 Have you noticed that all your favorite artists are giving you their phone number? If you were conscious before 2016, which with my audience that can often be pretty debatable for many reasons, this can seem a little odd to you since musicians did everything they could to keep a barrier between themselves and their audience. But ever since then, that barrier has fallen and you now have SZAed telling fans to come over to her house. In this post empire world, even some of the coolest bands making the best niche underground music are telling you to give them a call on their hotline. And while Blinkway II is a pop-on fan and I'd usually be a little worried about those type of bands giving their young fans their numbers, since we all know what happens there. There's something far more innocent going on and I'm not that worried. So while a lot of you don't have that many fans, one of the things that happens when you do get fans is you constantly regret not doing a certain strategy sooner since it would have been way more effective. And if you are collecting phone numbers from your fans, well, you will regret it when things are going well since you can really make tons of progress building your fan base with the numbers you have in order to do text message marketing or what nerds call SMS marketing. That is bigger nerds than me and trust me, you don't want to go full nerd like that. And here's why. People tend to check their phones a lot. You may have noticed this yourself. And 95% of text messages are read within three minutes of being sent. Text message marketing averages around a 90% open rate and email averages 20 to 25%, which is a pretty big difference. And if you do text messaging marketing right, it's way more effective than email, Instagram, Facebook, or anything ever was. And I know we're all propping up TikTok as being the greatest thing that ever happened to music marketing, but it's not very good at announcements and promoting things, as you will see if you ever try to do that on there. But this is the thing. Text message marketing is often three to four times more effective than anything else. Now, while those numbers don't mean a ton to you right now, it's all to say you want to be building your fan base and your business smart. And this is a place you should really be building. And I'm now telling you about it because these text message marketing services used to cost a fortune and we're clunky at best. But now we have great tools to build your fan base with them. So let's talk about what you can text message fans to grow your fan base and your income. When your new sub comes out and you text all the fans you have the number of, you can get a high open rate and it's pretty likely the people who will like your music the most are the same ones who will give you their numbers and then we'll also be excited to listen to your new song and drive up your Spotify popularity score. And then I'll drive up the beloved algorithm putting you on to release radar and discover weekly playlist and hopefully then push you into an editorial playlist placement. Since the open rate on text messages is so much better than email, this could be a really big deal. And if you don't want to know what I'm talking about with all this Spotify algorithm stuff, hit the description because there's so many links in there. But there's more. When you have merch and are trying to raise money, you can drive sales to the people most enthused towards you with text message marketing. When you're playing in someone whose number you have's town, you can text them your coming. Since if you collect zip codes, you can then sort it inside your text messaging app and then target those people who are in that area. But there's a funny thing. While text message marketing has been around for quite a long time, it really hasn't been exploited yet. So it feels intimate to many fans and you can get them to do a lot of things that a social media post or an email will end up being ignored if you ask for. Text message marketing is a great way to get UGC. Which is, you know, dork for user generated content. And it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Users make TikToks of your song or share it on their Instagram story. It's content that your fans generate for you. So here's the wild thing. Because this tech is so new, you can often send a text with a bit of vulnerability to these fans and they'll feel really close to you because it's their text messaging app where they message their friends. Try something like this. Hey, it's in Cell High Beast. My new song, Meet Cute at the Purge, is a song that's really important to me. If any of you can make a TikTok to it, well, it means the world to me. And my cat, Mr. Whiskers, since I'm trying to blow up this song so I can get him one of those crazy cat trees things to climb. And really, who doesn't want to help Mr. Whiskers? But seriously, this is the type of thing that really works even when you have a few fans since it just feels so intimate. There's a lot of possibilities and people are still innovating what you can do here so you should really dive in and experiment. But how do you collect these texts? Well, if you play live, you can do the old-fashioned way and print a mailing list paper and ask for phone numbers, emails. Since emails are still effective and some people will only give you those. End zip codes so you can text them the next time you play their area. Some musicians get fancy and have people type into an iPad and then use some fancy email automation where you could send them an unreleased song or other fun stuff like a cover or whatever you did that is only available to people who subscribe to your mailing list. That works really well. If you sell merch on Shopify because you want it to be on Spotify you could also collect from anyone who orders there. And yeah, I know that sentence is wildly confusing because these lame companies name themselves the same things. So let's say you are doing that. You're now able to collect phone numbers and zip codes of everyone who buys from you using Shopify's very cool engage message tool and then you can message them from that. And I should also say if you have a website or one of those link tree type services almost all of them have a way to collect phone numbers and emails. And they all have for years, frankly. So I know a lot of you are now excited about doing this and want to know which service for text messaging you should be using. Now I don't want to go too crazy talking about the best service because frankly they're all changing fast. And with the growing competition in this space the prices change every few weeks on some of them. So I'm just going to do a quick survey of what I have seen so far. But honestly this is a great thing to comment down below and let us know what you've used if anything and what you're liking. Community is the service that has made the most noise and to my eyes is one of the cleaner ones with robust features. But of course that comes with a price. And while they aren't at mail chimp levels of exploiting their customers for what they get for the money I'd like to see this tool become a bit more cost effective as the market opens up. But this is truly a tool I am watching for anyone who has a sizable income from music. Since this is a service that could pay for itself with its really great engagement tools. On the opposite end of the spectrum for those of you with really small email lists if you want to get started but not use your own number you can use Google Voice. Which will for free give you a number where you can keep track of numbers on a spreadsheet and then text them individually without giving out your number. While this will get to be very cumbersome once your lists get sizable this is a great place to start for a lot of you who don't want to spend any money but get these advantages. Then we get to the two services most people I work with use. Send Hub is known for being affordable and having the tools you need to get started when you aren't doing super complicated marketing pushes. But as I was saying earlier if you use Shopify to sell merch their tool has great rates and really is effective at doing wild marketing moves and driving sales and this tool continues to approve all the time. There's so many of these which is why this space is changing so rapidly and making this more and more viable for even musicians who are at the start of building a fan base. I'm pretty convinced in the last year that while a lot of these services will change there's no doubt especially with constant articles about how Gen Z and even younger are going to be less into email and more into text and WhatsApp marketing that this will be one of the most powerful avenues you should start building. As these relationships and who you could write to often can last decades at a time so really getting invested in this can really help build your fan base in your musical journey. So here's the thing while you just learned all about text marketing if you really want to grow your fan base you need to understand how to drive and engage fans so you should really watch my video on Rivet an amazing new tool for doing just that which is on the screen right now. So make sure you watch that next if you really want to level up. Thanks for watching.