Wow, I have a lot of work getting my friend propelled into the top f the market, where he belongs. When he plays his saxophone, close your eyes and you are in heaven on earth; his name is Jocelyn Menard, originally from the outskirts of Montreal Canada.

Hi Mihai,

Thanks for these comments! I’m actually working on a whole article about how to win with your mailing list. Once it’s finished, I’ll post a link to the article here. In the meantime, a few quick points:

– Sure, mailouts are not the answer – on their own – to booking gigs and connecting with people. I’m sure a lot of promoters are noticing (unsolicited) mailouts and deleting immediately. It also shows a slight laziness; if someone is that important to you, you should take the time to reach out personally.

As an agent, I find that mailouts are good for broadcasting news and updates, if they are then followed up with personal emails (possibly decided by who opens/clicks the initial contact).

As an artist, connecting with fans by Mailchimp (or similar) is a lot more acceptable way to update a large group of people without seeming rude. Tools like auto-inserting first names (I will go through that in the article) also help a lot and allow you to be personable with a large amount of people.

In response to your numbered points:

1. If, by ‘deliverability’ you mean ‘open rates,’ then this is something that can be improved by making sure that the content of the email is really what people want, so that they get into the habit of opening. If you blast upcoming dates for countries where the recipients are not based, for example, they will remember the mails as less useful.

2. Signup forms: for sure, it’s not easy to get someone’s email address these days. It’s a way to reach them at any point of any day and, quite rightly, people are more and more careful of who they give it to. If your goal is to build an mailing list, you need to be using strong call-to-actions (CTAs) on your Facebook/website and giving people a good incentive to sign up. I currently have 913 people who have signed up to the Jazzfuel mailing list via the website so it is certainly possible. I’ll go into more details in the article.

3. Yes, Mailchimp reports cannot be 100% accurate. I find it’s good enough to give you an impression – over weeks and months – of how you are doing though.

4. I don’t use promotion tabs on my gmail so I’m not sure about this. Again, though, if people are excited to receive your mails, they will generally look out for it and see it.

5. Ditto with Spam, people need to help by reading and marking it as not-spam. The better quality your list is though (i.e. no out of date emails or people who don’t want to be on there), the less chance there is of you being marked spam. There are a few other technical things I will go into in the article too.

Cheers!

Matt

Although I use Mailchimp for a few years, there are some “obstacles” which I discovered in time:

1. Deliverability is quite low, usually between 20-30%. Mailchimp says that this is normal, and there are many reasons for this (the biggest issue is that email clients are against unwanted mail, often called “spam”). I think that we should NOT use Mailchimp when reaching out to promoters in order to get gigs. Individual mails are much more effective in this case.

2. Subscriptions from forms (website or Facebook) are very low. Our band had under 10 since we have the signup forms. I guess this is because it is getting old fashioned to sign up for a mailing list, people are lazy and busy. The most effective way to get them signed up, in my experience, is by kindly asking for their email in Facebook message, AND telling them that they will be on their mailing list. This way we do it for them, and they skip the confirmation email.

3. Mailchimp reports are not 100% accurate. Even our band is Romanian, I get a lot of opens in the US, and this on my list of Romanian contacts. I think this is related to the browser language, as many people from Romania use the English version of the browser. Also many people did not click the SHOW IMAGES button, so the tracking for the report does not even happen.

4. Gmail puts messages from mailing lists in the Promotions tab. There are reasons for this too, but I get this told a lot, and I think this is the #1 reason why people do not see our emails.

5. I also get many reports that our mails get into the spam folder. Every time I get a report, I ask people to click the NOT SPAM button, I read that this helps.

However, I still think that Mailchimp is still a great platform and that it can be very useful to musicians! It is also free for the first 2000 contacts, which is more than enough for most jazz musicians.

What I usually do, I often manually add emails I find online (contact emails for festivals, agents, contests, promoters, newspapers, friends, and (most important!) emails from Bandcamp sales) without asking them. Although this might be a bit abusive, unsubscribes have been quite low.

Although some people just click on the email and delete it, they most probably find out about your album release or new gig by simply reading the subject, which can be great word of mouth!

Welcome – feel free to get in touch if you have any questions! Matt