Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Promoting a Band using ClientTouch.com

Fan Base is More Important Than How Good Your Show Is
Don't get me wrong, being able to put on a good performance is essential, but what might not be obvious is that building and communicating with the fan base is more critical than how good the show is. That might sound a little counter-intuitive, so here's some background. When it's time to negotiate the pricing, being able to pack the house is what's important to everybody, the promoter, the venue and ultimately the band. More bodies means more opportunity for dollars to flow and thus gives the band more leverage. For example, if you are in a band where you know that you can bring in 200 to 400 people to see the show every Friday night, that gives you flexibility when it's time to negotiate prices and ticket sales. If you know that you can bring in more people, then that's even better. So one of the most important aspects to becoming a successful band is building and communicating with your fan base.

Getting Fans to Sign Up
So on to how to build a fan base. Make it easier to sign up by distributing sign-up cards and pens around the venue beforehand. Offer prizes each show for signing up. Some bands have a sign-up sheet on a clipboard on stage where fans can add their contact info, others let users sign up on a website. While clipboards and websites will help, that's more work for the fan and the less likely you'll get fans to sign up on the spot. The key is to make it easy for fans to sign up and encourage fans to sign up. Make it part of the show if possible and keep in mind that the power of the Mic. Fans tend to do what you tell them to if done on the Mic.

Communicating With Your Fans
So now you have a stack of names and contact info, now what? We all start out trying to manage our fan base with our personal email account, just typing out the list of emails from each card. That's fine for 25 fans or so, but what about when you have 500, 1,000 or 10,000 fans? At some point you're going to need help.

ClientTouch.com
We use a web-based product called ClientTouch.com for $30 a month. Here's how it works... We get between 50 and 100 contacts each show. Those contacts are entered into an Excel spreadsheet, then uploaded to ClientTouch.com. For each new show, we create an HTML based email template that will be sent to all of the fans on a specific day. The email template has images and links so the fans can find out more information if they choose, plus they can forward the email to friends. Now that we've been using the product for a few months, inputting the contact info takes about an hour per show and creating a new email template takes about the same.

The Bottom Line 
So you're probably wondering whether it's worth the time and trouble. In our case, we were able to double our customer base over a 4 month period and we've almost outgrown our venue. I would certainly say it's worth $120 and 10 hours worth of work to double the customer base.



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