Daily D.I.Y. – Know Where Your Fans Are
FOR THE INDIE IN ALL OF US – It doesn't seem like it matters now. You just want to get as many emails on your list as possible. But as the list grows knowing who is on it and where they are from will start to matter.
Your band swings through the South (or just a neighboring state or off to NYC) a couple of times a year and you really want to build that fan base. Do you think you accomplish that by filling their inbox with last minute set time changes for a show 1500 miles away? How many unsubscribes does each of those intrusions cause?
From the very beginning, make it simple to sign up for your email list, but also ask them who they are. Talk to your webmaster. Various email programs offer different solutions like just asking the state or a zip code without demanding a full address. Some like the free tool at ReverbNation, add a kind of geo-targeting that can tell where the ISP is that your fan uses. But it works only if an email is opened and is not 100% accurate; so that should be a secondary option.
If getting to know your fans is a goal – and it needs to be – knowing where they live is a great place to start.
MORE: Better Email Blasts, Daily. D.I.Y. Archives
Hey Bruce,
Thanks for mentioning us in your article.
I just want to clarify that the ReverbNation product, called ‘FanReach’, requires only an email address at first, but then prompts the fan for age, gender, and location AFTER they click on the verification email that they receive. It is completely optional for the fan to provide that additional info, and if they choose to not provide a location, we will capture the location that we have traced back to them based on their IP address.
Just didn’t want anyone thinking that our product doesn’t allow fans to provide extensive information about themselves to the Artist if they would like to.
good advice! i’m not an indy artist but i talk to many of them and am a freelance writer so it is useful to someone like me, too.
Good stuff!
Glad you mentioned ReverbNation and glad someone from ReverbNation chimed in on this. We (State of Man) use ReverbNation exclusively for our email program due to the extensive details it provides on Email analytics (conversions/click throughs/open rates, etc.) for free. The staff post already covered the ability to gain extensive details via the fans, but they also offer a 3rd party solution called Fan360 (14.95/mo) that combs the net to retrieve all missing info (e.g. Myspace, Facebook, city, state, zip…). For Artists with email lists in the thousands and beyond without complete info (like us), this is a great help. Given RN’s FanReach has everything else you need FREE, $14.95/mo is quite a deal for artists in our position… oh yeah.. and we get paid for the traffic that visits our profile (plug: http://www.reverbnation.com/stateofman), so how great is that?