Mailchimp, Pt. 1
In this series, we’re looking into various tech platforms for artists, within the context of how artist friendly they are. Last time, we talked about self-releasing your music.
Maybe, just maybe, the best platform to be on is yourself.
Today, we’re talking email service providers: tech services that help you manage an email list.
Email’s not dead: it’s actually great, for a lot of reasons. The best one being that you own your email audience forever, and you set the rules of engagement on your own terms. With email, you’ve got full control.
Email means no algorithm in the middle controlling who sees what with some dumb set of arbitrary rules that only benefit the platform. It’s direct, one-to-one communication between you and the people who are interested in your stuff. If you do it right, it’s the digital equivalent of sending out a nice handwritten postcard.
Think about that the next time you worry about the size of your social media following. If only 10% of your social media followers are even being shown what you’re posting (not an uncommon average nowadays), then 100,000 TikTok followers is really 10,000. And 1,000 followers would be the functional equivalent of only 100.
When you think about how it’s getting rarer and rarer to actually follow anyone directly anymore on social platforms like TikTok, the value of your follower count decreases even further.
Email services like Mailchimp can be a tool to build a better audience for yourself: one that you own instead of rent.
Mailchimp/Email Marketing Pros
Mailchimp is great for starting out with an email list: they have free plans, and cheap plans that average around $15/month or less. It’s an awesome, affordable way to learn the ropes.
It’s a legacy platform that integrates easily with lots of popular website tools like Wordpress, Squarespace, etc.
Email followers, as a general statement, are much more valuable than social media followers. The quality of the audience is way better, because there’s a level of affirmative opt-in required, and it isn’t something that’s easy for people to do. In order to be on the list, you have to voluntarily give away something that’s quite valuable to you: a personal email address.
Email lists tend to clean themselves, which is better for everyone involved. If you’re interested, you’ll stick around. If you’re not, then you won’t. Much easier than trying to determine how many of your random 2 million social followers are real people or bots.
Less people than you might think will go through the effort of creating burner email addresses.
And, for those that do, that’s still OK. If someone were to join your email list with a burner address, assuming from the get-go that you’re trying to scam them, then they’ve already jumped to a conclusion and their mind is made up. So, it would be a waste of time for both them and you if they stayed on the list, and they can just go enjoy the free stuff you’re (hopefully) putting out on a social page or a website instead. Who knows, they might change their mind later and join up again after they’ve seen more. Email services like Mailchimp are getting better and better at filtering this type of inauthentic user behavior out; the self-selecting, voluntary opt-in nature of an email list is really critical for making this work for everyone.
Email content that you send out is savable forever by the people receiving it, because it’s stored on their local system or individual user account. Even if the email service provider changes, you can always just search your own email database (that you have complete control over) for every single email that I’ve ever sent, and that info will always be there for you until you choose to delete it. Try doing that easily with a social feed.
The ethics of data use on a small personal scale are way less sketchy than the mass data harvesting done via social media and companies like Google or Meta. Personal email audience sample sizes are so small, statistically speaking, that the data is worthless to the large advertisers who buy that kind of thing. There’s no financial incentive for any sketchy data use here: nobody would buy my email user data, even if I wanted to sell it. This all works together to make your email list a much more genuine and direct form of communication between you and the people who are interested in what you’re doing.
It’s possible for many businesses to generate sustainable revenue from a very small email list of perhaps 1,000-5,000 people. On the flip side, there’s examples of social influencers with millions of followers who aren’t able to make any kind of living at all: the story of the influencer with 3 million followers who couldn’t sell 30 T-shirts comes to mind. This makes email marketing a great choice for the smaller independent artist who maybe doesn't care as much about mass appeal or being famous, and just wants to do their own projects on their own terms.
Mailchimp is a strong option to consider for email marketing, and email marketing is important to consider as a promotional too for everyone.
But, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies, and there are some additional considerations you’ll want to be aware of when it comes to Mailchimp, specifically. We’ll get into those next time.
