A Complete Guide to Email Marketing for Musicians

Email marketing can be extremely effective when done right.

It can help you build an engaged fanbase and sell more concert tickets, albums, and merch. 

That’s why today we are going to discuss how you can use email marketing to grow your music business.

Design Your Sales Funnel First

Email marketing doesn’t exist in isolation – it should always be viewed in the context of your overall sales funnel.

That’s why we recommend designing your sales funnel first!

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a system that businesses use to convert potential customers into leads, leads into paying customers and paying customers into repeat customers.

Here’s what the core sales funnel structure looks like:

• Top of the funnel: potential customers
• Middle of the funnel: leads
• Bottom of the funnel: customers

While this core structure is great for understanding the concept of a sales funnel, it probably won’t help you much in terms of growing your business because it’s too generic to be practical. 

That’s why it makes sense to use a specific sales funnel model. There are several popular ones out there. So which one should you choose for your music business?

The Value Ladder Sales Funnel

We believe that the most effective way to sell anything online is the Value Ladder sales funnel.

It was created by our co-founder Russell Brunson who then used it to take ClickFunnels from zero to $10M+ in annual revenue in just one year (it’s at $100M+ now!). 

This sales funnel has four stages:

• Bait – You offer the potential customer your lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
• Frontend – You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product or service.
• Middle – You offer the customer a more expensive and more valuable product or service.
• Backend – You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product or service.

Ideally, you also offer a continuity program of some sort, meaning, a subscription product that generates recurring revenue. 

We also recommend adding downsells, upsells, and cross-sells to these core offers in order to maximize your revenue. 

The reason why this sales funnel works so well is that it allows you to:

1. Start the relationship with that person by offering free value.
2. Nurture that relationship by continuing to provide free value via email.
3. Build trust by providing progressively more paid value at each stage.

Here’s how Russell explains it:

How to Build a Value Ladder Sales Funnel for Your Music Business

You can start with just the lead magnet and the frontend offer, then build out the rest of your Value Ladder sales funnel later. 

A lead magnet is a freebie that you offer to potential customers in exchange for their email addresses.

It can be anything that they can either download to their device or access online.

For a musician like yourself, using a free track or a free album as a lead magnet probably makes the most sense, especially if that music isn’t available anywhere else. 

This also makes it easy to follow it up with a sales pitch – your frontend offer can simply be more music, such as an entire album.

Alternatively, if you are already somewhat established and have a fanbase, then you can offer people exclusive content.

Say, you can film a Q&A video where you answer the most commonly asked questions or create a video that gives your fans a behind-the-scenes look into your life. 

You can then follow it up with a sales pitch for merch or a signed CD since someone who watched the video is probably a fan already and might be interested in that. 

Once you have a lead magnet, you will need a lead generation landing page, which is a web page designed specifically for converting visitors into leads (email subscribers).

We don’t advise building your lead generation landing page from scratch if you don’t have any previous experience designing landing pages.

Your best bet is to use a proven, high-converting landing page template instead.

Our software, ClickFunnels, includes a template library where you can find a suitable landing page template for your lead magnet. 

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Once you have your lead magnet landing page, it’s time to start driving traffic to it. That’s how you are going to build your email list. 

Create a Welcome Sequence

We don’t recommend hitting the new subscriber with a sales pitch for your frontend offer immediately – you want to build some trust first. But how can you do that?

ClickFunnels allows you to set up an automated welcome sequence that will be automatically sent to every new subscriber.

Use this sequence to introduce yourself, share your backstory, and tell the new subscriber what you are up to now. 

Do all this over several emails sent over the course of a week – so the frequency should be either one email every other day or one email every day depending on the length of your welcome sequence. 

It’s best to end each of these emails with a question directed to the new subscriber. Encourage them to hit the reply button and respond.

Make sure to then reply to all the responses that you get. This will help you learn more about your subscribers and make them feel valued. 

Only pitch your frontend offer in the last email of your welcome sequence. 

Alternatively, if you have already built out your Value Ladder, you can end your welcome sequence with a rundown of it. 

Let the new subscriber know what you have for sale with a short description of each offer and a link to its sales page. 

Launch a Music Newsletter

One of the biggest challenges in email marketing is staying top of mind with your email subscribers without being obnoxious. 

On the one hand, you want to message them regularly.

On the other hand, everyone is already overwhelmed by the amount of email that they get, which means that you can’t overdo it.

So how can you solve this conundrum?

We believe that the best way to do it is to launch a weekly email newsletter because it gives you an excuse to message your subscribers every week. 

You can start with a simple link roundup format where you share the most interesting music-related content that you came across that week.

It can be articles, interviews, songs, albums, playlists, videos, you name it. 

Once you get confident with that, you can start adding original content to your newsletter, such as your own articles, reviews, or interviews. 

As a musician, you probably know a lot of other musicians, which means that you can use those connections to introduce your subscribers to artists that they might have never discovered otherwise. 

Use the “Hook, Story, Offer” Copywriting Framework

Copywriting is what makes or breaks email marketing. So how can you get your subscribers to open your emails, read them, and act on the call to action?

We recommend using the “Hook, Story, Offer” copywriting framework in all your emails. That’s what we do and it’s amazing how well it works when implemented correctly!

• Hook – Grab the subscriber’s attention with a compelling subject line. Keep in mind that your email will be competing with all the other unopened emails in their inbox. That’s why the subject line is the most important element of email copy!
• Story – Tell the subscriber a captivating story in the body copy of your email. You want to keep it short but make sure that the core narrative structure is there.
• Offer – Transition from the story to the call to action. What do you want the subscriber to do next?
  
  The typical call to action is pitching one of your offers, then encouraging the subscriber to click through to its sales page.
  
  However, there might be situations where a different call to action might make more sense, such as asking them to reply to the email, following you on a specific social media platform, etc.
  
  Just remember that there should only be one call to action per email!

Here’s how Russell explains the “Hook, Story, Offer” framework:

Case Study: How Gabe Schillinger Sells Beats With ClickFunnels

Gabe Schillinger spent over a decade trying to build a career in the music industry. 

“I always thought that my big break was going to come from a record label cutting me a big check”, he recalls. 

Initially, he assumed that all he needed was an opportunity to work with some big artists.

But he eventually realized that even if you get such opportunities, you make some money and that’s it, you are back to waiting for the next gig. It simply wasn’t sustainable.

“10+ years of playing that game and I was feeling stuck. I was nearly 30 years old, still living at my Dad’s house, and couldn’t afford to move out.

I hated talking about what I was doing with music. I talked to friends, family, whatever… And it felt like they saw me as someone who was chasing this pipe dream. Like a starving artist. 

I just didn’t feel that respect. Honestly, at that point, I didn’t respect myself.”

Gabe decided to shift from the industry game to selling beats online. 

He made some money doing it the way everyone else was doing it – building an audience on social media and then driving traffic to a beats store. But it wasn’t enough to move out of his Dad’s house.

One day, when he was scrolling through Facebook, a link posted by a producer caught his attention. 

Gabe didn’t quite understand what he was looking at. “This guy was using funnels to sell beats. It was the first time I have seen it.” 

So he decided to do the same. And that’s when everything changed. 

“For the first time in my life, I applied some of that creativity and passion that I once only put into my music and started putting it into my marketing as well.”

He started focusing on growing his email list, building sales funnels, and creating true offers as opposed to just selling commodities like everyone else.

“And because I was doing these things, pretty quickly, in a couple of years, I was able to climb to the top of my industry.”

Today, Gabe makes a great living doing what he loves, all because he harnessed the power of sales funnels. 

Build A Sales Funnel for Your Music Business with ClickFunnels!

ClickFunnels has everything you need to build a sales funnel for your music business:

• Sales funnel and landing page templates
• Visual editor that you can use to customize those templates
• Email marketing functionality that allows you to send broadcast emails, set up automated email sequences, and create email workflows with behavioral triggers

What’s best is that we have a free trial which means that you can check out our software without any risk.

So why not start building your Value Ladder sales funnel today?

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