Your email list is one of your most valuable assets when it comes to marketing your music. So it’s important to get email marketing right and keep your fans engaged.

If you go months without sending anything to your email subscribers, they’ll soon forget who you are. When you finally send them something, they’ll then unsubscribe since they may not remember ever signing up.

Because of this, in order to maintain a top-of-mind position among your email subscribers, it’s important to engage them often.

So, how do you keep your email subscribers engaged without spamming them?

Here are 5 ideas you can make use of.

1. Release Music or Videos More Frequently

It’s likely that your fans signed up for your email list to hear about new music releases. Why make them wait?

When making full-length albums, artists often only have time for maybeone release every year – and that’s if they’re not on tour.

Depending on a number of factors, like your genre and audience, more frequent releases of singles might be a better alternative to the more traditional EP and album method of releasing music.

If you want to release music more frequently, then the recording costs can get expensive – especially if you need to spend time in the studio. Because of this, it might be a good idea to invest in some recording software, and learn how to efficiently record your music.

If you aren’t an expert mixing and mastering engineer, you can outsource these tasks to a service that does online mixing and mastering after tracking your instruments and vocals at home.

If you release a song every week, every 2 weeks, or every month, your email list subscribers will get used to it and eagerly anticipate your emails.

Use these email templates to promote your music:

2. Tour Regularly

If you want to stick to the traditional release structure of EPs and albums, touring more frequently would be a great way to keep your email subscribers engaged.

While it’s harder to maintain a steady tour pattern than it is to release music on a regular basis, maintaining some level of consistency in your tour schedule can give your email list subscribers something to look forward to – assuming they’re in a city you can play a show in.

The downside to touring too often is that it can be tough on your band members. It can also lead to decreased demand for your shows, and will likely result in the need for you to spend more time practicing your instrument.

So if you choose to tour more often as a way to keep your email subscribers engaged, make sure you tour effectively.

3. Make Sure Your Emails Match Your Opt-in form

When creating your opt-in form, it’s common practice to convince people to subscribe by offering something in return – like a free download of a song.

This is great! But in addition to using this as your call to action, you want to make it clear that they’ll also receive updates on music releases, merchandise promotions, tour dates, and anything else you plan on sending them.

If you start sending them things that they didn’t sign up for, it’s more likely that they’ll view this material as spam, and will unsubscribe. Make what you plan on sending out very clear from the beginning.

By setting clear expectations early on, your subscribers will be more willing to engage with your promotional emails.

4. Send Your Email Subscribers Playlist Updates

Playlists are the new radio. And on music streaming services like Spotify, you have the power to create and promote your own playlist, and maintaining a solid playlist within your genre can be a great way to keep your email subscribers engaged.

Simply create a playlist on the streaming service of your choice, and update it at whatever frequency you find necessary to keep your fans engaged. This might be every week, every 2 weeks, or every month. It depends on your specific fanbase.

While Spotify is popular among musicians, keep in mind that not everyone uses Spotify. (Apple Music reportedly has more subscribers than Spotify in the United States) So it might be a good idea to create the playlist on a streaming platform that doesn’t require signup – like SoundCloud or YouTube – to give your subscribers an alternate option to stream it. If a subscriber, doesn’t use Spotify, and you continue to send them Spotify related emails, your emails will quickly become irrelevant to them and they’ll unsubscribe.

You can also re-create the playlist on multiple streaming services so your fans can choose where to listen.

Each time you update the playlist, send a link to it to your email subscribers. After all, they did subscribe to your email list because they want to hear about new music, right?

5. Allow Responses, but Don’t Encourage Them

Two-way communication is a powerful relationship building tool, so letting your email subscribers respond to your emails can build a strong connection between you and your fans – especially if you actually get back to them.

The reason you don’t want to encourage this, however, is because the bigger you get, the harder this will be to manage.

If you’re getting 1 or 2 emails a day from fans, it’s easy to keep them happy by responding. But once you start getting hundreds of emails each day, responding will become impossible.

Because of this, while you should allow for replies and do your best to communicate directly with your fans, it’s important to reduce the number of incoming emails if it’s likely to become a problem.

Here’s are some ways you can do that:

• Include an FAQ page on your website for questions about merch orders and music downloads.
• Try and have them interact with you on social media instead to increase engagement on your pages. This way, other fans can see the interaction and your posts will have more reach.
• Try and write emails that don’t stimulate questions. If you send out a merch offer, for example, make it very simple.

Conclusion – Keep Your Email Subscribers Engaged

Keeping your email list engaged is key to being able to sell to them. However, if they only get sales-based emails from you, they won’t see much value in your emails and may view them as spam. Do your best to maintain value in your email exchanges with your subscribers, and you’ll be able to maintain high levels of engagement, which will ultimately lead to more sales of music, merchandise, and event tickets.

If you need more email tips, here’s what I recommend:

• Grow your email list using these 10 methods
• Try out this landing page strategy to get email signups
• Start with these free email templates to get some ideas
• Use these 10 points to refine and perfect your email writing

Guest post by Nicholas Rubright