Seth Werkheiser has an almost evangelical faith in the power of email marketing.
“When you post on social media, by the afternoon, that tweet or post is gone,” he reasons. “Whereas with an email, that email sticks around in a person's inbox and can be opened two days, three days later. And people still buy from that newsletter, or that email that you sent three days ago. Whereas social media, who sees that thing from three days ago?”
With a previous stint overseeing the D2C email operations for Death Row Records (before it was sold to Snoop Dogg), Werkheiser currently manages the email marketing operations in a freelance capacity for online merch store MNRK Heavy. He is also the founder of Social Media Escape Club, an online resource for those looking to break free of social media as a promotion and marketing tool. Which is where email marketing comes in.
Here, Werkheiser outlines his thoughts on subject lines, incorporating calls to action in emails, the frequency you should send emails, and much more…
When a fan signs up to an artist's or event's email database, how important is the welcome email?
The welcome email is a great way to get a person engaged with receiving emails from you whether by asking a question, or having them reply to something like, “Hey, tell us about this”, or, “Click this to update your preferences.” Because maybe you only captured their email at first.
To ask that follow-up question, click this link – anything to kind of show the magical email servers in the world that this isn't spam – is huge. That shows the Google servers, Outlook servers that this is a legit email, so we’d better not dump this in a spam folder.
Once you've got people on the database, how often is too often to engage with them?
It depends on the size and the scope of what you're doing.
If you're a record label, if you're a store, and you segment right, you can send multiple emails per week, because you're not usually hitting all the same people all the time.
If it's an artist, I think once a week is amazing for people who signed up – they want to know what the band is up to.
Artists, creative people have no problem updating social media 19 times a week. So send an email once a week. If you only send an email once a month, there's only 12 opportunities to learn something [about your audience] throughout the year. With the data you collect from sending an email once a week, if you have 50-plus data points throughout a whole year, you're going to learn what your audience is comfortable with. Whether it's subject lines, sending emails at midnight, maybe it's Wednesdays. Having weekly emails go out and learning that is huge.
You mentioned subject lines – are there any key fundamentals with subject lines that people should get right?
It depends on who you are. Can you get cute with it? Would your audience roll their eyes and be upset at that? So I think it really depends on what your audience might be comfortable with.
I've seen something fun where it was just like the number of the email that you've sent – and I've used this: here's email 080, this is our 80th email, and just lead with that. And then it's the subject line.
So it's just something familiar that shows up in someone's inbox that differentiates your email from everybody else's.
I think playing around with emojis is another thing that you can do. Or maybe it's text characters. Maybe it's a couple of stars or whatever, but not too many. Because you don't want to get too spammy, that might trip off some spam detectors.
But if you're [after] the tried and true, keep it simple. But also understand that everyone else in your inbox is keeping it simple.
So you just need to try and experiment and do a little something to stand out. Because you're blending in with everyone's bank emails and Amazon and Netflix updates. You’ve just got to try something to stand out and differentiate yourself.
"You're blending in with everyone's bank emails and Amazon and Netflix updates. You’ve just got to try something to stand out and differentiate yourself."
How do you strike a balance between providing useful information in an email and making an ask?
I've seen Prosthetic Records do this, where they included a handful of live photos of the band that they were promoting for tour, and a little bit of text. And of course, then the tour dates below.
We all love looking at band photos, the live action photos. So throwing that into a newsletter, and a bit of context around it. I love tour posters, they're wonderful, and they look great on walls. But I think leading with the tour poster, and then a ‘buy’ button…I don't think any of us really got into and sold our souls for music over a tour poster. I think it's that live show element.
As long as you can throw in the photo, the photography, the art, the joy, the action of the live show, then it doesn't feel so call-to-action at the bottom.
I've done that with clients where it was a pre-order. And we had the album art, and then a paragraph or two about the album art and the artists who made it, and this, that and the other.
By the time you got to the bottom, of course there was a pre-order button. But it wasn't the big screaming thing. If you didn't want to click on it, fine. We'll send another email in two weeks or whatever. And maybe you'll click on that one.
At the end of the day, provide value. Provide something that's not just asking for a sale. Provide that context, provide the story, give a bit of what is trying to be sold here, rather than just leading with the sale.
In the past you’ve celebrated an email by a band called Teenage Wrist, and how it was almost like a 300-word diary entry before they even got to the fact that they were going on tour…
Right. And what was amazing about that email too, it wasn't just, here's the button at the bottom for you to click on. They linked every single tour date. They made it as easy as possible for the end user to click. I'm in this city, I'm going to click on this link to buy tickets to this venue, rather than [having to] click the button at the bottom to go to this site.
Every time you make a user click, they're going to drop off. I mean, that's internet 101. So if you can link directly to the venue or the date that's most relevant to someone, that's huge.
Is there such a thing as a right way and a wrong way to do a newsletter?
I think the wrong way is to copy what someone else is doing at a level that you're not at and expect great results. There's a lot of artists out there that can get away with doing, ‘Here's a tour poster, buy tickets.’ They can do that, because they've earned it, they've been around for a decade, they have tens of thousands [of fans].
As a smaller artist, to copy exactly what they're doing – here's the poster, I hope everyone clicks – I don't think that can be as impactful. I think you need to do what we were just talking about – Teenage Wrist put heart into it, put art into it. Put as much art into the messaging and the email as you do the album art, as you do with your social feed.
If you're going a little bit above and beyond what everybody else is doing, in whatever you're doing, I think that can go a long way.
"The wrong way [to do a newsletter] is to copy what someone else is doing at a level that you're not at and expect great results."
How small a database is too small to even bother with email marketing?
I think if you have 10 people on your email list, you need to send an email every week, because those 10 people showed up and said, 'Yes, I want to hear from you.'
Ten people can turn into 20 can turn into 100. Make your mistakes in front of 10 people. Mistakes happen in these emails. There's a wrong link. Do it in front of 10 people instead of 10,000. You’ve got to learn how to write and communicate. It's a lot cheaper to make mistakes in front of 10 people than 100.
You’ve mentioned a couple of times that people have signed up because they want to hear from you. Do you see artists make the mistake of not actually fulfilling that wish?
Absolutely. I won't name names, but I saw one recently that sent a big tour announcement. And it was the standard, here's the tour poster, here's the button. Fine. They can do that.
But I went to their socials, and from the time that they sent that email they had posted on socials 20 times. And not just tour posters, but live action. Here's us with a whole bunch of people. Here's us with our crew.
People can think that the email is only for when you have this big thing to sell. And to that I say, if it's important enough to put on social media, which is just saying it's important enough to tell your fans on that medium, why isn't it as important to tell your fans in another medium such as email?
In the past you’ve questioned why people include links to their social media in their emails, reasoning why send people somewhere where they may not be able to see everything...
Yeah, I made the statement: stop sending your fans to platforms where you can't reach them. I see businesses, bands be like, make sure you follow us on this thing, where when we post something, you won't be able to see it. Because the algorithm decides you're not worthy, and we have to spend money to reach you.
To have links in your email that go out to the social media platforms I think is counterproductive. Because every click in an email is so precious. And there's not that many clicks to go around – you should only really have one or two big calls to action.
So if someone is at the bottom of your email and then they click Instagram, and it goes off to Instagram, where they're going to see 12% of your posts, what's the use?
Get them to click to your website, where you have amazing, compelling content to keep them there. Keep them in your ecosystem, rather than sending them to Zuckerberg or to Musk or to whoever else for them to monetize.
I get it, building social media profiles looks good to outlets, it looks good to higher ups. Many powers that be love to see those big social media numbers.
But at the end of the day, it's just gonna get harder to reach your social media followers in 2024. They're not going to make it any easier. If we're taking the time and spending resources to send an email once a week or once a month, we might as well keep [fans] engaged in that platform where we can best reach them.
Visit Social Media Escape Club here. Follow Seth on LinkedIn here.
