Customer feature: They Might Be Giants

They Might Be Giants‘ invitation to sign up to their mailing list is one of the most engaging ones out there:

Why join a mailing list?

Well, there are a few good reasons to join ours. They Might Be Giants’ mailing list has been in service for almost 20 years and currently serves over 125,000 folks with the latest info on TMBG’s output – delivering free and often exclusive music, inside ticket information, and secret merch info including sales at wildly discounted prices. We will never give your email address to somebody else, or sell it to a Mark Zuckerberg-shaped bot. Be part of a great thing and join this special conversation.

Witty, transparent, and refreshingly creative – this approach to building an email list really caught our eye. We sat down with TMBG to dive into how they’re using email marketing to promote their band. Here’s the full story behind their innovative strategy.

How does TMBG use email marketing? Who’s on your subscriber list, and what are you talking to them about?

We try not to overburden the inboxes of our subscribers, but when we have something to say we don’t mind saying it! Our emails usually have 4 or 5 big announcements included – lately they’ve been tour- and merch-heavy, but they’ve included everything from recent podcast appearances to John Flansburgh’s homemade mashed potato recipe (which may have been our most successful email blast ever!).

How does email marketing fit alongside other channels like social media, and why is email still important?

Our email list is by far our most effective tool in promoting shows, new merch, whatever announcements we have to share along the way, etc. With social media platforms seemingly throttling who exactly is seeing our posts, we find that our email list is not only our most engaged platform base but also our most visible.

Why EmailOctopus?

We were looking for a more affordable option than what we were previously using, and had the good fortune of stumbling across EmailOctopus via Google. EmailOctopus proved to be the most affordable option for what we were looking to use our email marketing platform for, without having to sacrifice any necessary features.

Are there any figures to back up that choice?

I don’t have any hard figures to compare from our previous services, but I will say that we have been very happy with our open rates. Our full email list blasts are usually somewhere around 30-35% in an industry where anything above 20% is considered impressive.

Any particular features or anything we do well?

In the past we’ve used the mail merge feature to assign personal and individual download codes to members of our fan club to send them secret music – for their ears only!

EmailOctopus note: check out our customisation cheat sheet to use this feature.

Are there any features you think we need to build next?

Sometimes the formatting of text can get a little wonky, especially when we’re copying and pasting text from emails into the campaign editor. I would love a button that changes text blocks from the easy-to-use interface to HTML coding so I can use the interface 90% of the time and switch it over to HTML to find why chunks of text aren’t pasting in right.

EmailOctopus note: Good news – we’ve recently launched the new version of our editor, and hopefully these quirks should now be solved!

What is your advice to others who are considering using EmailOctopus?

Think about what features are important to you in an email marketing platform. Some alternatives to EmailOctopus are more expensive because they have every possible bell and whistle, but often more than we’ve ever wanted to use.

What are the team’s priorities at the moment? What are you promoting?

The band is currently in Australia and will soon be in the United Kingdom and Ireland playing shows celebrating their platinum-selling album Flood. With so many dates and multiple shows in single cities, it’s been quite an adventure trying to communicate all of the details to ticketholders. We put together some very useful FAQs that we sent out to our entire email list, as well as directly to our lists of ticketholders through the venues to try to eliminate as much of the confusion as we can.