It’s hard to attract audiences to your performances. Even if the entrance is free and you promote it well with posters and social media, it can still be very difficult to get enough visitors. In this article, you will learn how to use email marketing for this, unless your might want to try solo ads.
Suppose you want to attract 100 visitors to your performance. Then you need more than 100 fans. Because not everyone will come to your performance, for various reasons: they don’t live nearby, they can’t that day or the bank looks just a bit more attractive from a night out. For many audiences at your performances, it is, therefore, necessary to build up your fan base.
Building an email list can help with that. Why? Social media is very important, but you don’t want to remain dependent on it. Social media is out of your control. Is not yours. As soon as Facebook decides to change something, you have to ‘deal’ with it. E-mail addresses are yours as soon as people have given approval for them and until they unsubscribe from your mailings. You immediately enter someone’s inbox, which is also much more powerful than the reach you have on social media.
That’s why it’s important that you start collecting a list of email addresses from your fans. How do you do that? By offering something of value in exchange for an email address. For example, free downloads of some of your songs. Or maybe something completely different. Something that really gives people a good reason to leave an email address. So not just ‘sign up for our newsletter,’, or ‘stay informed of updates.’ That may trigger a few people, but not nearly enough people.
Once you’re building your mailing list, you can use the tips below to eventually get more visitors to your gigs:
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1. Build a relationship
Get them to know you. And make sure you get to know your fáns! Build it up step by step. Mail regularly to the people on your list. For example, by first telling who you are. Backstories. Fun content that people like to receive. This way you build a relationship with your fan so that they want to make more and more ‘effort’ for you, including visiting a performance. You make them ‘warm’ before you want anything from them. So don’t immediately ask if they want to buy something from you or come to a performance, first of all, a lot!
2. Specific target group
As soon as you start emailing about performances, make sure you only email the right people about it. Someone in Groningen may not come to a performance in South Limburg. Or it has to be a very special performance, then that may be the case. You have to determine this per performance. Once you’ve determined the “radius” from which your fans would want to come to your gig, you can use a mail client like Mailchimp to make sure that only people within that radius receive the mail, so you don’t “tire” the rest with your mail while they would never come anyway. This way you keep your subscribers ‘fresh’ and they can assume that emails from you always relate to them.
3. Make it something special
Maybe this tip doesn’t apply to every gig, but try to make regular performances a little more special than “just a gig.” Give people a reason to come to this performance as well. So: can you hang a special theme on it? Can you do something special with your set? Do you have something to celebrate? (Your 100th performance, your band’s birthday, or the 5th anniversary of your album?) A special performance also gives a good reason to email about it more often. Split news about the performance, for example, into multiple emails. People often need around 7 ‘touchpoints’ to finally take action (for example, buying tickets or putting them on their agenda). So if you email more often, in combination with social media and possibly posters and flyers, you are more likely to get to the number of ‘touchpoints’ that some people need to make the decision.