253 – What I’m Discovering Newly About Growing Your Email List

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Do you have an email list? Are you actively building it? Is your email list continually growing, are you building your community, and is your customer experience as good as it could be?

That’s what we’re going to be looking at in this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast.

Table of Contents

Podcast Highlights:

00:31 – What David learned from James Schramko’s course on email marketing
00:58 – How are you capturing your prospect’s email addresses?
02:40 – What happens when someone joins your list?
05:38 – How are you communicating with your subscribers?
08:59 – How our learnings have changed our email communication at Music Entrepreneur HQ
11:42 – Episode summary
12:33 – Closing thoughts

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Transcription:

Hey, it’s David Andrew Wiebe. In this episode, I wanted to share what I recently picked up from James Schramko’s course on email marketing.

I’m not going to summarize the course or give you a step by step or share templates with you. We’re not about plagiarism. I’ll be sharing my own discoveries from taking this course.

And then I’ll be sharing a little bit about what we’ve been doing at Music Entrepreneur HQ to improve our email process.

1. How Are You Capturing Emails?

What lead magnets do you have? A lead magnet is something you give away for free in exchange for an email address. It might be a single, it might be an EP. Are you giving anything away? If you’re not, then you don’t have a lead magnet. But if you do, you’re going to want to identify your assets.

Where are the signup forms on your website? Do you have email opt-in boxes on your site? Where are they located? Are they on your homepage? Are they in your internal pages? Are they in the sidebar? Header? Footer? Where are they?

Do you have any sales funnels set up? Because typically those capture emails as well?.

And are you capturing emails in person at gigs and conferences and wherever you go?

What you want to do here is identify all the touch points and preferably log them in a spreadsheet or maybe in a tool like Notion, so you can look at all of them from a bird’s eye view.

Now there is sort of a pros and cons of having more opportunities for people to sign up to your email list.

On the one hand, when you have more opportunities, and more lead magnets and more opt in boxes, you can tailor your communication to specific segments of your audience.

Let’s say for example, they download your free single. So, your first email might be delivering the goods that you promised them, right? But then in the future, when you have a new music release, and they are interested in your single, they might be interested in your EP or album or whatever your next release is.

But like I said, there’s a con. More isn’t always better, because it can add complexity. And you’ll see why that is a little later in this episode.

2. What Happens When Someone Joins Your List?

We have a few more questions to ask here.

Does everyone get added to the same list, or are they tagged the same way, it’s not a problem. If everyone is being added to your same list. It’s not even a problem If you’re not tagging them immediately. In fact, if you’re just getting started, and you don’t have a lot of products, and you don’t have a lot of offers, then maybe adding them all to the same list is a good idea.

But by the time you’ve started incorporating more lead magnets, and more offers on your website, you may want to start adding them to different lists. Or as the case might be with certain ESPs or email service providers, you’re going to want to start utilizing tags to track the behavior of the person who joined the list.

Do they receive the same automated welcome sequence from you, no matter how they get on your email list? Again, that’s not a bad thing. You definitely want to have an email sequence. You want to be able to introduce yourself, maybe share about your community, maybe share about your latest release in maybe three emails or so. But depending on the action they took, or whatever behavior they last exhibited, you may want to tailor your communication to them.

Do you even have a sequence set up for when people join your email list? Or do you just send out emails ad hoc?

Now, we’re artists, and although we’re quite smart, and we’re usually on the cutting edge of marketing, sometimes we’re a little lazy. And sometimes we’re a little afraid to put more emails in front of the people who are interested in us.

You know, if they signed up to get emails from you, even if it’s just a newsletter, they’re obviously more interested in you than you even realize. They want to see what you have coming out. They want to see what’s next. So, I wouldn’t recommend sending ad hoc emails only. That could absolutely be part of your plan. Such as if you’re sending weekly or bi-weekly or monthly emails. I don’t know that you’d want to go any less than that.

But the point is, if you improvise everything, this machine’s not going to work as well as it could.

Are new subscribers are receiving customized communication from you?

And this kind of goes hand in hand with what we’ve already talked about. When they sign up for a certain lead magnet or when they sign up for a certain offer or when they buy a certain price. product, are they receiving communication that’s a little more tailored to what they’ve already exhibited interest in?

Are you following up with leads and customers?

Many artists aren’t. In fact, there’s a lot of sales funnels out there that make big promises and offer big things. But after the fact, for whatever reason, they don’t follow up with additional communication, or you just don’t hear from them as often as you think. So, they work really hard to get you in the door, but then don’t really do a lot of work to keep you on the back end, right? And it’s worth looking at whether that’s true of you and your communication.

3. How Are You Communication with Your Subscribers?

And this goes hand in hand with a lot of things we’ve already looked at. But here’s a few more questions to ask yourself:

Do new subscribers get a welcome message from you when they sign up?

I would say one welcome message is minimal. Right? You at least want to put something in front of them saying, “Hey, thank you so much for joining the list. Thank you for joining the community.” And then maybe one next step, like “follow us on Facebook” or something like that,

if they are signed up for a lead magnet, are they actually getting it?

You know, this is where automation makes a big difference, right? You should probably have that set up in Leadpages or ClickFunnels or some other automated service that allows you to put that lead magnet in front of them right away, so that you aren’t sending out emails, you aren’t watching all day going, “Look,oh, someone new signed up, we have to send it!” It doesn’t work. And the customer, or in this case, the prospect, is expecting to receive that right away. So leverage automation.

if they bought a product, did they actually receive it?

It’s certainly worth following up, isn’t it? And even if that’s just a “thank you” email saying, “Hey, thank you for purchasing this product.” If they at least receive that email, they’re going to be more likely to respond to you if perchance they didn’t actually get it [the product]. It’s always good to make sure they did.

Are you following up with customers who bought something from you?

Look, the reality is the customers or your existing customers are really the best source of income. We often work really hard to get new customers. And that’s as it should be. We want to grow our fan base, right? We want to grow our subscriber list. But it’s important to realize that you’re not going to be spending as much time or energy or resources into nurturing your existing customers and putting new offers in front of them. If they already bought from you, they’re interested in buying from you again, you just have to create that opportunity.

Are you sending emails on a consistent schedule? Or are you just winging it?

Again, we can’t just improvise all the time. You should probably put a schedule in place if you don’t already have one. Like I said weekly is probably pretty good. We’ve figured out at Music Entrepreneur HQ that while you seem to like about two emails per week, any more than that starts to get a little crazy. We often actually do send about three emails a week. And it’s not to bug you. It’s just because we have different content initiatives. It’s like Tuesday, we do promos. Thursday, we send out the new podcast episode and then Saturday, we send out our weekly digest. But we could certainly adjust that depending on the user and their interests.

And do your subscribers get customized communication from you, when they’ve signed up for something specific?

Kind of goes hand in hand with what we already talked about. But let’s say they signed up for your new EP. So they like your EP, they’ve listened to it, they got it for free. Now they’re interested in a little bit more. How are you going to tailor your communication to them? What are you going to say? What’s the next step? And you might not immediately follow up with “Hey, buy our album,” but down the line right after you’ve nurtured them, you probably don’t want to wait forever. You want to get them into the habit and sort of training your customers. And it sounds weird. We’re not hurting sheep here. But we want to train our customers to buy things from us. And so putting an offer in front of them on a regular basis. Once every 90 days is good. We want to make sure that we get them into that cycle.

How We’ve Adapted at Music Entrepreneur HQ

Now here’s a little bit about what we’ve been up to with Music Entrepreneur HQ since making these discoveries. We really do believe in taking fast action, the moment you learn something, look to implement it right away.

And I even did this with a landing page the other day. I was watching someone else’s video about some funnel. And then I realized there’s no customer testimonials on this book funnel I created, maybe it’d be worth adding those. Now, I still don’t have data at this point to support that that has helped sales in any way. But I’ll be sure to keep you updated on that.

So while we thought we’d be a little further along by the time this podcast episode came out, we’ve still been in action.

One thing we’ve been doing for a while is building a new welcome sequence that’s almost done. I even looked at our existing welcome sequence and I realized, oh, there are some errors in there. And not to mention, the second email was like, “Hey, come and get your discounted virtual consultation” and there haven’t really been many claimers and so yeah, that’s not really working. And it’s probably better to put this new email sequence in front of our audience.

We created a simple sequence for those who signed up to receive the Music Money Machine training. That one’s sort of obvious because it is in the form of a sales funnel. So once people sign up for that, we want to say right away, thank you. Here’s what you opted in for. And by the way, did you get your free book?

We’re building new sequences for when people purchase anything from us. We’re not trying to build anything super complicated here, but we want to acknowledge their action. “Hey, thank you for purchasing this course.” I don’t think we have that right now, unfortunately. And I’m just realizing, as I go through this own mental model for myself, and consider all these questions and identifying our various opt ins, lead magnets and offers and all that, I realized that was a lacking. And this is one way we can definitely nurture and support our customers better. That’s what I’m seeing.

Like I said, we’re not perfect. So we just want to make sure that there’s at least two emails going out. One is just to thank them for the action they’ve taken. And two is probably to follow up about a week later and say, “Hey, how are you doing with that course, is everything good?”

And that’s something you might want to do in your own sequences, as well. Make sure that you’re following up. Depends on the product. I guess, if you have an infoproduct, or course, then you would probably want to follow up a week later or two weeks later, because the user won’t even had any opportunity to check it out and consume it yet.

And I would say it’s probably the same thing with a piece of music, although if it’s a single, you know, they’re either going to have listened to it right away or not. So, you could probably follow up within two days or three days.

So it’s all a work in progress, but we’re learning as we go. And whatever we learned here is going to be completely applicable to any other businesses or initiatives we launched, so it’s all beneficial.

Episode Summary

Identify how you’re collecting emails. You should keep a list of all your opt-in boxes and lead magnet assets, as well as where they are located on your website.
Create an email sequence based on the action the subscriber has taken. Did they sign up to receive a newsletter? Did they opt-in for some free music? Did they buy a product from you? Customize communication based on actions taken.
Better communication means a better customer experience. Getting new customers is hard. It takes more time, money, and energy than nurturing and re-engaging people who are already on your list and existing customers. How can you improve customer support and customer experience? If it improves their experience, it’s generally worth doing.

Closing Segment

Emails also play a key role in the offers you create. If you’re still distributing your music to Spotify, hoping and praying that your streams will go through the roof, it’s time to look at other ways of standing out from the crowd and delivering products your customers will pay more for. And that means more income with a smaller audience, without the need to compete with every musician, pro, amateur, or otherwise. If you’re ready to see how this all works, download our new training, Music Money Machine at MusicEntrepreneurHQ.com/Machine

This has been episode 253 of The New Music Industry Podcast. I’m David Andrew Wiebe, and I look forward to seeing you on the stages of the world.

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David Andrew Wiebe

Founder & CEO at Music Entrepreneur HQ

Award-winning composer, best-selling author, professional musician coach, and podcaster of over 10 years. Wiebe helps musicians like you unlock your full potential. If you'd like to be notified whenever the blog is updated, click here to subscribe.

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