Some Best Practices and Words of Warning

Just because you have someone’s email address, that doesn’t mean you have permission to send them mass marketing emails or text messages. You have a responsibility to your customers to protect their data and respect their communication preferences.

If you don’t treat your contact database properly, you could create a very negative impression of your brand (think about how you feel when you receive dozens of unsolicited spam emails from a company). Not only that, but your emails might get blocked entirely if you trigger spam filters or people receiving your emails click the ‘This is Spam’ button

Here are some best practices to protecting your reputation online while doing email marketing:

1. Always get permission before including someone in a marketing campaign.
2. Respect your contact’s wishes if they ask to be removed from your database.
3. Don’t buy or sell email databases.
4. Keep your database clean by removing addresses that bounce and incorrect email addresses.

Best Practice

Consider using an email service provider (such as Evently, Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor) to send your marketing emails. Personal mail services such as Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo! will try to prevent spamming by enforcing a limit to the number of recipients on any one message, and the number of emails you can send in a day. Trying to send too many emails will mean your email may not deliver at all (and you won’t even know!) and potential result in your account being suspended or banned.

Before Building Your Database: Allow Customers to Opt-In

Whether you are trying to communicate with current customers or new ones, you’ll need to get your contacts to explicitly opt in to email campaigns. The best way to do this is to create an online form where customers can enter their contact details and sign up to receive communications from you

Step 1: Create an opt-in form

You’ll need a web form where visitors can input their contact details. To create a web form, you’ll need some HTML code that takes information that visitors enter on your website and stores that information in a database.

If you already have a service that helps manage your email marketing, that service may have some tools to generate that HTML code for you – all you’ll need to do is copy and paste it on to your website, blog or Facebook page then you can start collecting data. If you don’t have an email marketing service yet, or if your service doesn’t generate web forms for you, there are a number of free and paid tools available to create web forms. A Google search for ‘free email sign up forms’ should give you a number of options.

Step 2: Publish your opt-in form to the web

You can paste your web form HTML code into any existing web page, blog post or Facebook Page tab but it is helpful to have a dedicated opt-in page where you can direct customers. Your opt-in page should:

1.Make it clear that anyone who fills out the form will receive your emails.

If you are running a competition, or require an email address before visitors can view additional content, be sure to make it clear that visitors will also be added to your marketing database.

2. Have minimal distractions on the page.

Try not to have too much other content on the page – if the aim is to get people to sign up to your newsletter, don’t send visitors to your website homepage which has event details, artist profiles, links and blog content, and a very small sign up box.

Have a unique URL

You’ll want to be able to send visitors directly to your email marketing opt-in page. Be sure you have a unique web address for your opt-in page to make it easy to share and so visitors don’t have to hunt around for your email opt-in form.

You have a couple of options for how to set up an opt-in web page.

• Get a web admin or designer to do it for you. If you have a website administrator, they should be able to help you create a unique page to collect email sign ups.
• Create a page on your website blog. If you have a blog on your website, you might be able to create a sign up page yourself. Simply add a new blog post with your opt-in form HTML code and publish the post.
• Create a tab on your Facebook Page. Your Facebook Page already has default tabs that sit above the timeline, such as photos and events. Some Facebook applications allow you to add custom tabs with your own content – such as your sign up form.

Building Your Database: Invite Current Contacts

The best way to begin building your contact database is to start with the people you already communicate with regularly – whether that’s customers, friends, suppliers or other promoters. Although you can’t simply add these contacts to your mailing list and begin sending them mass mail outs (remember you must receive an explicit opt-in first!) you can email them once inviting them to sign up for your mailing list.

Create an Email Invitation

You have one chance to encourage your contacts to sign up for your mailing list – you certainly don’t want to spam them with numerous reminders to sign up for your list or they won’t feel very comfortable giving you their data! Here are some suggestions for a great invitation email:

• Include the link to your email opt-in page It’s obvious but you don’t want to forget to include the link to where your contacts can actually sign up for your emails!
• Explain why someone should sign up for your emails Whether you’re planning on offering discounts, running competitions, announcing line ups early or sharing photos from your events in your emails, explain why your contacts might want to opt-in.
• Remind them it’s easy to opt out People will be more comfortable signing up for a newsletter if they feel they can change their mind. Make it clear that if they decide to opt out of future email communications, you will respect their decision.
• Explain you will not email them again without their permission Establish yourself as a responsible email marketer by letting your contacts know that you will not send them marketing emails unless they specifically opt in on your sign up page.

Who to Send Your Email Invitation To

1. Your Email Address Book. Your email provider may already be collecting your customer contacts and you might not even know it. Many free email providers, such as Google Mail, Yahoo, Hotmail store the email addresses of your commonly emailed contacts. Click on the ‘Contacts’ link in your email provider to see what is already stored in your address book. Depending on your email system, you may even be able to export these contacts or email them all directly
2. Your Previous Customers. If you’ve required customers to provide an email address when buying tickets or making reservations in the past, you should be sure to include them in your invitation email – you might even consider modifying the invitation to reference the specific even they attended to ensure they see the relevance of signing up for your newsletter and discovering similar events in the future. If you’ve used an online ticket reseller to sell tickets to your events in the past, you may have access to the data that they collected from your customers. Contact your ticket reseller directly to find out if they can provide you with names and email addresses.
3. Your LinkedIn Contacts. Did you know that you can export your LinkedIn contacts and their email addresses? Visit the ‘Contacts’ Tab and you can choose to export your contacts via the link in the bottom right hand corner.
4. Website and Blog Visitors. Do you have a section of your website or blog where people can leave comments? If so, find out if commenters are required to provide their email address before leaving a comment. Common blog services such as Wordpress and Blogger collect commenter’s email addresses and you may be able to include these contacts in your email invitation.

Best Practice

Be sure to review all of your contact lists so that you’re not emailing anyone twice, emailing your competitors or emailing irrelevant contacts.

Building Your Database: Social Media Sign Ups

After you’ve invited your current email contacts to join your mailing list, you can begin to reach out to your social media contacts. Facebook and Twitter in particular are particularly powerful places to connect with fans and encourage them to sign up for your mailing list but any social network provides a platform for you to share the link to your email opt-in page.

In all cases, because your social media contacts have a more casual relationship with your brand, you might want to consider some ways to incentivise your fans and followers to sign up for your newsletter through a competition, give away or special offer.

Converting Your Facebook Fans to Email Subscribers

Facebook fans are great potential email subscribers because they’ve already opted in to receiving your page updates on Facebook and so are clearly engaged with your events and brand. Here are a few ideas to convert that engagement to an email subscription.

• Only tell part of the story on Facebook. Instead of giving away all of the most exciting event details, or showing off all of your photos and videos, in Facebook status updates, consider posting a teaser of your content with a link to a page on your website with your opt-in form and the rest of the content.
• Show off the content your subscribers will see. Your Facebook wall is a great place to give visitors a sneak peek of what you’ll put in your email campaigns. Whether you plan on including interviews with artists, photos from past events or offers and discount codes, you can showcase the benefits of signing up. Be sure to include a link to your email opt-in page!
• Make your fans your marketing team. Think about offering an incentive to your Facebook fans to get them to promote your newsletter for you. For example, you might have a special drinks offer only if you get 25 new newsletter sign ups before the event – with the help of your fans of course!

Converting Your Twitter Fans to Email Subscribers

Your Twitter followers may not be as familiar with your brand and events as your Facebook fans, and may not respond to your Tweets immediately. Fortunately Twitter etiquette allows for you to post similar messages multiple times so you can experiment with posting a link to your email opt-in page a few times a day – just vary your Tweet content slightly. Beyond simply tweeting your email opt-in page link, you can also try:

• Change your Twitter profile to include your email opt-in page. If it’s very important that your Twitter followers find your email opt-in page, be sure to include the link in your brief bio on Twitter so that it’s easily accessible to all followers.
• Run a competition for Twitter followers who sign up to your newsletter. Because your Twitter followers may not know your brand and events as well as your email contacts or Facebook fans, you might need to provide some extra incentive to get them to sign up.
• Use popular Twitter hashtags. Hashtags are simple ways to categorise your Tweets and identify them to general web users. Hashtags like #free #competition and #offer will help your Tweet reach a large audience of people looking for deals while location-based tags like #london will help flag your Tweet for locals.

Some Best Practices for Turning Social Media Contacts in to Email Subscribers

Social media is another channel for promoting your email opt-in form but be sure that your social media content is more than just an advert for your newsletter or tickets. If your Twitter feed is just ticket and newsletter sign up links, followers might assume your email content will be the same. If you include interesting, engaging content on social media, and mix in a few links for tickets and your email opt-in page, fans and followers will assume your email content will be equally engaging.

Building Your Database: Working with Partners and Promoters

Although you may have created a sizable database simply through inviting your current contacts and leveraging your social media channels, you can dramatically increase the size of your database by working with your partners and promoters. While you should never buy a database and begin emailing them without their express permission, you can still work with partners to drive email sign ups in a greater volume than you could generate on your own. Here are a few ideas of how:

Run a joint competition and share the addresses of everyone who enters This is particularly effective if you can run a competition with a media partner, like an event listing website, or a ticket provider but any partner with a larger volume of website traffic is a great option. Offer them some free tickets to your events and let them run the competition – just ensure you can use the emails of everyone who enters. Be sure that people who enter the competition are aware that by entering, they are opting in to future email communications.

Incentivise promoters to include your opt-in link when they use your venue If you have a venue often booked out by promoters, make it a requirement, or offer them a discount to promote your email opt-in page in their own email communications. You can make this easy for them by giving them a standard bit of text they can include in their emails or on their website such as “Want to learn more about the venue where we’re holding this event? Sign up for Your Venue Name’s email newsletter here: http://www.your-email-opt-in-page.com”

Include your email opt-in link in online event listings Although some event listing sites will remove links in the body of your event description, many will allow you to include informational links. Consider adding a link to your email opt-in page in your event description, along with a one sentence description of the benefits of signing up for your email marketing.

Top Tip: Do a search of event listing websites offering competitions in your area and approach them directly to see if they’d be interested in running a competition for your event.

Building Your Database: During Your Events

It makes sense to use online channels to collect email address for online marketing – but it’s important not to forget to use your event itself as a way to collect new addresses for your contact database. Here are a few suggestions for ways you can collect email addresses from attendees at your event:

Business card prize draw. It’s too difficult to try to get people to write down their email addresses – especially if it’s dark or they have bad handwriting! Instead, get people to add their business card to a prize draw bowl. You should let attendees know in advance that you will be running a competition and what the prize will be to ensure that attendees bring their business card with them. You can then copy their email addresses from the cards into your email database. Again, it’s important you make it clear that participants will receive marketing material from you after the event.

Text-in mobile campaign. Put up fliers at the bar for a text-in campaign where if someone texts into a certain number, they will get a code for discount drinks or food. You can either send them a mobile flyer with your email sign up form, or ask them to text in with their email address. This particular technique has the added bonus of giving you customer’s mobile numbers as well as their email. There are a number of 3rd party services, including Evently, that allow you to set up text-in short codes, but if you want to test this kind of promotion, you can buy a cheap Pay-As-You-Go phone and ask customers to text their email address to that phone’s number to enter the campaign!

Hand out your own business cards or flyers with your email opt-in page link. As guests leave your event, give them a card or flyer with your email opt-in link prominently on the page. This can have very similar content to your email invitation, outlining the benefits of signing up for future email marketing. If your card or flyer has a ticket or drinks offer for your next event, it will double as a way to build your database and drum up publicity for your next event!