Category: Big CartelCategory: Big Cartel

Jon Davis of Conan wrote a great piece on LinkedIn, talking about how bands (or any creative project) can sustain themselves by selling directly to their fans.

Aside from social media, boosting posts, and making a quality product, he also spoke of my favorite thing:

Use email marketing. This is incredibly powerful. Yesterday, after some exporting data from Big Cartel and into EmailOctopus, I wrote to every single person who has ordered merch through the Conan UK page (approx 4700 people) and every single person who has ordered merch through our USA store (approx 3200 people). I was raising awareness of one of my releases. I sent the mail at 15:00 Friday afternoon, and since then (it’s 10:10am the next day now) have sold almost £1500 worth of items.

He sent an email to just under 8,000 former customers, and made £1500 ($1,923) in not even 24 hours.

Can you email everyone that bought your recent thing?
If you can, that’s big business.

From Shopify – “Repeat customers have a higher (customer lifetime value): The more repeat customers trust you, the less they hesitate to buy from you. That’s why promoting new products to repeat buyers takes less effort than promoting the products to new customers.”

From HubSpot – “Acquiring new customers costs 5 to 10 times more than selling to a current customer.” Think about it – make five more REELS, or just email a former customer – which is gonna make you a dollar faster?

From Mailchimp – “The success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 20%.”

From Paychex – “Little to no additional marketing is generally required to attract a repeat customer back, as opposed to starting from scratch with people who know nothing about your company.”

The allure of the NEW FAN / NEW FOLLOWER / NEW CUSTOMER is exciting, sure, but don’t neglect the customers you’ve already had over the years.

Like Jon Davis of Conan demonstrated above, he sent one email and made about $2,000.

That’s a lot easier than making a bunch of vertical videos and carousel posts and hoping 30% of your audience will even see them.

And don’t be afraid to sell. Give your fans a chance to give you money. Let them exchange currency for something you make, or offer, or do.

Linking to Spotify is fun, and all the “engagement” of likes and comments are cool, and it’s part of the game, but putting for-real dollars into your bank account is nice, too.