As someone who love love loves data, you’d think I’d be devastated by Apple’s recent announcement to limit information sent to email senders (like open rates and IP address [location identifiers]).

Open rates are used to test a subject line’s effectiveness, as well as the level of engagement of the recipient.

If a musician has a fan list, they would want to know if their fans are opening their emails, thus getting to know them, their music, and what the musician is offering, like merch, ticket sales, or new music.

But what if we don’t have that information? What should change with our email marketing strategies?

Keep Calm and Email On!

~Cheryl B. Engelhardt

Here’s what I’ll be telling the musicians in my program Rock Your Email List, the ones who know that email is the #1 way to monetize a fan base:

1. Use a community of people in your industry (like the Facebook group for Rock Your Email List or another community such as Amplify) to bounce your subject line ideas off of. Any feedback will help you craft a great subject line, and mitigate the need for data.
2. Ditch the re-engagement series, or change to be click-based. A re-engagement series is designed to send a series of emails to subscribers who haven’t engaged in a while, meaning, it’s been a few months since they’ve opened an email. With the new changes to Apple’s mail (40% of mail clients) this data will be skewed such that someone who may have opened an email, won’t necessarily be reported having done so. So an engaged fan may start getting emails saying “hey, is this the correct email?” and “is this goodbye?” You’ll want to change your settings to reflect clicks, or ditch the series all together.
3. Write great emails. The more and more you write engaging emails giving value, making a person’s day better, the more likely they will continue to open the emails in the future. It sounds simple, but this is the entire point of email marketing in the first place!
4. Engage in other ways to build the relationship. Set up a text responder, message people individually on Facebook or Instagram, and keep people engaged on social media. This is not for the purpose of replacing email, but to build the relationship with your fans so that when they get your email, they want to open it.

This is all to say that you’ve got this: be real, be vulnerable, be strategic, and email will continue to be your biggest tool in your musician tool belt!