Good communication with your fans is a cornerstone of the post-net music industry. But in an era of spam and email overload is email marketing still effective? Web based application FanMail certainly thinks so.
1) What is FanMail? FanMail is a marketing platform that provides the tools, strategy and expertise to enable professionals in the music industry to target and communicate effectively with their most important fans and clients through email.
2) Other than being music-centric, what makes FanMail different from other email marketing systems? FanMail is built on ExactTarget technology which is the industry leader in email marketing. It is rated best in business suitability by Jupiter Research and is consistently featured by the Forrester Report. In addition to providing the best software in the world, FanMail has a team of interactive marketing consultants, developers, designers and managers who have initiated thousands of email marketing campaigns both for the music and mainstream industries.
3) With spam and email overload is email marketing still effective? Yes… if it done right. In order to be really effective, email must be a relationship tool and not a mass marketing tool. What works in email is delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Anything else is bordering on spam and so it gets filtered, ignored and ultimately becomes irrelevant.
4) What should a band or label do to help build their lists? They need to find their fans, know their fans, love their fans and empower their fans. Certainly there are some strategies that can be implemented to sign people up, but at the end of the day it is the QUALITY of fan and not quantity of names that is really important. Bands and labels would be crazy not to take advantage of their most important fans to help grow their resources.
5) What new concepts or technologies are on the horizon for music email marketing? Personalization and relevancy is really exiting. The ability to segment and target fan databases is where people are seeing amazing results. Streaming Media inside email is exciting to. Although it has challenges, the potential is really cool. I have also been seeing some neat stuff in viral email strategy to empower fans to forward messages on.
6) BONUS QUESTION: What in music or the music industry excited you right now? (Shameless plugs are acceptable.) The whole Web 2.0 thing is very cool for the music industry. The ability for people to plug into information that is really valuable and relative to their lives and simultaneously have a voice in that information is very cool. The huge success of something like MySpace is built on empowerment. I believe that there is nothing right now in the music industry that is more valuable than a fan that is empowered to act for the music that they love.
STAY TUNED: We'll be publishing case studies of a few FanMail clients in the coming days.
