Mailchimp is the new Facebook

This is not another ‘Facebook is dead’ article.

Facebook isn’t dead – it’s just shifted from a traditional social media platform to a tremendously powerful digital marketing tool. It’s changed – I believe for the better – but it’s certainly not dead.

If you miss the old Kanye Facebook, however, I have great news for you: your MailChimp account is exactly what you miss about Facebook, only much better.

Right now, most bands are sending out a newsletter once a month at most, and they look more or less like press releases asking their fans to buy something.

But artists need to stop thinking of their newsletter like a spam blast, and start treating it like a social media account. That means, artist managers and record labels, keep your hands off. And to artists: start taking control of your subscribers!

Think about it like this.

Most people miss Facebook for the organic reach it once gave them, but they love it for its flexibility in the content you can share and the mass of data it gives you. The social media platforms that give you the most organic reach, like Twitter and Instagram, are generally less flexible and share less data.

So, has the penny dropped yet?

Your newsletter gives you 100% organic reach, and gives you far richer data than Facebook does. It’s what you miss about Facebook, only better.

How to use Mailchimp for artists

Bands need to start sending out more frequent newsletter blasts, but also make them more personal and less ‘press release-y’ – just like their social media accounts.

It’s a strategy that adds real equity into your artist business. Not only will you reach who you want, when you want, but you’ll also start to collate real, meaningful data about each and every fan. Who they are, what they clicked, what they opened, and how often etc.

You can also segment your fans by territory, the super fans, the less engaged fans, and the list goes on.

Done right, this will fast-track both your brand development, as you learn what your audience actually cares about, and your revenue, as you gain more clarity over your conversion metrics on sales for each blast.

There are also two added bonuses to treating your newsletter like a social media account, and focusing on it over traditional socials:

1. You own your fan data, and email isn’t going anywhere. So, when social media platforms come and go, you don’t have to stress about falling out of touch with your fans.This is why at Seventh Street Media we work on growing our newsletters every day; it’s far more important to us (and our advertisers) than our social accounts. This year alone we went from 30,000 subscribers across our titles to 140,000 – that’s real equity that no one social media giant can control. And we email our audience every day!
2. You can use these emails to find fans on your socials. Run look-alike marketing campaigns across all your social accounts when you have something to sell (as we do with our clients’ products), and you’ll increase your conversions dramatically, making that elusive revenue easier to come by.

I did this a lot when I managed bands, and still do with my artist Simone Giertz, who just launched a Kickstarter project and raised over $500,000 in just 1 week.

Is your newsletter an afterthought? It’s time to change that.

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.