Thursday, January 21, 2010

Growing the Band's Email list - And What To Do With It!

Hi everyone! Wow, what a great weekend Demimonde Slumber Party had! Our out-of-town bassist Tim Romain was here, and we worked on some video in preparation for our upcoming record release! More on that very soon!

This week, I'm going to address two chapters of Ariel's book, Chapters 5 and 6. They are both related, and involve a band's email list. Chapter 5 has suggestions for how to use this list. One of these is surveying your fans as to what they might want from you (such as playing a house concert or selling them official Demimonde Slumber Party pajamas for their next slumber party). She suggests waiting until your list has 1000 members to begin surveying them. Well, since our list is not quite 1000 strong yet, I was eager to also read through the next chapter, which is about growing your email list.

Another topic she addresses in Chapter 5 is the band newsletter. She stresses the importance of staying connected with your fans, and mind you, she isn't suggesting emailing people very often, just once or twice a month. We haven't been emailing our fans very frequently, so starting now, we will begin sending out a newsletter once a month!

And why haven't we been emailing our fans very often? Partly because we haven't been gigging in awhile. And that is because, after our last local bassist moved away, we decided to record a new CD before looking for local bassists again. Luckily for us, we still have our out-of-town bassist, and so we recorded our new CD with him.

Now that the CD is finished, and soon to be released, it is time for the band to rouse completely from its 'Slumber' and start being active again - getting some new local bassists (yeah, I won't settle for less than two this time :-)), gigging, and communicating more consistently with our email list!

As for her suggestions for growing our email list... One that I've been meaning to get to anyway is personally inviting each of our MySpace friends to join our list. That will be my next task here - wish me luck!

- Melissa

p.s. - How can you join our awesome list? Go to our website - or the right hand column of this blog - and click on the big green button that says "free downloads"! And you'll get free songs for joining our list!!!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Good for you!! I learned the hard way that it's better to send newsletters - whether or not you have a gig coming up.

Folks like to hear about what you're up to between gigs too, otherwise you run the risk of only reaching out to them when you want something.

Share your stories, funny experiences, whatever. Give them something entertaining to read, and they'll even forward it to their friends.

Keep up the great work!

Carla