Neil Mason, drummer with Nashville country-blues-rock trio The Cadillac Three, was getting frustrated. Every year he and his band would spend months on the road playing to thousands of fans, but after each show they’d leave town not knowing exactly who'd bought tickets, and how to directly stay in touch with them.
“It drives me absolutely crazy that I spend hundreds of days a year traveling and then I go into these rooms, and I see hundreds or thousands of people and then I leave and I don't know who any of them are,” he tells Audience Republic. “It just absolutely drives me nuts."
As he outlines in his Artist Development blog, though the band would place a sign-up form at the merch desk on which fans could write their details and e-mail address, often it was hard to read what people had written (if they’d even been able to find the piece of paper), and sometimes the list wouldn’t even get collected at the end of the night.
After witnessing the popularity of a photo booth at a wedding, Mason had an idea.
“Everybody was at the photo booth, because everybody wants that photo from the wedding, they want to put it on their fridge or whatever it is,” he offers.
“And I was like, the same thing would apply to a concert. That's a memory that everybody wants to remember and hold on to.”
The band invested $3000 in a photo booth that’s run on an iPad, with software that captures email addresses, phone numbers and geo-targeted location.
“[We] have it around the merch table. It’s in a centralized place that people can see other people using it. It's kind of a win-win for everybody – you give the audience a free photo and in return, you get their email address.
“It tells us, okay, we got 150 emails in Detroit last night. That's 150 people that the next time we're going to Detroit, we send them the presale code, we send them the info about the tour.
“On top of that,” he adds, “part two is we send them the photo after the show. And then there's an email sequence that happens afterwards that says, ‘Welcome to our mailing list. And if you'd be interested in even more The Cadillac Three, here's our fan club.’ It just starts to lead them down the path of, here's how to get further engaged in the world that our band’s created.
“It’s been a great way to gather data on the people in the room, and it's also converted people into more of a paid fan than a passive one.”
In addition, the photos end up generating social media content, which the band can repost to promote their upcoming shows.
“When we send the photos we also say, ‘Feel free to tag us on social media.’ So people post their photos, they've got a little frame [that’s] branded with the tour name that we're on at the time.
“And so then that gives us free social media content to then repost. It tells people, ‘Oh, when I go to the Cadillac show, there's going to be a photo booth. I can take a picture.’ And then more people end up doing it, more people end up posting, and it just goes on and on and on.”
Follow Neil on LinkedIn here, and visit The Cadillac Three here.
