1. Is Email Dead? Is Email Dead?

2. Is Email Dead? “As social media proliferates and becomes the peer communication method of choice for many of our consumers, is email still a relevant means of promoting our artists and driving sales?” Is email still relevant? Yes

3. Is Email Dead? By opening more communication channels with the consumer, social media puts us in a much stronger position to build a relationship between fan and artist (the core principle of eCRM) than when we could only send emails As you’d expect, this is a good thing Social media is great for eCRM…

4. Is Email Dead? However each of these channels (email, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) has different strengths, so the appropriate communication method will vary depending on your objective If you want to publicise a free gig happening in London in 3 hours send a Tweet or SMS If you want to sell a £45 boxed set, take some nice photos and send them in an email which follows best practise principles for driving clicks to retail …but it’s not great at everything

5. Is Email Dead? The key to a good eCRM strategy is to incorporate all appropriate channels into a single fan communication strategy By knowing which channel to use in a given situation and accepting that any one channel is not a replacement for the others, you will have happier fans and drive more sales What does this mean?

6. Is Email Dead? Still not convinced?

7. Is Email Dead? Email allows much more accurate targeting than social media and experience has shown that good targeting is key to driving sales through eCRM Email campaigns can also be personalised on an individual basis to a much greater degree than social communications, which strengthens response rates Targeting and personalisation

8. Is Email Dead? An email address is necessary to access any social network, so a consumer that uses social media will also have an email account which they are likely to check A high percentage of our target audience use business email addresses which are unlikely to be replaced by social media any time soon What about the fans?

9. Is Email Dead? Email is still by far the best digital medium to showcase our products and convince consumers they are worth investigating. Email is compelling

10. Is Email Dead? The benefits of email marketing are clear to Apple, Amazon and many other market leading companies that make millions of pounds with email campaigns Our database is growing, our response rates are high and we are effectively driving sales of music and merchandise through email The financial value of Facebook fans and Twitter followers is still up for debate, whereas email has a reliable track record of driving sales Evidence?

11. Is Email Dead? As with anything, the potential of fan communications to sell our products will depend on the quality of the campaign, regardless of the channel being used Unfortunately our email mailing lists are often neglected until the point when we want the fans to make a purchase, which unsurprisingly yields low response rates By engaging our fans with high quality eCRM campaigns, email marketing will continue to be a vital aspect of our digital marketing strategies What makes the difference?