Congratulations.

You created great music, ran high-quality ads, and implemented an effective retargeting strategy to earn that highest-of-high-value results: the email address.

Now what?

Well, once you’ve taken a moment to be proud of yourself (and you should be—generating leads isn’t easy) it’s time to start thinking about how best to nurture these newfound relationships.

Email is such a huge unlock for independent artists on the path toward building a business, but there are a lot of questions surrounding that:

What do I talk about?

How do I sell stuff?

How frequently do I send updates?

We’re going to attempt to answer all of these questions and more.

So let’s take a look at the three primary use cases for email marketing for independent artists (and we’ll even cover a bit of what not to do at the end).

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Notifications

The lowest-hanging fruit for email is to provide your audience with important updates.

People follow you on Instagram and Spotify to tap into what you’re doing, but they subscribe to your email list to make sure they don’t miss out.

Big difference.

This makes email critical for notifying your fans about things like new music, merch, shows, and more.

So if you have something new to report, share it via email.

And extra points for giving your subscribers the heads up about this stuff before you share it anywhere else.

Exclusivity is a huge selling point for joining your inner circle.

Bonus tip: outside of some small automated stuff, emails really shouldn’t go out more than once a week (any more and you’re likely to annoy people and cause them to unsubscribe), so use your email schedule as motivation to stay consistent with bringing new and exciting things to the table for your fans but don’t overdo it.

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Adding value

Delivering value to your audience is the single greatest unlock to a winning email strategy.

Ask yourself, “How can I use what I do to enrich the lives of others?”

If you can come up with a compelling answer to this question, you’re on the right track.

This is easy to do in service or product-based business (ahem 👋🏻), but we might need to dig a little deeper when it comes to music.

Now, this will vary for every artist and genre as no two voices are the same, but try to get into the minds of your subscribers.

What do they value?

Why did they sign up?

What do they have in common?

Some effective ideas: unreleased material, a deep dive into your creative process and the story behind your song (non-technical—your audience is most likely not other musicians), or even behind-the-scenes stuff like tour footage and photos not seen anywhere else.

Bonus tip: giving stuff away for free can be a pretty magical incentive for your subscribers—the rule of reciprocity is strong and gifts often compel people to further support you in ways they hadn’t originally considered.

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Selling

Email is easily the best place to sell stuff to your audience; however, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.

But if done correctly, you can sell lots of things without “selling” anything at all.

Take my newsletter for example: at the bottom of every issue of The One Thing is a small section where I “passively” sell within every email.

No pressure.

No tactics.

No sleaziness or spam.

Just an option and a reminder. That’s it.

Take the next step if you want to.

Or don’t.

Totally up to you.

Now, obviously, there are going to be times when a sales-only email is necessary or even desirable.

New tour dates added?

Limited edition merch?

Push that stuff, for sure.

But the majority of the time, the passive method works wonders.

So if you’re sharing the story behind a song, for example, the bottom of your email might be a great place to link to branded merch, a place to buy a physical copy of that specific song, or simply an option to listen on Spotify.

Bonus tip: if you’ve got a tour coming up or other in-person appearances, this is an excellent place to share those as well.

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What not to do

Sharing one’s email address requires a great deal of trust, so don’t abuse it.

Things like constantly hard-selling with every email or sending out updates every day are just too much.

People will unsubscribe.

And they should—you’ve abused their trust.

If you’ve crafted a clearly defined set of expectations for your newsletter (and you should) do your best to stick to that.

Of course, content and focus evolve, so don’t be afraid to experiment (this newsletter is a great example of the evolution of what I’m working on—even the name has changed), but don’t pull a bait-and-switch on your audience.

If your signup form says you’ll share new work, exclusive content, and behind-the-scenes updates, all centered around your music, don’t start sharing your favorite recipes for mac and cheese.

Unless of course that’s part of who you are as an artist and your audience might reasonably expect that, in which case, you do you.

Everybody loves mac and cheese, after all.

Whatever your strategy looks like, stick to the core, mix up the details, respect your audience, and, above all, be authentic.

Take it from me—authenticity wins every time.

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