If you’re looking for a creative way to build your email list, you might want to give download cards a try.
A while back I was having a coffee at my neighbourhood corpobucks, where they always have a stack of these iTunes download cards, which offer a free “song of the day.”
After giving it a whirl and downloading a track, I immediately had two thoughts:
- These cards could be a great opportunity to have people opt-in to an email marketing campaign.
- I can do so much better than one lonesome song.
So I started contacting reps for every artist performing at this year’s Saskatchewan Jazz Festival. Before long I had nearly 30 artists who freely gave permission for one of their songs to be used on a download card to promote the festival.
As soon as I wrap up the design, I’ll be placing an order with Dropcards, who offer a discount for nonprofit organizations. By next week I’ll have a few thousand cards to hand out at events, leave on shop counters, include with ticket orders, and otherwise distribute in diverse and creative ways. Whoever receives one just has to visit the festival’s website and pop in the unique code to download a meaty mp3 sampler.
The download page will have an option to opt-in to our email updates, and this is where our list building will take place. Now, you could make this obligatory, but I recommend keeping it optional. After all, while I want to build our organization’s email list, I also want as many potential ticket buyers as possible to hear the artists who are performing at this year’s Jazz Festival — even if they don’t want to get any email from me afterwards.
For some extra promotional milage, you could send those who do opt-in a welcome email thanking them for checking out your sampler, and offering a special discount, a bonus download, or something else of value to your audience.
Remember, these cards aren’t limited to distributing music. Filmmakers could distribute short films or trailers, authors could include eBooks, educators could include instructional videos — you’re only limited by your creativity. So figure out what you could offer up that would be valuable to your current and potential audience, and get busy printing and distributing your download cards.
