This post is in response to the questions I’ve been getting about a recent tutorial on following up with your fans.
In that post I recommended that you connect with your fans each day, or as often as possible with maybe a few short gaps here and there.
This freaked a lot of people out and there were cries of “rubbish” and “they will unsubscribe” from a few.
So in this post I want to introduce you to an idea, that will help you get over this fear of following up, and help you sell 10X more music without even one email that says:
“Buy in the next 30 seconds, or the kitten GETS IT”
Introducing Check Move Theory…
Basically a Check Move is any contact you have with your fans from the moment that they first hear about you. The more Check Moves you make the more chance that fans will make positive action toward your career like buying a CD, passing on your music to a friend or coming to a show.
This gives you a lot of freedom as a musician because you don’t have to become a master salesman; you just need to come up with quality Check Moves that engage and entertain your fans each and every day.
That is why I like the daily update email to let your fans know about a new blog post, or something cool you have found.
For a simple example of this let’s look at two bands with really boring names…
Band A – has a email list sign up box on their website, and once a new fan puts their email address in that box Band A follow up once a month with a newsletter full of 25 confusing links to loads of random shit! Hardly any of them get clicked at all.
Band A have sold 14 albums in two years, and the singers mother bought 2 copies.
Band B – has a pop over that shows up one time when new fans reach the home page of their site, with a really cool free music and video offer. They have been tracking how many people sign up, and their visitor-to-fan conversion is 25%.
Once Band B have the email they start to work on their Check Moves.
They have already set up 150 messages that will go out over the course of a year, delivering great content to the fans. They tweet twice a day and make daily updates on their Facebook page.
Who do you think is going to have the best chance of motivating the fans to take action?
The law of averages tells us that the band who sent out 150 messages will sell far more than the band that sent 1 per month. You might think that the first band get a lot of unsubscribes which is true, but I would suggest this is the process of pruning your list to just your hardcore fans.
Band B win by default…
I have to say at this point that if you try and send out junk to your fans just to make a Check Move then it’s just turns into spam.
Something myself and a lot of other music marketers have found is that it can take 7 messages on average to get under the fans skin and move them to action.
So it’s my personal belief that you should get to this number as fast as possible and not wait 7 months. (But I know that this will piss off a lot of people.)
All I can do is quote John Oszajca from Music Marketing Manifesto who I remember saying…
“This is the Music Business, not the Music Charity!”
It’s works best if you can make this follow up a great soap opera with cliffhangers, tears, excitement and anything else that will hook the fans in.
For ideas on engaging stories check out popular TV shows like Heroes and Lost to see how they get people watching every week. Those guys are the masters of fan building!
Ideas for Check Moves
- New shows
- Blog posts
- Tweets
- Facebook wall posts
- Follow up emails
- New merch
- Reviews
- Interviews
- Amusing content about your band members
- Podcasts
- Live videos
I did not invent Check Move theory, but I want to try and help music marketeers to take on the theory, and start to engage with the fans more regularly.
A clever old marketer once said “The more you tell the more you sell” and I think that music marketers can update that to…
The more you sing, the more you win!
Don’t be afraid to connect with your fans, and if a few of them unsubscribe don’t worry this is totally natural, and you should not take it personal.
Please feel free to call me a total idiot in the comments below.
I look forward to sparring with you ;p
- Chris
Watch the Video Podcast version of this below:
Tags: Sell Music, sell your music
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