If you send an email about a new show to your fan list and no one opens it, have you effectively announced the event? Probably not. It’s likely that your previous emails were not exciting fans enough to open your next one. If you want to buck this trend, consider these three important types of feedback to create more effective fan email campaigns (which means getting high open and engagement rates).
1. Personal Feedback
When crafting a campaign, think about what gets your attention. When you go through your email, what subject lines get opened first before anything else? What content gets forwarded to a friend? Be sure to draw inspiration from Facebook and Twitter as well. Take note of what gets retweeted or photos that everyone likes and has an endless stream of complimentary comments. Along with the good, it is important to note the bad. Does an ALL CAPS SUBJECT LINE GET DELETED IMMEDIATELY or do mEsSaGeS tHaT r HaRd To ReAd GiVe U a HeAdAcHe???? Most likely, the things that excite and annoy you are the same things that excite and annoy fans receiving your emails.
2. Inner-circle Feedback
Before every campaign you send, be sure to make the most of the test message. Send yourself a test to give your message a final look through. And the great thing about test messages is that you can send them to any additional person you’d like. If your current fan email list provider can’t do this for you, find one that has this functionality as it is important. Send a test to all the band members, family, friends, or people whose opinions you value. Maybe you misspelled “Cincinnati” in your tour announcement or the font is too small to read. Better to send a poor looking draft to a few people for feedback than to present it as the final version to all your fans.
And finally, the most important type of feedback:
3. Fan Feedback
When you think about it, deep down inside, you most likely send messages to your fans to get them to take action. Whether it is buying your music, buying tickets to an upcoming show, or telling their friends about you, you want to make sure you are sending something your fans want to open and read (or else they won’t take action). Many artists assume they know what fans want to hear about in newsletters, and our research has shown that many times, the artist is wrong. So how do you know what your fans want?
Great question, and we’ve thought about this for quite a while now. You can surely justask fans and tell them to reply via email with their thoughts, but that is cumbersome and FanBridge.com hard to track when you receive a bunch of responses.
After talking with a number of artists and fans to get their feedback, we have built a Fan Feedback feature, which makes it really easy to collect valuable fan feedback on your campaigns. With one click, you can automatically include an unobtrusive callout for fans to give you feedback on that specific campaign, and your emails in general.
Fans can tell you how often they want to hear from you, what kind of things they want to hear about, and how much they like your most recent email message. We then make it easy to see all of the fan feedback in one place, and also give you the ability to reply to as much or as little feedback as you would like (straight from your FanBridge account). You can then use this feedback to improve your future messages, making them more effective.
Be the artist that is constantly seeking constructive criticism. You just might be surprised at how much it pays off.
Want more tips like this? Sign up for the Fan Marketing Institute and get free weekly lessons designed to help you get more fans, cultivate loyalty, and turn fans into customers.
