We recently ran a sales campaign for an artist to coincide with a tour. (John, you might remember that I asked a question in a coaching call about running sales funnels for other artists and you were firmly against the idea - well, we did it anyway )

We imported subscribers from the artist's existing list (which was on Mailchimp) and set up an Aweber opt-in form on her website. She drove traffic to the opt-in form by handing out free download offers on postcards at her gigs. We also promoted her free track offer to our list. 

The results for the campaign are:

Imported subscribers                                                  738

New subscribers                                                         421              58% list growth

Total subscribers                                                       1159

Less unsubscribes (excluding customers)                       182              16% unsubscribe rate

Net subscribers                                                           977

Customers                                                                    61              6% purchase rate

We ran a 6 email sequence with the offer made in email 4. 

Open rates for the existing subscribers were consistently c45% and the open rates for new subscribers dropped steadily to c55% by the end of the campaign.

Sales Results:

One of the main challenges with this artist is that she doesn't have a significant catalogue of music that she has released independently. She was previously signed with a big label and the rights to the music she released with them aren't hers. She released an album last year, but it was a Christmas collection (hard to sell in April!) We had to get creative and encouraged her to pick out the least seasonal tracks from the album plus a couple of unreleased tracks that she had available (one live, one demo) to create an exclusive collection.

The sales offer that came out of this was a seven-track bundle including priced at £7.95 - we sold 47 of these. 

We added an upsell of seven tracks from another artist, at a combined price for both collections of £14.50 - we sold 14 of these.

So the total revenue from the campaign was just short of £600. The direct costs of the campaign were the Paypal fees and the costs of printing the postcards, which was less than £100 in total.

The campaign ran for two months, the first month coincided with the tour, so the second month was much quieter (although she had a few additional gigs and continued to hand out the postcards).

There was very little social media activity from the artist through the campaign. Interesting, though, the artist posted on her Facebook at the end of the campaign to thank us for our help and reminded people about the free track offer (which is still available, although we have closed down the sales funnel that runs off it) and we got another c20 people sign up!

I'd love to get feedback on these results - how do they compare with others' experience and are there any areas that stand out as good or poor performance? Is there anything in particular that we should use as a benchmark to measure our performance?

Deb x