In ‘Part 1’ we looked at why you should be building a mailing list of fans and some of the basic ways of going about that, both online and at gigs.
This second part is a look at what options you have in setting up your mailing list, in which will decide that it must be web hosted In a 3rd part, we will look at how you can best use it to build your relationship with your fans.
Often when we first meet a band they tell us that they have a mailing list already. The two most common things that this means is that they have a list of names scrawled on sheets of paper that they have had the brains to get filled in at their shows. Or that they have managed to get these names (and others) on to a spreadsheet or in to the address book of their email client. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but it is very much stage one and obviously fraught with possible cock-ups.
Firstly, there is the perennial problem in getting that information from drunken scrawl on a sheet of paper from the gig the night before onto a database of some sort and being able to accurately transcribe people’s names. That problem can’t be overcome when collecting details at a live event from people. That is, it can’t be avoided unless you plain just take a laptop, which I would heartily recommend, and get people to type in their details themselves in some way. These days you can get a very cheap netbook that will do all you need and it’ll save so much time, whichever way you choose to manage your list. There are clever widget bits of Champion Sound and FanBridge which will allow you to do this, or you can get your own cool techy system – which we’ll look at below
If you have managed to get a way to also collect details on your MySpace page, facebook, and on your own website etc, you still have to get them into your one combined database. Often what we see people doing is manually transcribing this collected data with that from shows on bits of paper into a spreadsheet or their email address book and then mailing fans from there in small groups. OK – it works, but it’s a load of grief and you’ve missed out a load of very cool and useful stuff that comes from being in the 21st century and using what’s available.
It’s also a major pain sending emails from one account and copying it to all the other addresses in your list – plus it can get you into trouble as a spammer!
In short, it just about works, but why would you, when there are much, much better solutions available, some of them for free.
We’re only going to look at some of the possible options, some in much more detail than the others. There are other options and we cover a lot of them in the resource section of our MySpace book, and will get that on to the forthcoming ‘Resources’ section of the site as soon as we can!
All of these systems are web-hosted databases for your fan’s emails and other details and will give you varying degrees of ease of use and control. No single one suits all and some are more difficult to use than others. But, you must use a web based email mailing list tool! There is no debate!
1. ReverbNation
ReverbNation is, quite simply, awesome, and I make no apology for spending the longest on it.
I think that using ReverbNation’s mailing list system, called ‘Fan Reach’ is the easiest and most obvious route for many, at least up to a certain level.
We’ll have a good look at the whole site’s great in depth features another time, but it’s certainly somewhere that you should have a profile and where you should send your fans.
There’s always a lot of chat about ReverbNation on the forums at Taxi, so go over there and get an impartial view.
For now, I’m just going to have a very quick look at their email list system.
The reason it’s so good at what it does is that it’s simple to set-up, import lists that you already have and, since you’ll be running a profile here anyway, it makes it easy having it all in one place. What it’s not so good at is offline data collection and some major tracking and detail tools that others offer, but they aren’t exactly slack in that department either. Oh, but it is free, nada, zilch! Well, at least for the basic version which is all you need to begin with.
So, the main ways that you’ll be getting new emails for your list will be by having sign-up forms, widgets or boxes at various places on the internet, or by collecting names in the real world – at gigs or wherever (a band we worked with had a sign up form at their local record store – owned by a friend – and when he played their stuff he left a sheet out for people to sign up, and it worked, building them a very healthy young local fanbase). ReverbNation excels at online widgets to create the sign-up forms. Their widget creator is set up to automatically make the form for most of the Social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc), so it’s really easy to do. The system will also create html code for you to use anywhere else – or to give to your friendly geek fan who helps you out to deal with – you do have a friendly geek ‘fifth Beatle’ don’t you?
The widgets also integrate seamlessly with all the other elements of a ReverbNation profile so that it’s very easy to offer a free track in return for an email address and it’s all done automatically. When you see how this works in practice and how your new fans can take parts of your profile to spread around the web for you it makes sense to use such an integrated approach – and the email element won’t let you down
To start you out, Fan Reach will allow you to import any existing mailing list you have, either from your email address book, a Word or Excel file, or just by typing them straight in. To ensure that you’re building a valid and useable list, these names get quarantined for 72 hours whilst ReverbNation’s systems ask people to opt out if they don’t want to be on your list. That’s fair enough and actually means your list is better targeted.
Lastly, you can email people a link automatically from your email client asking them to join your list. You can also use the same link as your usual email signature.
It’s a great system that covers all the online bases. What it doesn’t do….. is have a straightforward answer to the issue of getting people to sign up offline. OK, you can still use the pen and paper routine and transcribe the addresses very, very regularly (preferably the day you get them, so that you can send a thank you email immediately – preferably with a freebie), but that’s what we’re trying to get away from.
You could take the html and get your geek to make that into an application that you run on a laptop at shows for later uploading when you can get to the web, but that requires some skill. I’m pretty sure that ReverbNation will come up with the solution in the near future –as others have – see below!
The last thing to cover on Fan Reach is the upgrades available – ‘Fan 360’ and ‘Fan Reach Pro’. Fan 360 is a paid upgrade and basically helps to flesh out the information that you have about a fan – name, location (useful if you’ve not asked for that in the first place, as we suggest is sensible) and details from their Social Network profiles.
Fan Reach Pro is a further upgrade that includes the Fan 360 features but also adds a load of customisable templates and integrates with your ReverbNation content, which could be song players or your digital download store.
For the pricing and all the other details you need on thisclick this link – ReverbNation Pricing
This is a great option!
2. FanBridge
FanBridge comes next as it deals with the one current flaw in ReverbNation’s system – it has a totally cool offline widget that is called the ‘Merch Table SignUp Form’.
So, not only do you get all the same online widgets that are dead easy to use and place in all your internet profiles – all going to one central mailing list database – but you also get this cool way of dealing with sign-ups offline!
This form installs on a laptop and runs full screen so that fans can walk up to your merch table at a gig and put in their details. It’s all saved to a file and uploads the next time you log-on to the web and the fan is added to your list. They’ll receive whatever welcome email and freebie you’ve set up.
A great addition and, of course, makes you look like a very switched on band to everyone at the gig – fans and promoter alike.
The best way to look at FanBridge is as the cut-down email-centric little brother of ReverbNation – it doesn’t have all the other stuff that ReverbNation offers for a full band profile, but it does the email bit just as well, probably a bit better in fact.
FanBridge offers all the sign-up boxes and widgets that you’d need and allows a significant degree of editability. Its tracking stats are fantastic too, giving you information about who opened the emails, when and whether they clicked on any links in the email you sent them. All good data to have.
You lose nothing in the ‘offer for email’ department either as FanBridge allows you to automatically offer tracks or images in return for a fan signing up. It also has clever methods to incentivise fans to share your newsletter to spread the word and build your list even further.
The other difference that it has as an advantage is the mobile marketing that’s possible if you’ve collected mobile numbers on your sign-up forms. Being able to update fans via SMS at the last minute before a gig is a major plus.
Downsides? It’s not free. Well, it is for the first 400 messages per month. This is calculated as a total number of messages sent, so that 100 people on a list sent four messages in a month use up your 400 total. After that, it becomes paid – see the rates here – FanBridge Pricing – but it’s a small investment to make to have such a powerful tool to communicate with your fanbase at your fingertips.
3. Champion Sound
Champion Sound is a smaller company that doesn’t yet have the reach of FanBridge and ReverbNation, but it’s a really great alternative that some will decide suits them perfectly.
It does most of what the first two do, but with a little less sophistication overall than FanBridge in terms of pure email managemnent (although it’s still very good) and none of the bells and whistles in addition to email list management of ReverbNation.
You can offer free downloads for an email sign-up but you’ll have to do some of the work to deliver that mp3 or image yourself – setting up a page on the web where people can download it. Not hard but not slick. You do however get a public profile page on which to do that.
So why’s it mentioned? Well it has great tracking and list sub-division (so it’s easy to split the people in one town from another in an email blast) and does the main task of building a list and mailing newsletters without any drama. Users also like the way that you can blast out the email messages to Twitter and Facebook. And it builds guest lists too!
But that’s not why we include it here. It’s maybe a bit sad for us to be excited by it, but the thing that makes it different is the iphone app! I know, it shouldn’t come down to that, but it’s a great idea and it works brilliantly.
The app allows people to sign up on your phone at a gig. Simple as that. It does other stuff too but that’s the cool trick. One of our clients uses this platform and people at gigs love it!
Using Champion Sound is effectively a paid service unless you have a tiny list and don’t use all the features (and that’s not the point is it!). Check the pricing here – Champion Sound Pricing.
We like Champion Sound – it’s another good option.
4. Aweber
So, what’s left?
Well, we’re going to be a bit perverse now and recommend the service that we use to contact all of our subscribers on this site and which we have used in the past for our bands. Aweber.
The reason that this is perverse is that it isn’t an email list system that is designed for musicians to build a mailing list – it’s actually a system that is designed for email list marketing for any business and it’s the market leader in that field. The number one system that businesses use if they need ultimate flexibility in email list management.
That means that for the job of building an email list and communicating with the people on that list, it is the best that you can get.
Why is it so good? Well, basically it comes down to the depth of the functions and what you can do with them.
The big advantage is that Aweber is not just an email management system it’s also an ‘Autoresponder’. That means that it can be set up to automatically send a series of emails that you pre-load into it at any given intervals. So, you can send all the new people that sign-up to your list an email the day after they signed up asking them if they liked the free tracks you gave them, and then a week later asking them to leave a comment on your blog and then two weeks later asking them to buy a single – and, once you’ve set this up once, Aweber will send all these emails automatically.
This is a very powerful way of communicating with your fans. You can actually set up as many pre-determined emails as you like. It could be one a week for a year.
You kind of have to use an autoresponder to see how clever and effective it is. Explaining it doesn’t really do it justice.
All emails are what is called ‘double opt-in’. This means that when a fan signs up, they are sent an email that asks them to confirm that they want to be on the list. This makes for a better controlled list that only people who are genuinely interested get signed up to. It also means that your emails are more likely to be delivered when you send them which then also adds to the ‘open-rate’. This is significant and ‘double opt-in’ (not used by any of the others we have looked at) is industry standard for professional email list management.
Of course, Aweber will allow you to create a form that you can use anywhere on the web to get sign-ups. This will be html or javascript but is easy to use, to update and is super effective.
Aweber allows you to do some really cool stuff with your list. It’s easy to write a newsletter and send it to a segment of your list. And then, a few days later, you can send it again to only those that didn’t open it or didn’t click on the link you wanted them to click. Maybe you can change your offer just to those people? Lists can be segmented and mailed as often as you like. There is no charge for the number of emails sent) unlike the other systems. Aweber charges for the number of people on your list, not the number of emails that you send them.
As you’d expect, you can create as many lists from scratch as you like.
And, the analytics of who is doing what with the information you send them is more detailed than you can get anywhere else. Split tests to increase open rates and click conversion, automated follow ups and web-hosted versions that you can link to Facebook and Twitter – all very trick stuff.
What’s wrong with it? Well it’s not designed for musicians. It’s not hard to use and the tutorials, and step by step set-up, are fantastic (as is the customer support) but you will have to build your own ‘thank you’ pages where you send people after they sign up to get the free download track or whatever you’re offering. That could be a pain and a deal breaker if you have no geek / nerd skills at all.
At the moment they don’t do mobile and they don’t have an offline sign-up, but you could code one from their html form if you were smart enough. I have raised this with them though and they are looking at it as it’s something they know they should offer.
And, of course, there is no integration with a myriad of widgets and a full music profile like you get with ReverbNation. This, again, may be a deal breaker for many as it does make a whole lot of sense to have all your software tools talking to each other.
If though, you are tech savvy and are building your own site (which you should be) and can deal with creating a page for free downloads for people who sign-up, then it’s well worth thinking about. Particularly if your band is getting to the stage where the fan sign-up is more than a trickle and your fanbase is active.
We use it and we work with bands who use it and, used correctly, it is the best email management tool
5. Anything Else?
Just to confuse you a bit there are three others to consider.
Bandcamp is another brilliant multi-faceted online profile site that allows you to sell your music direct. It has an email collection element, but the reason we haven’t looked at it here is that it just isn’t up to the job like the four we’ve covered. It’s a great system overall but the email list is an add-on, not the focus.
Then there’s Nimbit and Topspin. These are the lurking wannabe giants that might change things for good.
In short they’re full service music systems that do email (very well but not with autoresponders) and manage all your digital (and physical) sales of music and merchandise and provide tools to virally spread your music.
They have subtle differences. We haven’t looked at them here as they aren’t just about email and aren’t necessary for most bands until they are up and running and selling commercially viable amounts of music.
We’ll look at them both in detail in the future. For now, let’s say that Nimbit is the longer established of the two with great tools and an expanding user base and is great for all levels of artist. A slightly more heavyweight answer is Topspin but they don’t let all and sundry in to use the platform. More another time. Just be aware of them and have a look around the web to see what people think of these before making your choice.
In conclusion, I’d recommend all four systems we looked at. My preference is for either ReverbNation or Aweber depending on your point of view and how important the added features of ReverbNation are to you.
It may be a little unfair, but if you are going to be a long term underground band that never ‘breaks through’ but makes a living playing circuit gigs and selling to a small diehard tribe of fans, then ReverbNation is probably right for you.
If, on the other hand, you think you’re going all the way and want the best solution and can find a way to integrate it with other tools to offer your fans all the things they come to expect, then Aweber is the one for you.
In ‘Part 3′, we’ll look at how to use your list and how to communicate with your fans.
You can read ‘Part 1′ of ‘Building a fan mailing list‘ on this site by clicking the link.
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