Case Study: Marketing an Entertainment Newsletter

Posted by Justin Premick

Customers often ask us for examples of how people are using AWeber in different industries, and what they can do to effectively run an opt-in email campaign.

So, last month we solicited candidates to help us show how they’ve implemented email campaigns with their businesses.

Our 2007 case study series starts in the music industry, with John Waterman and the Bandit A&R Newsletter.

Background

We’ve all heard great bands that we simply couldn’t find in our local music store. We say to ourselves, “These guys are great! Their CDs should be flying off the shelves!”

But the CDs aren’t flying off the shelves. Because they haven’t made it there. Because the band never got noticed by the record labels.

That’s where John Waterman comes in. His Bandit A&R Newsletter was formed in 1988 to help aspiring artists:

“Bandit aims to help ambitious singers, bands, songwriters and producers find a market for their music whatever commercial music style they are working in. There are many paths to making a living from music and Bandit tries to cover recording deals, licensing of finished tracks, song publishing deals, TV/Film/Advertising use and artist management.”

Bandit is a monthly print and email publication providing artists information on which industry professionals are currently seeking new talent and how to get demos/samples to them.

Growth

While Bandit grew, so did use of another valuable tool: the Internet.

“In 1995 I ‘retired’ from the day job and set up a full time office, bought a PC and started to investigate the Internet. By the end of the year Bandit had a self designed/written web-site with the help of a 7 Pound ($13) “Teach yourself HTML” book and a plain text email option for subscribers! The subscriber base quickly spread world-wide and I decided to start an additional US content edition to satisfy and encourage more US based subscribers.”

A few years later, John picked up an AWeber account to automate his list management.

How John Uses AWeber

John offers a free sample copy of an old back issue of the Bandit newsletter as a PDF, and delivers the download link via AWeber.

Web forms are located on several pages of the Bandit website. Here’s an example from his homepage:

He also collects subscribers via emails to his autoresponder address, which he advertises in various industry publications:

“The facility to add a second section to the front of the auto-responder email address (bandit.###@aweber.com) is a key feature that I use to track the source of enquiries. I use this for keying print Ad responses or anywhere that uses email response. I also use it as a basic affiliate program where I give affiliates a exclusive number to add the email address they use to send me prospects and also to embed in their web-forms offering the free sample issue. If the prospect subsequently buys a subscription the affiliate can have their commission credited to their account.”

After subscribers confirm and get their sample, John follows up with them through a sequence of seven messages. He also broadcasts to his list one-two times per month, offering further samples and benefits of paid subscriptions. All messages are in plain-text format.

Results So Far

A look at his account showed that John gets a lot of junk traffic to his opt-in forms and spam sent to his autoresponder. However, he’s getting a lot of quality subscribers as well.

He’s currently converting nearly 7% of prospects to paid subscribers via his follow up messages. Most occur after the first follow up message, with the remaining sales spread across the subsequent ones.

John’s goals are to:

• Get more people to confirm their signups to his list
• Increase his sales conversion rate

Suggestions

John’s obviously succeeding — he’s run his web-based business full-time for over a decade — but like any smart business owner, he knows that there’s always room to get better.

After looking through John’s site and account, I offered several pieces of advice:

Homepage Opt-in Forms

I felt that the inline form on the Bandit homepage didn’t stand out enough: it was next to several order forms that drew attention away from it.

I suggested to John that he “draw out” that form some more on the page, which he did by adding a different background color to it:

The Bandit homepage also had a traditional popup form, set to display once per day. However, like many traditional popups, it was blocked when I went to his site in Firefox. So, he switched his form to one of our unblockable popover forms, which slides into the page from the top:

Now, more visitors will have the opportunity to subscribe via that form.

Improve Opt-In Confirmations

I was impressed to see that Bandit’s subscribe process was already taking advantage of our Custom Confirmation Page to provide the newsletter sample instantaneously to subscribers when they clicked the confirm link, and that the first follow up message included another link to the sample.

I did recommend a couple of changes to boost the opt-in confirmation rate:

• Thank-You Page ChangesAfter subscribers submitted the web form, they were taken to this thank-you page:
  (Click to See Full-Size)This page provided plenty of information, but not all of that information was necessarily important to someone filling out the web form. A lot of it talked about whitelisting and spam folders — things that while important to us as senders, aren’t the subscriber’s first concern. He just wants his sample!

  John has since simplified the thank-you page:

  Now, subscribers can see, briefly, exactly what they need to do in order to get their sample newsletter.
• Custom First ParagraphThe Bandit confirmed opt-in message text was OK, but like the thank-you page, it contained too much talk about spam. The focus wasn’t on the recipient and what s/he needed to do with the message.

  So, after we talked, John updated his confirm message text to thank the recipient for signing up, remind them of what benefits they were going to receive by being on his list, and advise them to click the link to access their free sample of the newsletter:

  
• Custom SubjectThe custom subject was rather long, and so I advised John to shorten it - that way, he could be confident that the full subject would appear when subscribers saw the message in their inboxes.

Converting More Sales

One of the challenges that faces anyone doing email marketing is how to improve conversions.

We’ve all heard the advice “test everything.” It’s good advice — just about everything we do, from where we put our forms, to what we say on our thank-you page, to where we put links in our messages, can be optimized.

However, sometimes broader, more holistic suggestions are helpful as well.

I don’t know the first thing about the music business, but I did have one suggestion to offer that can apply to a wide range of industries: start offering expert information/articles (in this case, on how musicians can more effectively market themselves to record labels).

By sharing some of his expertise in the music industry, John may be able to build interest in Bandit and further establish himself as an expert in his subscribers’ eyes.

Until Next Time…

We’ll be checking back in with John later this year to see what effect the changes to his site and campaign have had on their effectiveness.

In the meantime, we’ll be publishing other studies of AWeber users to the blog. Stay tuned!

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Check out the Bandit A&R Newsletter
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Justin Premick: Peter, Jonathan, Carol, I agree - that’s a cool idea. Looking into it

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