While social media can play an important part in your music marketing strategy, emails are a great way to target your message, provide a specific call to action, and promote yourself to industry professionals. Here are five things you can work on to start writing better emails.
Emails are an important part of many traditional and online music marketing strategies. If you want responses from the people you’re trying to contact, it’s important to send emails that your recipients can read and respond to quickly. Unfortunately, a lot of the emails sent by musicians are difficult to read and sometimes hard to understand. Below are five points to consider so you can write better emails, get more responses, and increase your mailing list click-through rate.
1. Keep it short
Many people are extremely limited on time and receive hundreds of emails every day. Because of this, they often ignore emails that are poorly written or too long. Trouble is, musicians often compose emails as one long paragraph packed with unimportant information, which makes it easy to miss important points.
Writing short emails is more time consuming for you – it takes effort to compose even simple thoughts into few words. However, when emails are too long, you aren’t being respectful of the recipient’s time – you’re valuing your time over theirs.
Here are some quick ways you can shorten your emails:
- Hyperlink text instead of including full URL’s
- Limit background information
- Don’t add fluff
The average person’s attention span is just eight seconds. Just as tweets are limited to 140 characters, try to keep emails under five sentences.
2. Space your information out
Most people don’t read entire paragraphs. Instead, they scan and pick out important points. Because of this, it’s important to craft your emails so that they’re easy to skim. Here’s how:
- Write short, one to two sentence paragraphs
- Increase readability with white space
- Use bulleted or numbered lists
If your emails are easy to read, it’s much more likely you’ll get your point across quickly and encourage a response.
3. Get to the point
Many emails include long, drawn out introductions and unnecessary buzzwords that add nothing to the message. Your recipient should know what you want within the first two or three sentences.
Here’s how I used to write my intros:
Hi [Name],
My name is Nicholas Rubright, and I’m the founder and CEO of Dozmia, a music streaming service available on iOS. We provide music recommendations to our app’s users based on what they have in their iTunes library.
Recently, I changed it to this:
Hi [Name],
I’m Nick, founder of Dozmia.
By hyperlinking Dozmia, I avoid cluttering the message with useless background information that most people won’t care about and make it easy for them to learn more by including a link. Unless you’re trying to sell your story as a musician, just provide a link to your website for your recipients to read more about you. In fact, provide links for anything that isn’t related to the main topic of your email.
4. Reread before sending
When I was in college starting Dozmia, I sent an email to a record label that didn’t only get the person’s name wrong, but also misspelled the record label’s name. The label executive replied with “Good job. You managed to get my name and the label’s name wrong.”
Ouch.
Learn from my mistake – reread your emails before sending them. Then do it again. When you’re sending a large number of emails every day, it’s easy to make simple (and potentially costly) mistakes.
5. Write compelling subject lines
If your emails don’t get clicked, they don’t get read, and you get no replies. It’s important to write subject lines that prompt the receiver to open the email.
Here are some things to keep in mind when constructing subject lines for your emails:
- Keep it short (like your email)
- Include the recipient’s name, if possible.
- Hint at what’s inside
- DON’T USE ALL CAPS or overuse exclamation points!!!!!
Great subject lines get your email opened. This, combined with an email that’s composed in an easy-to-read way, will result in a higher number of responses than long, drawn-out emails with self-serving, vague subject lines.
Nicholas Rubright is the founder and editor of Dozmia – a blog dedicated to helping musicians with everything — from finding band members to gear choices to growing a fanbase.
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I feel so much smarter now. I like the trend that content is becoming more and more important.