Five Ways to Improve Your Promos — Based on Recipient Feedback
Discover your recipients’ major pain points and simple instructions for solving them.
We’ve just spoken to around 1500 FATdrop recipients about their experience of receiving promos. The feedback was illuminating, and a handful of issues came up time and time again.
Here are their top five pain points and simple instructions for solving them.
1. Make your promo sends more targeted
The problem: Recipients are sent promos of the wrong genre or outside of their taste bracket. This leads them to ignore promos or unsubscribe from senders.
The solution: Create different lists or tags for each of the different styles or genres you send. Only add recipients into each list or tag if you know that’s the sort of thing they play or would like to receive. Encourage recipients to respond to promos and let you know if it’s the wrong style/genre. Make sure you maintain your lists & tags and then when you send a promo, use the filters to only send it to the right people.
2. Include more/better information in the promo text
The problem: People like to have as much information as possible about the release, especially if they work in the press. Many complained about the promo texts being long but lacking substance.
The solution: Include more information about the artist in the promo text (e.g. a short bio and links to their social media pages). Radio DJs are more likely to include your music on their shows when they also have something to say about the artist, the label or the release. Make it easy for them! When sending to press, include press packs, artist photos and the hi-res artwork in the misc files. If there are additional credits (e.g. recording artists, graphic designers, mix/mastering engineers), include these too.
3. Make sure to send the promo well in advance
The problem: Many people complained about receiving the promo after release date, or not far enough in advance of the release date.
The solution: When sending to blogs & online press, make sure to send at least four weeks in advance of the release date in order to give them enough time to properly review and plan their articles. For print press, they may even need the promo six to eight weeks before release date. Many DJs or radio hosts said they are much more likely to include the tracks in their sets while the music is still unreleased, so they would prefer to have it at least a week or two before the release date.
4. Fill out the metadata properly
The problem: Many promos don’t have the metadata filled out properly, either with mistakes or with empty fields. Many files don’t have the artwork embedded.
The solution: After uploading tracks, fill out all of the metadata — including fields like ‘label’ and ‘year’. Make sure to embed the artwork too (if you’re in the campaign creator, you can do this by clicking the grey square in the bottom left of the metadata section). Double check there aren’t any mistakes (one common one was including the artist name in the track title field).
You can also change the filename in this section, so remember to remove things like MSTR or FINAL from the filename and just include the artist & track title (and additionally the track number & label if you want).
5. Enable lossless downloads
The problem: Lots of people prefer to download in one of the lossless formats (WAV, FLAC or AIFF), but aren’t always given this option. Some even said that they wouldn’t play or review any music that was sent as MP3 only.
The solution: Make sure you upload a lossless file (e.g. WAV) when creating a campaign, and then ensure the download quality is set to lossless. We’ll let your recipients choose which format they want to download in (out of WAV, FLAC, AIFF and 320kbps MP3), and do all of the converting automatically.
Furthermore, sending in lossless doesn’t use up any additional bandwidth compared to 320kbps MP3, so will never cost you extra.
Aside from those five, here are a few more common recipient requests:
- Fill out the campaign release info properly, so that the downloaded folder is named correctly, and the promo name appears correctly in the recipient dashboard.
- Include the release date in promo texts.
- Include extended mixes for club DJs and short edits for radio contacts.
A rule of thumb: the more you segment your audience and tailor promos, the happier and more engaged your recipients will be, and the better your chances of success.
