Fame House Marketing Stack Spotlight: Email Marketing
In our previous White Paper, Owning Your Audience, Building a Direct-to-Fan Strategy in 2016, we covered the methods in which we both cultivate and monetize our owned audience. As email continues to be a significant sales driver for our clients, offering bespoke email solutions allows us to be flexible platform to platform, while upholding best in class email campaigns. The biggest factors of helping clients find an email service provider (ESP), are traditionally budget and business objectives.
The Build
When building our emails, many of our Marketers are using Brackets as their HTML editor of choice. This gives us more flexibility than building an email directly in a platform’s HTML editor. Brackets allows us to live-preview an email as we build, while saving multiple versions of the HTML to keep tabs on revisions as they occur. From here, it is just a simple copy paste into one of our go-to ESPs below to begin testing.
ExactTarget / Salesforce Marketing Cloud
ExactTarget (Salesforce Marketing Cloud) is our preferred ESP here at Fame House. The feature set is far and away more advanced than other platforms, and allows us to create complex customer journeys, trigger sends, and automate list segmentation that would otherwise be a very time-intensive process. These features are especially useful for an artist with a healthy e-commerce operation. ExactTarget’s advanced feature set isn’t always necessary for an artist’s email program, and the price tag can often be cost prohibitive for smaller artists.
FanBridge
FanBridge is also one of our go-to ESPs, as it is built specifically for content creators. Built-in integrations with SoundCloud and Spotify allow artists to gate content in exchange for a subscription or email address, increasing the value of every single send. There are also out-of-the-box solutions for integrating tour dates, and to geo-target fans for those artists that spend a majority of their time on the road. In terms of pricing, FanBridge is very reasonable, and is based on number of sends per month. See the full feature set here.
MailChimp
Last but certainly not least is MailChimp. This platform is sneaky, in that its simplicity often overshadows how much is actually under the hood. Robust automations, A/B testing, custom forms, and flexible email templates are just a few of the options that make MailChimp a fantastic solution for artists of any size. Though it is helpful, an advanced knowledge of HTML is not necessary here, as the drag and drop editor does all the heavy lifting for you. MailChimp is very easy to scale with a growing fan base, and has a great free tier for artists who are just beginning to build their subscribers. See the full feature set here.
Testing
Once our emails are ready to go, we run it through rigorous testing via Litmus, which ensures that images are optimized, links are accurate, and most importantly, emails are rendering accurately across email clients and devices.
Though these are the three platforms we use most regularly, there a number of platforms that we have encountered, including Aweber, Constant Contact, and many others. Every platform has different nuances and quirks, but building a solid foundation for sends will ensure a high deliverability to your list of subscribers, regardless of platform.
Originally published in March 2017, from the Fame House White Paper, The Fame House Stack. Download the full white paper for free here.
