Social media is great for musicians – it gives you the ability to interact with your fans and promote your music to a well-targeted audience.

Even with all of the benefits, social media sites come and go. However, one thing seems to remain constant – email.

This is why the most important asset you’ll ever have is your email list.  Growing an email list is a great way to increase sales of your music and merchandise, and allows you an avenue of direct communication with your fans. (If you want ideas for what to send to your email list, check out these 10 free templates.)

Because of this, if you have even a $5 per day marketing budget, you should spend some of it on building your email list. In this post, I’m going to show you how you can do this with Facebook ads.

Use Facebook Ads as a Part of a Bigger Strategy

Keep in mind that Facebook ads should not be the entirety of your strategy to grow your email list. Instead, it should be one aspect of a larger music promotion strategy. So maybe you use Facebook ads to get in front of new fans, but you also have an email form on your Facebook artist page as well as your website where you offer things like free music, discounted merch, and early access in exchange for an email address.

The Facebook ads will be targeting people who may have never heard of you before but are inclined to like your music based on their interests. Having forms on your website will target current fans who already know about your music and want to go deeper. Both are necessary for an effective email strategy.

About Facebook Lead Ads

In the world of music marketing, a lead is – in simple terms – someone who has shown enough interest in your music that they’ve shared their contact information with you.

Because of this, Facebook has built a type of advertisement that lets you easily collect information like email addresses and phone numbers (with a user’s consent) through their ad platform – they call them Lead Ads.

These ads can be a great way to build your email list with your Facebook advertising budget.

Targeting

When targeting Facebook users for any ad campaign, you should aim to reach people who are interested in music similar to yours.

To do this, you need to find out what your current fans listen to.  One easy way to figure this out is by looking at your “related artists” page on streaming services like Spotify, and by seeing what kind of playlists people are placing you into. You could also post a simple message on Facebook asking your fans to comment their favorite bands and musicians. 

When targeting your ads on Facebook, it’s a good idea to have at least 2 ads running at a time, each with a different audience.  So if you’re targeting punk music fans, you might have one ad aimed at Blink-182 fans, and another targeting Green Day fans.

After each of these ads run for a few days, continue with the one that’s performing best, and replace the one that’s performing worse with a different targeting set.  This process is known as A/B testing and can help you make the most of your online ad budget. No sense paying for an ad that’s not working for you, right?

Formatting Your Ad

Another thing you want to test with your ad is the format.  With Facebook Lead Ads, you can use images or videos and have a number of choices for a call to action.

As mentioned above with targeting, you also want to A/B test your format and call to action.  

Try combining a music video ad with an option for viewers to download the song for free in exchange for their email address, or if you’re promoting your email list to current fans, an image announcing that mailing list subscribers have a chance to win a signed copy of your upcoming album might work.

Test multiple combinations of ad formats and value propositions to see what converts best.

What Fields to Use

When creating a Facebook lead ad with the intent to collect email list subscribers, it’s obvious that you want to include a form where people can enter their email, but what other information do you need?

Too many form fields can make people wary of signing up, so it’s important to limit the fields to only what’s necessary.

Here are some fields to consider:

• Name – Personalizing your emails by using a subscriber’s name can increase open and click thru rates. You probably only need the first name.
• Zip code or City, State/Province, and Country – This can be helpful when planning tour dates.  Rather than blasting your entire tour schedule to your email list, you can personalize it to them by including only the tour dates closest to them within the email with a link to purchase tickets.  Since zip codes don’t exist everywhere, you may want to use city, state/province, and country instead of zip code if you’re an international artist.
• Address – If you plan to host giveaways for your mailing list subscribers or send them anything physical, ask for their address. If not, stay away from this. Remember, simpler is better. 

Remember, paid advertising should only be a small part of your overall music promotion strategy. If you want more ideas for how to promote your music, we recommend the Musician Power Tools course. You’ll go step-by-step through setting up your social media pages, your website, and your email list (and how to turn them into conversion machines that will help you develop superfans who will support your career).