No Abbath, not that sort of campaign

So your adoring fan base has swarmed to your website and signed up to your mailing list. You also got a bunch of email addresses at your last gig. Before you start firing off tantalizing epistles documenting your drunken studio antics and news of your drummer’s breakup with his girlfriend (gotta keep the groupies happy, right?) let me urge you to exercise a little restraint, and think about how you intend to use your entrusting fans’ details.

When you hear big companies talking about ‘marketing campaigns’ they’re not merely referring to the latest stupid advert aimed at coercing you to buy their shit washing powder. A campaign is usually a targeted schedule of communication and grouping of themed marketing that is being enacted for a specific reason. Marketing campaigns are rarely begun with the sole directive of ‘selling more stuff’ although that is usually the ultimate goal. More likely, a high up exec noticed that they were selling well to the under 30’s, so they designed a campaign specifically aimed at selling to that demographic. Other reasons may be a new product launch, basic product awareness (perhaps of the back of poor sales versus a competitor), acquiring new customers, or selling more to existing customers. All these goals require very different campaigns and modes of communication.

You should think of your communications to your fans in a similar context. So before sending out a single email, ask yourself, ‘what is it that I’m trying to achieve?’ Perhaps you’re just about to go on tour, and you want to get people to gigs. Maybe you’re just about to release a new EP or album. You may just be interested in striking a rapport with your fans. Maybe what you want is a bigger email list. Perhaps you want to all of the above.

The next question to ask yourself is “what does success look like?” There’s little point in a campaign that achieves nothing, and understanding the specific goals you want to achieve is vital when constructing your campaign. Some possible outcomes are:

• Gig ticket sales, or higher attendance
• Hits to your Myspace or website
• Downloads of your new track(s)
• Signups to your mailing list
• Album sales CD or iTunes
• Merchandise sales
• Beers bought for you by fans post-gig
• Mentions on other sites (blogs, review sites, news sites etc.)
• Ego boost, attention from ladies/guys/both etc.

It’s likely that several of the above are important to you. So state your objectives, and write them down somewhere, you’ll need to refer back to this when making decision about how to conduct your campaign – if something you’re doing doesn’t contribute to these goals, should you really be doing it?

The next dimension to consider is time. There are key dates in your band’s diary that are important in this endeavour: album release date, tour dates, band t-shirts get delivered, interview/review appears in some magazine. Communications to your fans should mean something to the fans and should be delivered at the right time to be relevant to the corresponding event. If the only email you send advertising your new album release is sent 6 weeks before it’s available, then that message will be lost or forgotten. Conversely, you need to give people plenty of advance warning for gigs, but you don’t want to tell them until the tickets are actually available.

So perhaps you’ve got a new album coming out, a short tour to support this, and t-shirts with the album cover on the front being sold online and at the gigs. This calls for a well structured email campaign, as there’s quite a lot going on. Before you set down a single word of an email, write down a schedule for those events and corresponding communications to the fan base. Your campaign summary may look something like this (except with realistic dates!):

Oct 1st – Recording/mixing finishes
Oct 7th – Initial teaser email send to tell the fanbase about the album
Oct 10th – t-shirts available
Oct 14th – Pressing finishes, hard copies delivered
Oct 15th – 2nd email drop with album releases date and artwork, track listing and links to buy t-shirts and pre-order album
Oct 20th – Tour dates confirmed, tickets available
Oct 22nd – 3rd email drop, tour dates, ticket sources, album, release date, t-shirt link
Nov 1st – Album released
Nov 1st – 4th email drop with links to buy album, t-shirts, tour dates etc.
Nov 15th – 5th Email drop to remind folks who didn’t buy your. Remind about the tour
Nov 17th – tour begins
…

This is the campaign you will execute to. Don’t send ANY other emails. Be wary of communicating release dates early on, or until they’re absolutely committed to, otherwise you’ll have to send out an embarrassing retraction. Early teaser emails should say something like “touring before the end of the year” or “in the shops this spring”.

The emails’ design, colour scheme and construction should be consistent throughout the campaign. Also, make sure it’s obvious what to click on or where to go to get the stuff you’re advertising (these are called ‘calls to action’ in business speak).

If you’re feeling really ambitious, you could accompany this with a purely online campaign, using your website, Twitter, Myspace or whatever, to try and coerce new punters to your Fanbridge/Reverb Nation site and thus widen your audience for the big release.

Campaigns can get infinitely more complicated than this, however it’s always important not to overstate your message or saturate your audience. Always revisit your objectives and why you are communicating with your fans, and ask yourself before sending any emails “do they really care?”

That’s quite a lot to take in. I’ll leave you to digest for a while!

CRM for Bands – Turning fans into Fanatics

CRM for Metal Bands #1: Make contact

AIC+CRM=WIN

There was an excellent example of CRM building up to the release of Alice in Chains’ new album Black Gives Way to Blue. Here’s what they did:

1. Introduced some teaser videos onto the internet for the their new track thus creating buzz
2. Several days later they made the full video available
   At roughly the same time they made the track available free online for fans once they submitted their email address
3. Several weeks later these fans were sent correspondence regarding the release date of their new album, plus info about merch available
4. Soon after they advertised that the album would by available for pre-sales, and that anyone who purchased the album on pre-sale would receive another track off of the album immediately for free
5. When the album was release they sent more email with details of where to get the album and more merchandising links

The buzz around Black Gives Way to Blue was immense. Before the album was released they had sold a bunch of albums and load of merch, and fans suspicious of a band returning without their revered frontman are now singing along with the new singer and material at gigs.

Make no mistake, this is exemplary music marketing – marketing of ANY kind. AIC had a hard job ahead of them, after being away for over a decade, to convince a bunch of fans already suspicious of the whole venture that they were still relevant. Well they certainly took the risk out of the situation!

This approach was clearly tailored for the needs of a massive band, but the same principles apply to any band. The 3 basic steps are:

1. Announce your presence
2. Locate your fans
3. Talk to them

Step 1 and 3 I’ll cover off in a later article. Here I’ll concentrate on step 2 as you need to give it a little forethought before you plough into this endeavour.

So when people turn up at your gig, or website or Myspace, you need to be ready to try and grab some information about them.

Now, I’m going to talk explicitly about email in this article. In theory, any detail you can get about your fans is useful (for example Twitter/Facebook/Myspace account, address, phone number, favourite bands, shoe size, propensity to put out) but email is still the most versatile, powerful and easy to exploit, plus pretty much everyone has an email address.

Ideally you want email address and name (first, and preferably full), but just email address is fine. There are various ways to grab this info.

• At gigs. Put a sheet of paper on the merch counter to get folks to sign up for your mailing list. Consider offering an incentive for this, perhaps a free button badge, or a discount voucher for the next gig.
• Folks you run into. You’re always banging on about your band to whoever will listen, at parties and stuff, right? Folks sound interested? GET THEIR EMAIL! Wake up next to that random chick who’s wearing nothing but your AC/DC socks? Decided you never want to see her again? I don’t care, GET HER EMAIL!
• Collect it online. I saw a particularly good example of an unsigned band doing this recently. The most excellent prog-metalers Stone Circle announced via Twitter that they are giving away a free MP3 from their current EP, and more free stuff to come, to anyone who will sign up to their mailing list using a service called FanBridge. This site exists for the explicit purpose of collecting an managing email lists for bands. They offer a bunch of tool to manage your email campaigns and I’ll be referencing them a LOT in upcoming articles. Do go and sign-up to Stone Circle’s FanBridge list by the way – they will get signed soon and will probably stop giving away their excellent music.

So you’ve got a bunch of email addresses, what do you do with them? This I will cover in more detail in later articles, but for the moment, you need to store them somewhere. The first thing to do is transfer details collected in the real world to you computer, preferably into MS Excel (if you or your folks don’t have a copy, try Google Docs which has a free online spreadsheet) and save somewhere safe. FanBridge will let you upload lists of fan detail from Excel, so if you have an account this is a good idea.

For details collected at gigs, note the town that the gig was in as part of the details you collect. Later, when you’re telling folks about your tour, you won’t need to spam people in Brighton about your gig in Glasgow; you can create a separate email for each town or area.

Now, before you get too excited and start spamming your list with random photos of the band getting drunk, beware the evils of excessive email. If people don’t like what you send them, they’ll simply mark your email address as spam, and all further mails from your email address will be relegated to the junk mail folder. Before you send out any email at all, you need to plan your email campaign based on what you need to get out of it. This we will discuss in the next article. In the meantime, get collecting kiddies!

CRM for Bands – Turning fans into Fanatics

We want email!

Whether you like it or not, if you’re in a band (unsigned or otherwise), you are a business. You have ‘customers’ (the fans), you generate revenue (the 10 quid you made from that gig down your local) and have overheads (booze, guitar strings). It doesn’t matter how big or small you are. Not very rock n’ roll I know, but an unavoidable reality. I’ve spoken before about bands viewing themselves as small business; indeed in the changing music landscape, this is going to become more and more of a necessity. I’m aware that at some point you may be one of the lucky few to be offered a record deal, but in the meantime you still want to be packing out those gigs, selling merch and getting your music heard right?

So I’m going to spend a little time talking about your fans and how you engage them at the times you’re not screaming at them and jumping on their heads. The corporate world has this concept called Customer Relationship Management (CRM) which relates to the management of customers or contacts and how you engage with them. It’s big business. Massive. The music industry uniformly sucks at it. It’s because they assume that they have the fans in a strangle hold – the fans want the music, they proved that by buying the last record, so all we have to do is make the new one and tell them about it. Well times are a changing folks. When a band’s new album is on the internet before most of the folks at the label heard it, then you need to look at engaging your ‘customers’ in the different way.

This aside, as an unsigned band, communicating well with your fanbase could make or brake you as a band. You’re reliant on them to buy your stuff, spread the word about your band and turn up to gigs. You probably can’t afford much advertising or PR, so you need to rely on your fanbase to help you stay afloat. If this is done well, not only will you create a base of well informed devotees (known as advocates in the business world) but you may even make a bit of money.

So what exactly am I on about? Well, those adoring faces in the front row getting kicks out of your mad skillz on your Les Paul have names, likes and dislikes, personalities. They also have emails addresses, Myspace/Facebook/Twitter accounts, money and a propensity to bang on about your band to anyone who will listen. The row back from there have all of the above but may be yet to be convinced about your band. The row behind them didn’t get your EP yet and only turned up because one of the kids in the front row keeps banging on about how good your band is.

These people have information, all of which can be used to help connect with them, to get them to help you, to sell more stuff to them. If you can get the email addresses of a quarter of the folks at that gig – say 25 people – you now have 25 direct lines into people’s lives to tell them about your next gig, your ace new t-shirt, your new record.

This all probably seems blindingly obvious, and you may already by doing this, or perhaps you’ve got a bunch of friends on Facebook. Let me tell you about that little collection of gold dust. Some big corporates will pay literally hundreds of pounds for a single email address. It’s depressingly common practise for companies to spend out £10 per contact!

You can get it free. Perhaps you need to give a little out (maybe a free mp3 download) but it’s worth it. If you collect 100 email addresses across 3 gigs, and send out emails to these folks, and get 3 t-shirt sales as a result, is it worth it? Hell yeah! Here’s what you have now:

1. A few quid
2. 3 walking adverts for your band
3. The email addresses of 3 people who like your band enough to want to wear your shitty t-shirt!

Which is the more important of these outcomes? Number 3 of course! Next time you send out a bunch of email, you don’t spam these 3 about merch, you send them a link to download one of your new tracks and a free ticket to your next gig. Now what you have is someone who’s going to make damn sure they turn up at your next gig, proudly sporting your t-shirt, and bring all their mates.

This is a fairly facile example, but it illustrates how CRM works. I know a company that would personally deliver free laptop to their key advocates loaded with all the stuff they needed to do more of what they were doing.

There’s plenty of ways of doing this, but getting the basics right is important. If you get a bunch of contacts and proceed to spam them, then not only will they start to hate you, they’ll bitch about you to all their mates. If you treat all your fans as equal, then you’re missing a trick. If you do nothing at all, who’s to say they’ll ever give you a second thought?

In the following articles we’ll talk about ways to gather data, what we do with it, and how we manage different profiles of fan. These techniques and considerations should be built into the daily running of your band along with turning up for rehearsals, booking gigs and screwing groupies.