In February we spoke with Neil Mason, drummer with Nashville trio The Cadillac Three, about the photo booth the band take on the road as a tool for engaging their fans and, ultimately, collecting their email addresses.
Now, as the trio prepare to hit the road for a typically lengthy tour in support of their sixth studio album The Years Go Fast – starting in Atlanta on April 3, it winds up in Minneapolis in October – we present the second part of the interview, in which the drummer details the band’s methods of promoting and marketing tours, their approach to VIP meet and greets, and much more.
What are the key components you prioritize when announcing a tour to make sure as many fans know about it as possible?
For my band, we've been collecting names for 13 years now in various forms: email addresses, we have a text phone number community, we've got a fan club that is based around email that's paid. And then we also have kind of an unofficial fan club that is a Facebook group that has 8000 or 9000 people in it. And so it's kind of a hybrid of all of those things.
And then also an emphasis on social media. Instagram and Facebook are our primary places for posting about tour dates, along with Bandsintown. And we have a really good subscriber base on Bandsintown. That's kind of like a secret weapon.
What I love about Bandsintown is it's people that are following you literally for tour dates. I would assume that those people are even more interested than a casual follower on Instagram or Facebook.
And so it's really just building a plan around all of those things. We will always try and start with our email list. And our fan club is kind of tier one – those are the people that have directly said, ‘Hey, we want you to communicate with us.’ And so we always try and give them a little bit of preferential treatment.
Similarly, we've kind of grandfathered in our unofficial fan club over there on Facebook, because they've just been huge supporters for years and years now. And then tier two would be making sure that all the social platforms are aware of not only any presales, but also onsales, show announcements, etc.
"When you only have one fan, you talk to the one fan. And then as it grows, you just try and keep it feeling like that."
So you've really made a point of nurturing that one to one fan communication…
Well, when you only have one fan, you talk to the one fan. And then as it grows, you just try and keep it feeling like that. You're not necessarily having one-on-one communication with everybody, but you still try to make it feel like that.
And you still want to do your best to connect with people on a real level. Whether it's in comments, whether it's responding to questions, whether it's social media, emails, DMs, etc. I keep an eye on all of that. I keep an eye on our fan club and the Facebook group and just kind of monitor all of it, because it gives you insight and it also gives you an opportunity to connect.
When you're doing an email blast about a tour, what content would you put in that email?
I test this a little differently from time to time. We video a lot of shows and grab a lot of content. And then we also have past set lists and things like that from all of our shows.
And so all of those things can be used as tools in eblasts, in the fan club, sometimes on socials.
I put a post in our fan club the other day asking what 10 songs should be on the setlist for the upcoming tour and got 100 replies or something like that.
Any of that engagement and interactive stuff is really great.
And on top of that, as clearly and concisely as possible, spell out the tour dates, here's how you get tickets, let us know if you have any trouble.
Another thing that we try and do is Kelby [Ray], our lap steel player, keeps a journal from every show that we play. And so he'll just write down whatever random two or three things he remembers from the day before. And so I'm often hitting him up and being like, ‘Hey, what did you have about the last time we were wherever?’ And so that's a really great tool to just pull out a little memory.
"People need to feel like they're being given hundreds, thousands of dollars’ worth of value throughout a calendar year."
The paid fan club’s really interesting. What are the most effective ways of getting people to sign up to that?
You just have to give and give and give and give. If you're going to ask for $1, $75 or whatever you're going to ask for, people need to feel like they're being given hundreds, thousands of dollars’ worth of value throughout a calendar year.
We put in live shows that we haven't released anywhere else, whether that's audio or video. Around Christmas, we put in full top-to-bottom concerts, audio and video, that were two hour-plus shows. That was like a Christmas present to the fan club.
And we'll drop in a random show or an unreleased song, maybe a demo from our new album that's unreleased.
We’ll pop in there for chats every once in a while, where we all just kind of get on and have fans submit questions, and we'll talk to them.
So it's really just about keeping it fresh, and trying to give people a way to be directly connected with us on a semi-regular basis.
Your photo booth is a great tool for gathering fans’ email addresses. Have you come up with any other ways to get those details?
There's definitely an opportunity for some very simple giveaways at a merch table that's just based around a QR code. Something as simple as, hey, we're recording the show tonight, if you'd like a free download, grab this QR code and give us your email, we'll send it to you after the show, or we'll send you a song from the show.
And then we'll upload the rest of the show to our paid fan club and then try and get you into the paid fan club.
You could do it with a free merch giveaway at the merch table where you just say, ‘Hey, we're giving away one jacket at the end of the night. Enter to win.’ More like a raffle or something like that. I think there's a lot of different ways you could get email addresses.
"Evergreen merch that isn't necessarily tied to a specific song or two is a really good idea."
You mentioned the merch stand – merch is such a crucial source of revenue. What’s your approach to maximizing your revenue from merch?
I would say just trying to have evergreen merch that isn't necessarily tied to a specific song or two is a really good idea. It's really easy to get caught up in, oh, we've got a new single out, we must need a new T-shirt for it. But if that shirt doesn't sell well, or the song doesn't do particularly well, and you over order, then all of a sudden you're sitting on something that's a little bit harder to get rid of.
And I would say the same thing is true with merch that's got 50 tour dates on the back. You’ve got 50 shows to move through those, or they kind of become less attractive.
What I'm getting at is that an evergreen design to me would be something that probably feels a little bit generic to you, but also feels like a lot of different people would wear it and like it.
And so it might be something as simple as like, 'The Cadillac Three, Nashville, Tennessee, circa 2005', or something like that that is kind of a badge of honor: I support the history of this band.
If you put it out at your first show, it could still work 13 years later, and the longer time goes on, the more likely that more people will have seen it and they'll want one too. And where you can get variety with that is rather than changing up the design, just change the shirt color. Then all the people that already had the old one might want the new one.
What do you find are the best ways to market your VIP packages?
We don't overdo it on marketing. But I will say we'll usually announce all of them at the same time. So it kind of feels like a tour announce. It'll be like a VIP announcement.
One of the best tricks, honestly, is just to capture the VIP experience, and then repurpose that to socials so people can actually get a feel of what it is that they'd be paying for. I think that's the most genuine way to do it.
You want people to feel good about what they're spending their money on. I don't want anybody to spend money that they don't want to spend or regret spending. And so I think the best thing to do is just show people exactly what they're getting. And then hopefully everybody leaves happy and they want to tell more people about it, and then that's great word of mouth.
What do you see the really good promoters getting right when it comes to promoting your shows?
The best promoters are like the best artists and bands. They are really tight with their audience and their market. So they have their own email [list]. And they have their own social media dialed in, they know how to build up anticipation around presales and onsales and show announcements. They're telling their own localized story around all of their events.
And hopefully keeping fees low, to just have their audience appreciate their venue over others. I think that can be a difference maker. If you're talking about a local promoter versus more of a national promoter, they might be able to keep fees a little bit lower and that can be a way to win over fans or bring them to their venue.
Beyond sending fans a photo from your photo booth, do you do any other kind of post-event or post-tour communication?
We'll do recaps and things from time to time where we send basically like a bi-weekly eblast to our email list. Even if we're not promoting a tour or not promoting an album, it might just be, hey, here's an update. Here's what we've been doing for the last two weeks while we're home.
So we're not even asking for anything, it's really just a check in. And I think that's important. You don't really want to be asking for much from your audience, you really want to be giving your audience things all the time. And then when you finally get around to promoting something, you don't really want to ask for anything then either, you just want them to think it's a good idea to come hang out with you.
The magic trick is that you've created such a world that they feel like they're being handed Christmas morning by you saying that you're coming to town.
Visit The Cadillac Three here. Follow Neil on LinkedIn here.
