Where in the world am I today?: North Vancouver, BC, Canada

For a variety of reasons I’ve earned the reputation of having great promo and being great at promoting myself… It, along with some dedication and persistence has allowed me to enjoy a career that’s spanned almost three decades. It always surprises me a little bit when people comment on my prowess as a self-promoter because I’m still trying to figure it out. Every year there seems to be a new way to reach out and connect with Fans, clients and leads and although email newsletters aren’t new by any stretch of the imagination I finally got the push I needed to push one out the preverbal door… There was of course no door that this virtual campaign had to go through when it got sent out, just a button clicked, but it felt like a very new thing to me on some levels.

Truth be told, I actually toyed with the idea of putting out an email newsletter about five years ago and even went as far as to creating one and posting it on-line where I figured I could send people to get the latest news… Email newsletter campaigns have come a long way since then though and it was my Manager, Corwin, who suggested that we go with Mail Chimp as the package of choice for the very first official cbg world report.

Working with Corwin on this was a really great as it really did feel like a collaboration. Job one for me was to come up with a list of email addresses to send the newsletter out to. I went through my address book pulling addresses out that went back to the days when I hosted a performer’s database on my website. In all I had 1337 email addresses that the first newsletter got sent to. Next I created the header and footer graphics for the campaign, third I needed to generate the content. Corwin took this, added a few snazzy icons for the right hand link info section and voila – Newsletter!

There is a fee charged by Mail Chimp to deliver an email campaign like this and for this particular run my bill came to under five bucks. This has got to be one of the most economical promotional vehicles I’ve ever tapped into… Amazing!

So, did it work? Was it a success?

Well that depends on how you judge these sorts of things I guess. Mail Chimp makes it easy by providing a report with all sorts of interesting statistics…

I knew well before we clicked the send button that many of the email addresses were probably no longer valid. Corwin gave me an interesting statistic at one point that amounted to the fact that the average life expectancy of an email address these days is something like six months. That many of the addresses I pulled from my address book were years old I anticipated that many of the messages sent out would bounce… In the end, about a third of the emails sent out did bounce. These will get pulled from the system immediately. The unsubscribe option was exercised by only 17 people who received the message which was an interesting statistic, and interesting to see who did opt out of getting the email news from me in the future. Some weren’t a surprise at all, others were, and gave me a clue as to where I should (or in this case shouldn’t) focus my efforts.

Were I to list the top three things I learned from this first stab at sending out an email Newsletter the you be, in no particular order –

• There are people who actually want to know what I’m up to and appreciated getting the Newsletter.
• Some of my best friends found it amusing that I was obviously sending this Newsletter out myself, but chose to write in the third person.
• This is likely one of the cheapest way to stay connected with a client and fan base that there is.

Will I be sending out more Newsletters in the future? Yep! No question about it, but I’m not going to make it a once a month thing, rather, as Corwin pointed out, it make more sense to send out a Newsletter when there’s something to tell people about. In this instance it was the recent trip I had to India and the work I had been doing during the Olympics.

Didn’t receive the Newsletter? I find that bizarre as I pretty much sent it to anyone I could think of, but if you didn’t get it and would like to have a look at it go here and have a boo. Wanna get the News as it’s published? Send me an email and I’ll make sure you’re on the list for the next round of info.