 Matt, this first one's yours. It's from Airborne Toxic Bandai. Actually, I think that they have four amazing songs and they're named after the great book, White Noise. I actually know very little about this band. I don't even know how I got on their email list because one of my weird emails is on this email list, but I've been really struck by it and I stayed on it because I thought it was a good email list. Here they really understand two things really well. First and foremost is the idea that you're treating your email list like a secret club, right? Like they need to feel exclusive. They need to feel beloved in a very specific way, right? That's something like what we do with Apocalyptica, who some of you might have heard of, who's like a pretty big metal band who played a thousand, three thousand people in the States. But like what Apocalyptica, what we do is every announcement, like if it's a new song, if it's a tour, whatever we announced it a day before to the email list because it doesn't really matter if it gets announced like 12 hours before to the super fans and we make sure that people involved know, but like we just do that and we create this kind of inner circle that sort of like cult following of like, oh shit, I'm like an Apocalyptica insider because I know about the tours and I look cool in front of my friends. And that's exactly what they're doing here. The other thing they're doing here that I think is really valuable is talking in the first person and making it feel personal. And to make that clear, like they start off, we will be playing a series of shows. It's not the manager talking, one of the key things you're gonna see us talking about here and over and over again is mailing list people are the people who've chosen to give you the most access to them. You're going in their most sacred place, they're in box. So you wanna make sure that they feel especially connected to you. Yes, exactly. So that's the other thing it's just, and the writing I think, especially in like a casual tone or in a tone that's relevant to the band I think is really important. You know, like if you're on the Guar email list, like they're very enthusiastic about the like, ah, you know, but like that's my Guar noise, but you know what I'm saying. I thought it was a good Guar noise. Like, you know, like that's what they do is, and it's same with their text list, right? Where they'll like, it's a reverent, it's gross, it's funny. And I think you have to understand like, right the way almost you talk to your fans on stage, you know what I mean? Right the way you talk to them at the merch booth afterwards, maybe not the way you talk on stage. Hello Cleveland! I was using Guar for example. Yeah, you know what I mean. Yeah, you gotta go. You know, like you wanna just have that energy. Yeah, I'm trying to think what it will say. See, I like this too. One of the things you always can do with email lists is try to get people to go deeper and deeper. These are already very engaged fans. You know, no one signs up for an email list that is just listening to your song three times on a playlist. It's a person who actually wants to hear from you. So they have this, oh, and one more thing. People who are SVP will be able to choose songs for the band to play on the set list. That's pretty fucking smart. Yeah. Especially for a group that's getting like, a little legacy in their years. I mean, how old is this one? This is 2022. Yeah, this is recent. So this is band Metric. You may be familiar with them if you are old boring like me. Metric are a very solid indie band. Particularly, I think one of their better things is they did this record Fantasies around 2009. And I've been on their mailing list since 2009 because they're that good. Here's the other crazy thing I'll tell you. This is something that you and I I think have disagreed about in the past. Metric has emailed me 59 times since 2009. And yet they are a type of, you know, they play in New York City to nearly 5 to 10,000 people every time they come. They don't, what I like to say, abuse the privilege. They make it so that no one's unsubscribing by betraying how often they hit them up. They really make it when it's something important, they make it count. Okay, so watch this. Welcome to your reliably cryptic and erratically infrequent Metric newsletter. Spring is strange coming from no winter. Time staggers on and we get our news from the comedy network. If only Stephen Colbert were the Republican candidate. In extraterrestrial news, Elon Musk is amazing. Woo, that age badge. Scientists contemplated the existence of double planet system. NASA captured the video of solar flares erupting on the sun and spin unveiled the artwork and track listing for our new album. Absolute God tier way of showing the band's personality and then going into the news that their new album synthetica is coming out. So two things here. One, what I wanna point out with this email and with the airborne toxic event one is notice that both are extremely simple in their formatting, right? I think that a lot of people get really lost in the weeds of formatting the perfect email or whatever. If you overwhelm people, especially with like a relatively small band's email, you know, like Metric have an audience, but they're not. Two of the artists we're gonna look at later. Like don't overwhelm people with it. Just have it, like make it feel like you're getting a letter from your friend, you know, which is what this kind of feels like. And I think that's really crucial to sort of communicating with your audience because they feel that, you know, it doesn't feel like a huge marketing thing. It just feels like, oh, okay. I'm getting a letter from Metric. As per the frequency, the Metric's but no. That I find like with my list that I hit on a weekly basis for pretty big bands, you know, that there's definitely some like white noise in the signups, you know, like... Charm. It's rare that our unsubscribe is over 0.01%. So which is like five to 10 people, you know, on a 10 to 20,000 person list. Like the one exception is the first email will always have a high unsubscribe, which no one can help that. That's just part of the game. I think you can do weekly emails and literally only lose to a few people at a time. And none of those people, generally speaking, are the type of people who like, we're gonna spend a bunch of money on your merch and who we're gonna be super fans anyway. So I think you can go in pretty regularly and just like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And like I've even done emails where going into release week, we just dropped an email every day and didn't really see high unsubscribes day three or four like before the Wednesday or Thursday before release day. So days you think might be lower pre-order days. We're still like $800, $1,000 in email without really changing up the formula without offering anything new. It's just like email is important because the awareness is important, right? Because even if you don't open this metric email, what's the subject line, Jesse? Subject line was hello again, friend of a friend. Sure. So that was a really bad example for what I needed. But like the airport... You know what's the funny thing is that's their style is that they really do make it folksy and personal. But it's like airborne toxic events. One was like come see us play these secret shows. So even if you don't open it and even if you kind of have a sort of irrelevant but like on brand subject line, you're thinking about the band name. You're thinking, oh shit, they're doing a thing, you know? And it's kind of the same with like airborne toxic event, come see secret shows. Even if you delete it, you know the airborne toxic event are playing secret shows, right? Because you have to read it before you delete it basically. Unless I guess you're a really slow reader. Okay, so here's an interesting thing. They really don't just do the cold open. Like some people do the cold open where they keep it a little friendly. They kind of go back and forth. So they're really worrying the people who are interested in this band in while giving them news. Yes, a lot is happening. Our new album, Synthetica, is coming out in North America on June 12th, 2012. Fucking 10 years ago. This is still one of the best emails I've ever seen. Everywhere else, shortly thereafter. And all the little elves here at MMI, which was their label that they had for a while, are madly preparing to get this new music out to the world. Everything is full steam ahead and it's pretty intense. No turning back now. The first thing on youth without youth, which happens to coincide with May Day, a celebration of protest, which did you know originated with 19th century organized labor movement in the USA. So telling you some of the story of the song. Now, before you jump to conclusions about those old time socialist anarchists, take a moment to thank them for effective implementing the eight hour workday and making it illegal for you to get stuck in a factory job when you're still in grade school. So they like really go in on showing you what they're about, what they're precise. You can cringe at the politics, all you want, everything's political these days. Get the fuck over, you're a loser if you think that. This is exactly what their audience wants to hear from them. Yeah. But I also like too, by the end, they get there. Yet again, in other news, our reflections of Synthetica are going viral, like a virus. Think good back to it. Only before coronavirus, 2012. Just remember. So it's okay. And what are these reflections you ask? You can take your question to Susan Miller, the Oracle, or Siri, but the only way to really find out for yourself is to go here for a minute. So they then link into this interactive thing, which I tested before it doesn't work still. And then they talk about how they're doing some more dates and then they do a call to action to go buy some tickets too. So they have a few links, all over the thing, which can be difficult for some people when you're first starting out having a few links can be a little rough. But when you're building bonds with fans the way this band does and doing it very erratically, this is very, very good. And as a note, if you're doing more regular emails, try to focus on just one topic per email. We're gonna see that in a minute. Okay, let's go to your next email. Yes, yeah. So Jesse and I have similar ones. Jesse's might be a slightly better example. But this is good though, because this doesn't, while it doesn't do the thing we initially discussed, this is very good. Yeah. And this is just a black Sabbath email. Black Sabbath hit their list probably more than any classic rock band that I can tell. And one of the things I think is really important here is just like the pushing the constant awareness. Like they've sent similar graphics to me probably three times in the last week. But it's just like black Sabbath is my favorite band has been my favorite band since I was 10 years old. I am never gonna go to the black Sabbath store and be like, huh, I wonder what black Sabbath things are up for sale. But if I get an email and I'm bored because I don't wanna fucking deal with fucking all these idiots who hit me up, I'm gonna look through and be like, oh, shit, that's a really cool master of reality design. You know, that's like, and just like having everything in one place like that and just periodically reminding your fan base, like, hey man, there's stuff here. Make sure you buy it is super important. No, this is very well done. And like, I'll say too, it's like, you know, the presentation with it on the back of all those old fan pick pictures. Oh yeah. It really makes it feel like of a time and of the place the band was in, like contextualize our stuff. Like even like so many people just do the white and like don't think about like what color and gradient is gonna make all the designs pop. Like as you can see, this isn't like fully what I'd consider a gradient, but there's this thing of that. If you look at some of the primary colors and if you learn colors, they're Google it on YouTube. You can learn what colors are gonna really help make something pop and stand out. As you can see, they're doing a lot of black and white in the background. And then they're doing the white there, the purple, sticking to very similar colors to make sure every one of these merch designs pops as much as possible so that they can sell them as best as they can. Oh, this is just a great subject. Today is the anniversary of Master of Reality. You can do that once a year for all your big mows. Very shocking. Jesse Cannon's gonna plug the 1975. No one would have guessed this. No one could have seen it coming. Got some solid black metal designs going there. Yeah, no one could have seen this coming that I'd refer to them. I can't imagine how this happened. Anyway, Matt and I were discussing GIFs. GIFs are some of the best things you can do at your mailbox because here's the fact that matters. So you can see these things in certain email software that are very expensive called IheatMaps and it'll actually show you how much of the email somebody's read. Getting down 25% is a fucking miracle for even your big fans if you're regularly using your thing. But what does help is if you put a lot of the content up fast so the black Sabbath one, while it's great, this is the real shit right here. Now, here's the one problem. When people are on bad connections, this does take a while to load. So you get this disadvantage of doing this technique because an email needs to load. I'm sure we've all had somebody just like email you saying, I don't like the mix of this song or something like that. And it says message when you're loading, you're like, why isn't this loaded? Then it loads and you're like, I'm gonna kill this person, maybe just me. All this is to say doing GIFs, especially on your pre-order or when you drop a new merch line, could be very good. Then you highlight some other things. You know, they highlight this necklace in particular because as we know with merch, anybody who's experienced with this, T-shirts are great, but man, when you do these special merch items, you can, that's where the profits are. Absolutely. And just as a quick note. Whoa, whoa, whoa, don't get carried away. Let me finish it, let me finish it. If you have like serious super fans, long emails can do really well. Like I've done stuff with like Arthur Brown or Steve Vantil from Neurosis, where people were, and obviously these are like legendary musicians who like shaped fucking music forever. But well, Arthur Brown more than Steve Vantil, but I care a lot about Steve Vantil. I don't have very many friends. But like when those guys write like a six paragraph thing, that's just like text-to-speech, people are stoked. And like if you have like- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, really? They do text-to-speech. Well, like I'll like literally sit with Arthur Brown just to transcribe what he says. Got it. But what I'm saying is like, you can get away with longer emails. Don't worry about it. Don't get painfully long, but you can write some thoughts and people will read them. No, I'm with you. Can't believe I'm one of you dudes. My favorite artist. Can't believe I'm one of you dudes. My favorite all time artist. I'm on my stream, so fucking cursed. It's all one JPEG, that's the best part. Yeah. No, so the Jimmy Buffett one. I love Jimmy Buffett a lot. As if you could tell. As you could tell. Fashion style. Got my cigar, good to go. I thought I even clipped it. It didn't even, disastrous. You didn't circumcise your cigar? I didn't circumcise my cigar. All this to say, there's a few things here. The Jimmy Buffett email list gets me literally every day with stuff. What? And because they've got like so many product lines and stuff, it just works. So I think that's a big takeaway. I gotta tell you, I'm shocked. There's no comic sans in this fucker. But also. This is so boomer, it's like murdering my soul. What about it is so boomer that it murders your soul? Jimmy recently returned to play his first live performance since early 2020. A show for 40 guests at the belly-up in Solano, California. Yeah, but that's the point. An historic seaside venue before he got since the 70s. That's why I chose this one because it is so boomer that it's kind of ridiculous. But it knows its audience so perfectly. And I think there's some value to that. That's all I was trying to say here. I also was trying to troll Jesse, if I'm being honest. I did make fun of him for liking Jimmy Buffett, but here's the one thing I'll say with this. So knowing your audience in which to engage with, one of the things both of us always talk about is that thing of knowing culturally what does well. And so we know with boomers what does really well. They love a graphic. They love a meme. I mean, dude, if you put a fucking minion on Jimmy Buffett said it might break the fucking internet. Yeah. I'm gonna hit up my friends at Margaritaville Corporation and all what's up. That minions collab just gotta drop, y'all. The Parrot Heads needs some fucking minions, man. No, but seriously, like, and also just as a side note, like, you can get all the pertinent detail in that main graphic and still have the graphic look good. And that's like also another big thing is like, they understand what Jesse was saying, getting below 25% scroll really hard. So make sure the splash is awesome. Same like in a web design, where you're like your splash on your webpage has to be relevant. We should also explain, these people don't know the splash. Sorry, the splash is like when you click on the page and the bit you see without scrolling, that's the splash. Right, so you don't want that to all be one stupid gross graphic. You want it to immediately give some piece of information to your fans. This is that. Is that splash of opening immediately is like intimate live stream with Florida God, Jimmy Buffett. Yeah, Florida and God are double negative, if I'm asking me, but that's a different story. Oh, and it says no cap. That's for young people. That's for young people, that's true. We bustin' fam. Real fast, the PS is really valuable. And it's something I've gotten a lot out of because, you know, again, maybe someone doesn't read the three full paragraphs or whatever, but they will always read a PS. And so one of the rules they give you in copywriting is to add a PS with the call to action because people will actually read that, like no matter what you do. You know, they'll read the first three sentences and then they'll read the PS. So have that PS. And again, it adds, like Jesse was saying, you know, they're letting you into their most sacred space, they're inbox. So if you have a good PS, people, it's a more intimate thing, right? Like you don't put a PS unless you have like a sort of a relationship with somebody. It just makes it that much more intimate for your fans. And I think it's just a really valuable, cool thing to do. And the other thing, just cause Jesse did make the comic sans joke, but like, don't like, I know you can like play with fonts in interesting ways on Facebook and Instagram. And that can actually work pretty effectively. Don't play with font on your email. Nobody wants, cause like, people are actually trying to read the email and you're not stopping the thumb in the same way. You know what I mean? The way you are on Instagram, where you're like, this is a thumb stopper. So you did the fancy curse of font hack and now you've done it. I don't know, that's just a piece to focus on is like, just have normal fun. Don't try to impress people. Yeah, I don't know. You make a good point here. And like what I would actually say is pick a font you can do really well with on all your emails. Like just basically like the first time you're picking a vibe, but even maybe for the album cycle sometimes you can pick a vibe, but find a font and then don't fuck around. Like the last thing that's going to help anything is you choosing a new font and whole new graphic look. Once you have a look for your emails that had obeys these things that we've been talking about on the stream, pick a format and get to work. Yeah, literally I've been duplicating the same Kill Switch Engage email format for like two years. Never, there it is. Back to metric, the PS. While we do love it when you buy from us, we also want you to get the best deal you can. So for anyone looking to pick up copies of fantasies who isn't interested in the Twilight Eclipse soundtrack, iTunes is running a special promotion this week in the US during which you can buy the album for only $7.99. If you're new to metric and you live in the USA, you might want to check it out. So what I wanted to point out here is, we all know a call to action is like the most important that you're gonna put your most important thing in the collection, but the PS is really good for here's something else you can do that we want to tell you about. That is a perfect place that when you're like, instead of, let's say your main goal is to get everybody to buy your vinyl or buy the new T-shirt that you made for your single. Putting seven other T-shirt links or five other things they can do right next to that thing, very confusing. Get through the email, do the PS and then be like, by the way, we have tons of other merch designs for the last singles or things like that. Get it a little out of the way in the PS so people know that it's designated that this is not the main thing you want them to do. Something metric to mostly hear an airborne toxic event did is, especially if you're like a smaller artist who doesn't have like huge brand recognition, just put the URL in, just put the plain URL because people want to know where they're being taken, and they're a lot less likely to click. And this is also true on ads for Facebook is like people will actually click a URL, they won't click a shop now button, because they want to know this isn't going to be weird and it's not, even if it's like a mirrored link I found, it's still like people will click an actual link a lot more than they'll click a button that says like go here. You know, and you can have both sometimes or whatever, but really like have plain links because that makes people trust you a lot more. All right, Matt, I think we're through our examples. So let's talk subjects. I feel like we didn't really hit some. What do you see that is a good best practice for subjects? Less than nine words. A, insight people to click, you know, so like something I'll do to get people to follow on Spotify, for example, is like want to be the first to hear new music from Apocalyptica and try to make it pretty clear what the actual thing you're writing about is, because again, you know, your email list, a good email list has like 25% open rate maybe, but everyone reads the subject line. Like if you can just put in like I wrote percent one out for Apocalyptica today, we're touring around the Europe and the US this summer. You know, that simple. Like even if you don't open it and see that they're going to be in Portland, Maine on September 13th, you at least know that Apocalyptica are maybe coming by you if you live in the US or Europe this summer. You know, and I think that's really valuable, just appreciating the 100% penetration of the subject line. I don't know, what are your thoughts? So I think the most important thing actually with the subject line is a little bit of curiosity. So this is like one of those things I talk about constantly, I like so, as I've mentioned before. Day jobs at tons of media companies, Rolling Stone, Daily Beast. What we're trying to do with headlines is we're trying to create enough curiosity to click. So here's a good example. The podcast I produce at Rolling Stone is called Don't Let This Flop. It's one of my favorite things I do with my life. So here's how we generate curiosity. The title of our podcast today, Why Brad Pitt Makes Everyone Fart Uncontrollably. So when you're doing a celebrity based podcast, people want to know why that happens. I think the best thing you can often do and when I see the best open rates and you can watch this in your metrics of your email provider is you can see how many people actually do the opens and like a fantastic opening rate is around 25%. That's about what you see these days. Like 23 is still great. And it depends where you get your emails from. Cause if you get your emails from merch buyers, that's going to be lower and the people will explicitly say sign up. That's just another thing to be aware of. The last thing I will also say is it should not have to be said, but send the email out to a couple of people before you send it to your thing. Every email provider has a test email function where you can send out the email and check it. You do not want to be, we've all gotten that email. I messed this up. Thoroughly click through, thoroughly do it again. You get so many unsubscribes when you mess up enough to send the same email again. Although I will say kind of a fun thing I've noticed. And it depends on your brand cause some of my artists are very not interested in this. But if you have a small typo in the subject line, sometimes that'll blow up your click fit. No, no, no. One of the most underestimated things. So no one will retweet a tweet with bad grammar, but oddly enough, they'll open an article and they'll open an email with bad grammar. Cause they'll be like, what the hell's wrong with this thing? So there was recently in media that we call this thing embargo where we know some news is going to happen. Like I'll often know something a few hours before it hits the world because we've been alerted to it. But you're not allowed to say anything till 3pm, let's say. Sometimes the media companies keep the embargoed thing in the article, cause then it seems more important to people even though it's all being released at three o'clock. If you want to like understand this really well, read Trust Me I'm Lying. Oh yeah, it's a great book. Great book. Cause it breaks down like a lot of the- What's explain? Ryan Holiday, who's a good author, he's written some great books, but Trust Me I'm Lying is a book about how he used PR games to deceive people and get bigger press for a lot of people. Great book. He's also the author of Growth Hacker Marketing, which I've recommended a million times on this channel. Yeah, no, he's an interesting guy. A lot of dark secrets available there. Guys, thank you so much. Follow for more, D.M. for Bremen Consultation. Oh Jesus Christ. I hope you notice I had the cigar ready.