already in a ‘network’ of some kind?

It can be hard to find interesting paid opportunities in the arts as they’re not all shared in the same place, and frankly freelancers have enough unpaid admin to do without spending hours hunting for the next commission.

The first (Twitter) thread was a hit, and my following grew steadily – I tried to keep up the thread every week, with a few breaks for holidays, and now I somehow have 16.5k followers, which seems wild to me as outside of OppTues and the occasional theatre/arts chat I mainly post about nonsense: cooking, gardening, and my dog!

When did you see the writing on the wall regarding Twitter?

I owe a lot to Twitter – I can’t deny that my following has helped me build a profile and definitely helps me find more work – I’m freelance too!

So I’ve been following the Musk takeover closely and it really feels like things are headed down a rocky path. If Twitter even still exists in a few months I’m concerned it will no longer be a safe or trusted platform. I hope I’m wrong!

Did you consider moving Opportunity Tuesday to another social media platform?

I did consider other platforms. I know quite a chunk of “theatre twitter” has already jumped ship to Mastodon, but it just didn’t seem as “easy” and accessible as Twitter. Instagram doesn’t really work for words and links in the way I would need it to for OppTues, lots of people aren’t on Facebook anymore, and I’m too old for TikTok!

I follow a couple of other Substack newsletters and it has always seemed a clean, simple and accessible form of communication – so giving that a go now instead. It’s going well so far!

The thing I love here is you’ve been doing this since 2018. That’s four years, which is forever in internet time. And in your first post on Twitter, asking for people to sign up, you got about 1,200 people to sign up. From one Tweet, that’s great! But again, you built up four years of trust to do that, so when people saw “hey, subscribe here,” they did it. They trusted you.

I guess so. It’s very lovely! I’m just so glad people have found it useful for all this time. It’s my favourite thing in the world when people get in touch to say they’ve had successful applications for things they’ve found through Opportunity Tuesday!

Can you speak a bit about showing up for those four years? There had to have been slow weeks, right? Self doubt creeps in, “why am I doing this?” What kept you going all those years?

Oh my gosh, yes absolutely. There are definitely times I’ve regretted committing to 10 every week!

I genuinely put the hours in to find the “right” things for the list each week. I won’t, for example, just list standard jobs that wouldn’t be of interest to freelance artists, and I won’t list anything exploitative. So it takes around three hours every week and there are of course times I wish I didn’t have the commitment. I’ve occasionally been known to post at midnight, or “Opportunity Tuesday… on Wednesday,” and even once or twice have included an “interval” in the thread while I eat my tea or watch bake-off.

But people get it because I don’t get paid for this so it’s got to realistically work with my life. I’ve taken a few breaks over the years, for holidays, family stuff, or just when work is particularly chaotic – and people have mostly been kind, understanding and patient.

For the handful of times I’ve regretted starting it, there have been 1,000 times I’ve been so glad I did.

It feels like it’s bigger than just me now – a community has been built around it, one that celebrates open recruitment, fair pay, and support for freelancers, arts and culture. A bunch of other free lists and threads have sparked since 2018, often citing Opportunity Tuesday as their inspiration. I feel very proud.

And with your first email send, what was the reaction? I’m guessing you had like a 50% or higher open rate, right?! What’s the response been so far, from sending out these listings via email?

You can tell I’m new at this because I hadn’t actually checked until I saw this question! Oops. Looks like the first email on Tuesday received a 76% open rate – wow!

Since then we’re now up to just under 1,800 subscribers in total – I’m floored to be honest. And delighted it will be able to keep going this way, if / when twitter dies.

A few people are also chipping in real money now – access is the same for free and paid subscribers (and always will be) but people can choose to chip in £1 a week if they can afford to. The income isn’t huge but will mean I can properly make time for it each week going forward. As a freelancer myself, in a cost of living crisis, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that!

A 76% open rate??! You are a legend. And it’s a testament against the silly notion that “nobody reads emails anymore!”

Compared to putting up these listings on Twitter, how was it different putting it all together in your first email? It was your first time, I know, so there’s a learning curve, for sure. But it’s nice to not have a character limit, right? Haha

Not going to lie, it took quite a bit longer than anticipated! But I think that’s just because it was my first time, and I’m also still cross posting to twitter at the moment which I won’t be doing forever (maybe).

Substack is a lovely platform though to use, really simple and clean, and it was a treat to be able to write as much as I like for the introduction and the end. It sounds silly, but OppTues has such a specific format that it’s hard to give it much…personality?

But you’re totally right, the change to email means each weekly list can come with a bit of razzamatazz and colour – an intro, a story, some context, a response to what’s going on in the world and in our industry for freelancers – that feels like an exciting opportunity.

I’ve already thought about adding in some news, links to other arts folk doing great things, stuff like that – it’s going to be fun to get creative and experiment. I’m sure the layout will get a little fancier in time too, once I’ve learnt the ropes! (It will probably always end with a photo of my rescue dog Mabel though, I reckon she’s the main reason the open rate is so high)

ANTI-SOCIAL

My absolutely-biased bunch of raging links against social media:

• “Instagram is telling creators when and why their posts are ‘shadowbanned’” – oh, how nice!
• “Facebook and Instagram are struggling to attract and retain the younger generation that’s crucial for their longevity. Why? The simple answer: Gen Z prefers video.”
• Speaking of video, “the rise of personalization and short-form video platforms means that the streaming services’ marquee editorial collections don’t drive as much listening.”

This week SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB speaks with artist, musician, and video editor Joan Pope about her weekly email newsletter Week in Review.

Pope’s creative output is epic, and as she explains how a trusty email newsletter keeps her fans in the loop with everything she’s creating on a weekly basis.

How long have you been doing a newsletter, and what sort of reaction or feedback have you gotten from it?

I started the Substack newsletter in January 2021. Its the email version of the blog posts I have on my website. I started doing the “Week in Review” compilation posts in 2017. I still do those posts on my website, but driving traffic to my website is probably harder than to deliver the newsletter right into people’s inboxes.

Why did you pick Substack for your email list, rather than something like Mailchimp?

I went with Substack because its sort of a newsletter-blog hybrid. The monetization feature is great, too.

How long does it take you to put together and send your weekly newsletter? And you do additional posts for paying subscribers, yes? What would you say the total time investment each week?

It takes me about an hour to compile everything for the newsletter.

At this point, I don’t really have any posts behind the paywall besides access to one of my poetry books. I really hate having to put my content behind a paywall, I want to be able to share it with everyone and I know not everyone can afford to pay for access. “Exclusive” content isn’t really my thing.

My approach has been this: pretty much everything is available to anyone, and if you have the means, and you like my work, you can choose to support it by paying for the subscription. Or just enjoy it for free. I leave it up to the fans to decide.

Why even have an email newsletter in 2021?

The fast pace of social media makes it pretty easy for stuff we actually like to get lost in the mix.

I have a pretty intense level of output, I can barely keep track of my own work, I can’t expect other people to be able to keep up, too. So the weekly compilation of all my creative works helps me reflect on my own work each week and it keeps my audience in the loop. It seems like people like it. A lot of people will tell me that they can’t keep up and the newsletter helps them do that.

I haven’t noticed any “subscribe to my email list” type posts on your socials – how do you grow your list? Or is that something that just happens organically from your All My Links page and Bandcamp?

It’s true that I hardly ever make posts like that. I have a link to the signup in my allmylinks link-list thing. I let people find it on their own. However, I usually do at least post the published Substack newsletter on my main Twitter account each week. I usually end up getting a few subscribers each week as new people discover my Twitter account.

So how do we as writers, artists, bands.. how do we stay motivated at one or two sign ups a week?

It might not seem like much, but signups do start to accumulate, and when they do, they start to grow exponentially.

Patience is key.

It’s important to remember that 10 genuine fans who subscribe to your newsletter, follow you on social media, etc.. are much better than 1,000 bots signing up for your newsletter. Bots don’t buy your albums, they dont come to your shows, they don’t care at all about whatever you are doing.

Cultivate the audience you have, regardless of the size.

I try to dissuade people from just shouting “hey, join my newsletter” messaging, which is why I appreciate how you put it on your Substack page: “This email newsletter documents my worship.”

How important is to you to present your work in such a way vs. the standard marketing speak?

I don’t exactly have the vocabulary to frame what I do in the typical marketing terms. However, the social-sharing aspect is as important to my work as the work itself.

I consider every art piece, song, video, etc to be truly complete once I’ve given it to the world. So, getting it out there is all part of the devotion I have to my creative works.

I guess my work is intriguing enough that it makes people want to dig deeper, they end up finding the newsletter, my bandcamp, my website, etc. I get a lot of people comparing this experience following a breadcrumb trail. Its not my style to do too much outright explicit promotion, I have a more subtle approach.

I want to close by saying that growing an audience is really hard work, and for most people, it will take a lot of time and effort to see results. It’s really unlikely that you will amass a huge email list or social media following overnight. However, if you are consistent and keep working at your craft, you will eventually succeed.

It took me over a decade to get to where I am, and the reality is, I’m still a virtually unknown artist. But I keep doing what I do, and I’m not going to stop. If you are just starting out, don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t go the way you hoped on the first day. Set attainable goals, and commit to following through.

What are some of those goals we can set as we’re just starting out, trying to move some of our fans from social media to an email newsletter?

You just have to be realistic, and put in the work to get the word out. I am grateful to have a decent social media following, its made getting subscribers to the newsletter much easier.

I’m pretty passive in my approach… I just post a link on twitter to each week’s newsletter. My way is probably not the best way to get results. If I was going to do it “right” I’d probably add a call to action, asking people to subscribe.

This week we welcome Professor Pizza of Axeslasher, a thrash-tastic band from Denver, Colorado that leans heavy into horror, gore, and other delicious death-metal themes.

But we’re not talking about any of that. Oh no, we’re talking about email marketing! Social media! Bandcamp!

Yes, we’re talking about how the heavy metal sausage gets made on the internet here in 2021, which helps get people to come to your shows, to buy your shirts, and listen to your new music. This is what you signed up for!

Oh, you’re reading this on the web, and you’re not signed up? Subscribe today so you don’t miss out on the next email I send out!

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You told me a bit ago, “I’ve been testing every avenue we’ve used for the last 10 years. Guess which one generates the most traffic and revenue,” with the answer being email. Can you speak a bit to how much WORK goes into email campaigns?

I’d start by saying we’re not particularly adept at email marketing. I always kind of considered it old-fashioned but knew we should be doing some form of it. Axeslasher rode the wave of social media really well until recently. Back in the days of chronological sorting we were able to find an audience quickly, especially on Instagram. I’m a super visual person and focusing on creating killer images really appealed to me, and when it was actually getting shown to our audience we caught lots of traction. 

Additionally, we were able to really take advantage of paid marketing1 on social media to increase our reach. There was a time where I could consistently count on a 2:1 return on marketing dollars spent to revenue made. 

But, that’s not the case any more.

Algorithmic sorting and the sheer amount of people paying for ads now has caused that reliability to plummet. Creating on those platforms feels an awful lot like working for Facebook and not myself. The mental math equation went from “What do I think our fans would like?” to “What do I think will break through the algo that our fans will tolerate?”

“The short answer is you have to start looking at and leveraging trends, which by-in-large, are fucking lame.”

We’re a thrash band comprised of ghosts of vengeance. We shouldn’t be doing funny hand dances, or the running man.

All that pre-amble is leading somewhere, I promise.

In regards to how much effort it takes to create an email campaign, I’d say it’s slightly more. I’m not a great writer so it takes me a little longer to craft longer-form messaging to make a marketing email worth reading. However, 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. 

How long have you been managing an email list, and how do you get new people onto your email list in this digital and social media age?

We’ve been tepidly maintaining an email list since 2012. I say tepidly because we’ve really only been sending three to six emails a year. However, over time, that list has grown to about 1,200 subscribers. It’s not the world’s biggest list, but the way we’ve built it has made it extremely valuable and effective. 

The main source of email subscriptions is through online sales. On Bandcamp and merch.axeslasher.com folks who buy our merch have the option to opt-in to our email list.

The key here is that they’ve already shown major interest in the band by putting their hard-earned dollars into the equation. By opting-in at purchase, the audience on that list is much more engaged and more likely to be interested in things we do in the future.  

I got your recent October Horror Marathon email on October 1st. The last email was from July 31st. Is there any set schedule you stick to with these things?

Nope, and I feel like that’s something we need to be better at. Until recently I’ve always looked at email as an additional boost for announcements. New merch, new music, festival appearances. Things like that. 

Lastly, you use Mailchimp, which I recommend to a lot of folks. Do you have any one little secret tip or “hack” you picked up over the years with using it?

I love Mailchimp. The UX of creating, sending, and measuring campaigns is top-notch.

If I had one hack, it’d be to connect it to your online store6. You can start to see things like how much sales revenue your campaigns generate, as well as let you segment your list by amount spent. You can basically make a segment of your folks who are most invested, literally, and hit them with special offers or poll their opinion on what merch to make next. They’re the ones spending their own money on your dream — give them what they want!

Hello, SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB folks!

This is the first official “email newsletter” from your pal Seth, and it’s an interview with Jeff Gretz who plays drums in Zao, along with From Autumn to Ashes, and a million other projects (including the killer ZOMBI and Friends). 

This interview supports the purpose of SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB: to learn how folks in music and the arts are using email marketing to connect directly with their fans – let’s go!

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You joined Zao before Twitter existed, right? 2005?

Yeah, 2005. Pre-Twitter. Even Facebook and YouTube were still off the grid, at least for bands. That was the Myspace era.

I remember having REALLY big arguments with a lot of people surrounding the band at the time, and with other bands, about not letting go of an actual website. My argument was, “if this MySpace thing goes down we lose all contact and are starting from scratch.”

Then Zao went dark for a bit when MySpace actually went down, and wiped everything out. By the time we came back everything had shifted and we were playing catch up, and still are to an extent.

Back to the original question about Twitter; we still struggle with that one. Just don’t have the time or energy to devote to those algorithms. Can’t tell if it makes a difference for a band like us or not. 

How long have you been working the online marketing side of things for the band?

Pretty immediately after joining. It was a case of one, seeing it needed to be done and in an involved way, ie the band itself, not some marketing team answering messages and questions, and two, nobody else in the band really wanting to do it or having the time. The job has stuck with me to this day. I really don’t mind, though.

You don’t have to disclose exact numbers of course, but how do socials perform vs email? Sales, clicks, “engagement,” etc. again, totally fine to be general about this.

They all feed into each other. We don’t worry so much about the click counts or the engagement. We do find that the more we engage – even if it’s with trolls – that it all helps beef up everything. 

I think people tend to pay a bit more attention because of the engagement from the band.  Email list is good for the real diehards, especially when it comes to new releases and big announcements like shows. But I feel like the social thing helps people find out we are still active in the first place, which then feeds back into stuff like them being on the email list.

How do you grow your email list? I know there’s a subscribe box on the website. Anything else beyond that?

I would say probably 95% of our email list has come from people that have bought things through bandcamp. Every time someone buys something that email gets added into “the list.” And honestly, that has worked out tremendously.

We have never really farmed email addresses at shows. People will sign up in that scenario as almost a, “oh I guess I should support,” but the turnover is too big.

When you are sourcing from people that go out of their way to purchase something from the band, that is already a prime person to have on your list. These are people that go out of their way to support bands in a direct way and want to buy shirts, records, CDs. They are also more likely to go out of their way to got to a show. 

You use Mailchimp for the Zao email list, right? Do you have any tips or tricks for using that for people who might just be starting an email list?

I don’t remember why I picked Mailchimp in particular, but it does the job. The nice thing about Mailchimp is you can see how many people open the email, how many people click on links, what links they click on. 

I am constantly tweaking how the emails go out, and what the setup is based on which links are being clicked. 

Subject lines are huge too. You want them to feel the need to open it, so too much info sometimes can be bad. Keep it just vague enough that they need to see what is up. 

Also don’t hit people too much. If you swamp them with emails too often you become an annoyance and they unsubscribe. 

How often do you send out emails?

When there is something to say, honestly. There is no schedule. And there are times where I will lay off if it’s something that isn’t time sensitive, but I know there is another thing around the corner. 

I would rather have an email with two or three big things in it, as opposed to hitting them with three separate emails. Maybe the people aren’t in the region you happen to be playing a show in, but they will click because they see “tour dates,” and while they are in there they think, “oh crap they aren’t coming to me, but oh look, I missed this album that came out last month, I will grab that.”

How’d the release of your most recent album ‘The Crimson Corridor‘ go?

It was pretty great. The first pressing of vinyl was almost immediately sold out, and we had a dead zone almost where there wasn’t any left, I literally had to tell distributors, “I don’t have anymore to send you for now.” The CDs even moved. It was a good feeling especially since we didn’t know if anyone even would buy a record after the past year and a half of uncertainty.

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PARTING THOUGHTS:

💰 Having the emails of people who have bought your album in the past is very important, so make sure your fans know they can buy music via Bandcamp, and not just stream it on Spotify. Give your biggest fans the chance to support you.

⏰ As far as frequency, Zao can get away with not sending too often – that’s an honor. But online stores can send like eight emails a week! I totally believe you can send something once a week, so long as it’s more than just “hey, pre-order our vinyl.” Use your existing photos and captions from social media and put that into your email newsletters – not all your fans are on every social media network, and even if they are, because of algorithms they probably didn’t see it anyways.

💀 Someday Twitter and Facebook and Instagram will be dead. Heck, MySpace was the #1 music site on the entire internet back in 2006, and AOL Music was #1 in 2008 – neither are a blip on the radar today. So make sure you’re building your email list today, while you can still reach some of your audience on social media!