If you’ve just joined us, you might want to read part one of this series on email marketing for musicians about setting up a Mailchimp account.
When you’re ready to begin optimising your mail campaigns for better results, look into the closest mirror, say ‘Mailchimp tips’ three times and scroll down…
Offline newsletter sign ups
Playing live or going on tour? Chimpadeedoo is an iPad app that allows offline signups (handy if you don’t have an active connection), and it will sync the contacts when you’re next online.
Give it to the person working the door or your merchandise table and get them to ask attendees to sign up.
Mailchimp for Facebook
You can also add a signup form to your Facebook fan page. This additional integration helps to reach as many people as possible.
Manual adds to you mailing lists
If you want to add a subscriber manually, you can add an entry easily from the list menu – but keep in mind that they need to have agreed to be signed up. Spam isn’t cool.
You can also import lists from other sources (again, if they have agreed, not lists you’ve scraped or compiled yourself). You can import contacts from a number of services including Google Contacts, Google Docs and Eventbrite – or simply as an Excel or CSV file.
Downloads for sign ups
You can also incentivise signups by offering free downloads using the non-profit, open-source CashMusic tool. Mailchimp doesn’t allow attachments (for security reasons, among others), but using the CashMusic tool, you can give your subscribers a choice of downloads via unique URL – and it doesn’t even have to be an audio file, so you can actually be creative with this.
Here’s a quick two minute video on how to set up a CashMusic email-for-download campaign:
Moving on from stock newsletter templates
Because users need to opt-in and then also confirm inclusion, they will receive a few stock-standard emails via Mailchimp before they get your first bespoke newsletter. It can be useful to customise all the communication during the subscription (and un-subscription) process.
To customise these messages, go to your lists, then to the signup forms, then general forms and in the drop down you will see titles like ‘thank you page’, ‘unsubscribe form’ and more. Now you can edit all of these canned responses to something a little more personal and on brand with your band!
RSS to Email Campaigns
If you have a blog that you post to semi-regularly, you might want to create an RSS driven campaign once you’ve got your head around the basics.
You can schedule an RSS campaign to automatically send out any new blog posts at regular intervals (for instance, we send out our articles once a week). Set it up once and let Freddie and the Mailchimp mechanics do their thing.
Segmenting your audience
You can also segment users in a mailing list, which is great if you want to have more than one conversation. If you were touring Australia, for instance, you could send out a newsletter just to your fans down under letting them know that you’re on your way.
Testing and Reporting
The reporting feature gives you some pretty interesting feedback on your campaigns. But Mailchimp A/B testing also allows you to send out variations of the same email template, so you can tell what type of content is more interesting to your audience, or what time of day your emails get more responses.
Here are the average stats for Mailchimps’s Music and Musicians industry:
- Open rate: 30.00%
- Clicks: 2.60%
- Soft Bounce (e.g. Mailbox full): 0.50%
- Hard Bounce (e.g. Mailbox not found): 0.50%
- Abuse Complaints: 0.04%
- Unsubscribe Rate: 0.18%
This, of course, leads us to more advanced analytics…
Google Analytics for Mailchimp
If you have a website with Google Analytics tracking you can also add the code to your Mailchimp list settings to get insights into the readership and interaction.
If you don’t have Google Analytics installed, read our intro guide to SEO for Musicians.
Archive pages
Because past campaigns are archived in a standalone page, you can also share the link for the page on Twitter or Facebook so even non-subscribers can view your content.
You can create a page on your website with all your previous mails quite easily. All you need to do is click on the campaigns page via the Mailchimp dashboard, create a folder and then copy the archive code and paste it into your site.
If you want to get the link for one specific archived email, you can do so by navigating to that email from the campaign page, clicking the drop down and selecting ‘social share’ (it will be a shortened link using the eepurl.com format).
That’s it! Let us know how you get on!