A mailing list is an important tool for any musician or band. Sending out consistent email campaigns helps your fans to stay connected to you. It’s also a great way to let them know of any upcoming events or new music you’re releasing.

For information on managing mailing list members, please view the ‘Mailing List Members’ Help article.

How to increase deliverability of email campaigns:

All email providers provide a certain level of software-based protection against spam - the reality is more spam gets blocked by your service provider than what actually arrives in your inbox. Email servers set up sophisticated anti-spam protocols which are useful for filtering out ‘questionable’ messages. Server-side spam guards don't actually 'read' your email, but search for certain criteria in a message, usually looking for things like:

  • Short, vague, or missing subject lines
  • Random words in the message that are clumped together or in high volume
  • Links to blacklisted or known spam sites
  • Messages coming from known spam addresses or sender IPs

Email providers cautiously deliver messages that appear legitimate, but these messages may still not be wanted by the recipient.

Because of this, most email recipients can also set 'filters' or mark a message as spam within their email account settings. This will flag messages that come from certain addresses or that contains specific content. This is offered because even though email provider anti-spam software is sophisticated, it’s ultimately not infallible.

Unfortunately, with email in general there's no guarantee that your message won't end up flagged as spam and be sorted into a junk folder. If you find a message from a campaign marked as spam in your email account, use the option to 'unmark' or 'mark as not-spam', which most email clients, like Gmail, provide within the junk folder.

This will signal to the email service filters that you consider the message legitimate, and that all subsequent similar messages should be treated as such.

One thing to remember is that messages don’t often wind up in ‘spam’ folders by accident. So. to make sure your messages are received and read as much as possible, here are a few simple rules you can apply when setting up email campaigns:

  1. Keep your content concise and stick to the point of the subject
  2. Use few images
  3. Limit or avoid profanity
  4. Provide a clear, concise (under 20 words if possible) subject for the message
  5. If providing links, make sure they go to ‘safe’ sites
  6. If importing mailing list members, make sure they’ve previously opted to be on your mailing list

Before sending an email campaign, consider what annoys you with email campaigns you receive from others. If it bothers you, don’t use it in your own email campaign. Likely, what annoys you also annoys your mailing list members.

Warning: As per our terms of service, we do not allow the sending of unsolicited email, or contacting anyone who did not expressly sign up to your mailing list.