I recently lost my Twitter account with over 40,000 followers due to what the social site terms as ‘permanent suspension’. Sad, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. With an email list, I can easily email those on it and inform them of my new Twitter handle. Imagine what that tool can do for a musician. I will be telling you more about email lists and how to use them to engage your fans.

What is an Email List?

An email list is a collection of email addresses and names that can be used when one needs to send an email message to multiple recipients. It could be a simple Excel spreadsheets with two columns (name and email address) or it could be more elaborate. How do you then send mails to your online list? There are websites with free tools to do this. My preferred is MailChimp.

How and where does the musician gets the email addresses

It is unethical and illegal to collect people’s personal information without informing them and so you need to do it the right way. You can capture email addresses using these methods:

1. Ask your Twitter, Instagram and Facebook fans to give you their email addresses. They can either send them to you as message (via inbox) or just comment on a post (risky, though). Carefully note this addresses down.
2. If you have a website, ask visitors to sign up. You have probably seen many websites do this, right?
3. You can also ask your offline friends and fans to share their email addresses with you. Just remember to tell them why you need it.

After collecting these addresses, you now need to build an online email list on a platform like MailChimp.

How to use MailChimp to build your online email list

With MailChimp, you can import an Excel spreadsheet or type in the names and addresses manually. However, you first will have to create an account here. You will then need to create a new list (MailChimp provides help/tutorial on how you will do this). After this, you will add details of your list and then either import addresses from the .xls file or just type in the contact details.

How do you then send the mails?

Well, you will need to create a campaign and select then list you want to broadcast it to.

For a visual guide, you can watch this clip on Youtube.