Email Marketing for Indie Artists: How To Build A Mailing List

Creating and building an email list is an important key to your success as an independent artist. While social media has its place, email marketing is one of the best ways to get your fans’ attention. When you promote music with email, you can let fans know about upcoming shows, albums releases, deals on merch, interviews, music videos, and more.

Email offers direct access to your audience, which isn’t always the case when it comes to social media. With Facebook, you generally have pay (in the form of a “boosted post”) to reach your entire audience. On Twitter and Instagram, you’re fighting for your followers’ attention against the hundreds of other accounts they follow and see in their feed.

With email, your messages are much more likely to be seen. That’s why it’s vital to place a high importance on building your email list. Once you’ve collected your fan’s email addresses, you control what to do with them, how you send messages to them, etc. Whereas on social media platforms have control over their own networks and how they want to show your posts to fans.

I’m going to show you how to get started collecting emails from your fans, how to create and build your list using one of the best email services, and more.

Before you start collecting your fans’ emails, you will need a way to manage and keep track of all of that addresses. You will also need a way to send bulk emails all at one time. To do this, you will need to have a website to collect and manage email addresses. You will need to use an email marketing platform to send out emails to all of your contacts at once.

If you’re an independent artist who’s serious about your music and you’re trying to make a decent living in the music business, you should have your own professional website with a relevant web domain (ex. www.yourbandname.com). If you don’t have that yet, book a phone consultation to speak 1 on 1 about developing your website. To collect emails on your website, you will need to set up a signup form for visitors to fill out. Growing your list means growing your fan base and the number of people you can advertise your music to. This is a great step towards creating a stable income for your music.

So that means not only collecting emails on your website but collecting emails at shows. You should have some kind of signup sheet for fans to write down their email so they can be added to your list. This can be as simple as a pen and paper, or maybe a tablet. Keep it at your merch table and ask fans to sign up when they visit or make a purchase.

Offer a free incentive to sign up like a band sticker or pin. Something that doesn’t cost you a lot to hand out but will entice people to sign up. After your show, you’ll then need to take that list and import it into your email database manually. Of course, you want your list to be legitimate and actually have people on there who are genuinely interested in your music, but don’t be afraid to get creative and try new ways to collect more emails.

Here are a few other places to consider:

• Ask the followers you already have on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to sign up for your email list too. Let them know the advantages of doing so; like being able to see all of your important updates on upcoming shows and album releases.
• Offer exclusive music and content to fans who sign up.
• Go on LIVE on social media and ask for viewers to sign up.

A great email mailing list and a clever marketing campaign can have a huge impact on your career as a musician. Having your fans’ emails allows you direct access to their inbox and ensures your messages are almost always seen. Make sure collecting subscribers is a priority on your website, at your shows, and anywhere else you can get hold of your fans’ emails addresses. Make sure to always collect phone numbers to use a Text Marketing strategy as well.

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