**Guest post written by Haley McCarthy of Bandzoogle.

"When it comes to music marketing, the most effective campaigns are the ones that are goal oriented and engage your audience right away. A landing page is the perfect combination of creativity and action, allowing you to gain more fans and build a lasting relationship.

Fans love the opportunity to get the inside scoop on upcoming releases, tour schedules, new merch drops, and ultimately learn more about their favorite artists.

As a musician, you can cater to this part of the fan experience with well-crafted newsletters. With a newsletter, you can address your fans directly, create timely content, and offer exclusive discounts or pre-releases.

To build your mailing list, you can create a custom landing page on your music website to capture fan emails. But what is a landing page and how do you encourage fans to sign up for your mailing list? Let’s explore how to use the email opt-in landing page to build your email list!

+Your Three Communities, Part 1: Your Super Fans

What is a landing page?

A landing page, sometimes referred to as a squeeze page, is a headerless page on your website. Headerless is a fancy way of saying there are no distractions on the page, like a menu or footer, so the page is completely focused on the action you want fans to take.

Of course, you can add your own design elements with background images and section colors, but a landing page works best when there are one or two features on the page with a clear objective.

A landing page that’s built directly on your music website allows you to use the tools you’re already familiar with, match your overall website design, and measure the outcome of your campaign directly in your website stats. You can then share your landing page using your custom band website domain name to your social media bios.

+How to build a marketing funnel to promote your music

Build your mailing list right on your own music website with an effective Landing page! Try Bandzoogle today.

Landing page templates

An email opt-in landing page focuses fans on one action - subscribing to your mailing list - and in exchange, fans are offered access to exclusive content. A landing page template that’s designed for this type of campaign will take the guesswork out of what will encourage visitors to sign up.

It’s a good idea to incentivize your fans and explain the benefits of being part of the list, so adding text with an eye-catching headline and description of what your newsletters will look like is a good idea for this page. You can add a headline like “Get to know the band!” or “Keep in touch!” and follow that up with letting fans know how often you’ll be sending them newsletters and what type of content they can expect in the future.

Adding a disclaimer below your mailing list signup, like unsubscribe options, fan privacy, or other ways to get in touch, is a nice gesture and makes you look professional and trustworthy.

If you’re offering something in exchange, the description is a good place to add a note about what fans will receive for subscribing. The built-in mailing list signup form will present you with the option to exchange a track or file to fans, so let’s look at how you can reward your fans!

Rewarding your new subscribers

It’s really exciting to offer a reward to new mailing list subscribers on your landing page. This is an opportunity to give new fans a way to remember you and look forward to your future newsletters.

Here are a few options for bonus content that you can send to your new subscribers:

• New Single - Since you can exchange either music tracks or file downloads for a mailing list sign up, there are a few solid choices for your offer. For instance, if you have a new album coming out soon, you can send the latest single from the album. This gives fans a preview of your music and encourages them to stay tuned to your newsletter to see when the album drops.
• B-Sides - When you’re making a record, you might have some tracks that didn’t quite make the cut. Back in the day, artists would release ‘B-Sides’ on vinyl or special cassettes, but the mailing list signup form makes it easy to exchange an album or a single track of unreleased materials straight to your fan’s inbox for download.
• Tour Posters - If you have an upcoming tour, you might have promotional artwork like show posters or a package of professional band photos that you circulate to the media. Let your fans in on the promotional material by packaging digital images and exchanging them for signing up.
• Lyric Booklets - Following the release of your album, fans might want to sing along to the songs. If you are the type of musician who works in notebooks and on scrap paper, scan your lyrics and notes and bundle them together in one digital file for your fans to enjoy.

Don’t forget to mention what you’ll be gifting fans in the description on your page, and remind fans that mailing list sign up requires confirmation, so they’ll need to confirm their subscription to get the goods.

+The Bribe to Subscribe: Bands and E-mails

Measuring fan engagement

Once you’ve shared the link to your email opt-in landing page on your social channels, give it a few days to gain momentum and then check the page-level reports to see how many visits you’ve had to the page, and how many fans have signed up.

It’s important to check the balance between page visitors and subscribers. If you find there are significantly more page visits than subscribers, make sure that you’ve added a note in the small print about confirming their subscription or encourage fans to check their spam folder and add your email to their safe list.

In your reports, you can also see where your fans are coming from. This helps you focus future marketing efforts on a particular channel. For instance, if you shared the link to your landing page in a Facebook post, as a link button in an Instagram story, or added it to your Smart Links page, you can see if fans are more likely to click-through from your story and invest more time in driving traffic to your website (for merch sales, ticket sales, and release radar) from Instagram.

+How to Increase the Conversion Rate of Your Music Website

Adding members to a group is another way to gauge fan engagement. When you’re getting started on your landing page, you can put the subscribers from this page into their own newsletter group.

Head to the mailing list feature and create a new group named after the page promotion, like “B-Sides Fans” or “Album Release”. In your mailing list tab, you can track how many members are in the group and you can send exclusive newsletters to these fans. For some advanced insight, check out the read rate for this group in your newsletter stats.

As a musician, marketing might not be at the forefront of your mind, but by building a website for your music you’re already investing in your marketing efforts. Adding pre-templated landing pages make it easy for you to connect with fans and promote the exciting work you’re doing in the studio and on the road.

You can be as creative as you’d like with your landing pages and offer fans unique ways to follow your journey as an independent musician."

Related Blog Posts:

+5 Email Marketing Tips for Your Next Tour

+How to sell a single from your music website (and why you should do it)

+10 Ways to Fail as an Independent Artist