Three Email Templates For Your Music Studio
[Scroll to the buttom to see the 3 email templates]
Get More Music Students With Email
August heats up as music studios rev up their fall marketing engines. Students that dropped out in the summer are a likely population to reach out to via email. Don’t forget those students that signed up last fall but dropped out of lessons around the time of Christmas break. They’re likely in the after school enrichment market.
3 Groups To Market To
- Summer drops
- Inactive students
- Warm and cold leads
How To Get Customers To Read Your Email
People have to be compelled to open, read and click on your emails in order for email marketing to work. These three things have to happen in order to make your email marketing effective. They have to open that email, they have to read it and they have to act.
I use to send out newsletter style emails. A combination of upcoming dates, events and promotions. Lots of pictures and headlines and a variety of messages. I felt like the more stuff I added the more interested my customers would become and the more inspired they would be to add on more programs.
The problem with this type of email is that very few people read these types of emails. It screams sales. People’s inboxes are inundated with sales emails. They’re getting emails from Neiman Marcus, Target, their gym and your email is just sandwiched right in there with the rest of the emails screaming for attention. 20% off, 24-hour flash sale, now enrolling for fall lessons. When people go to their inbox in the morning, they ask themselves, what is of interest to me and what isn’t?
If it doesn’t scream interesting, fun, thought provoking; they’ll click delete, delete, delete. They’re looking for what’s of interest-what’s of value to them. “Now enrolling for fall lessons” will only be of interest to someone who’s been trying to find a moment, between summer camp schedules and unpacking from vacation, to enroll their child in music lessons. There’s a small percentage of those people. The “now enrolling” email goes straight to the trash. What a waste of your time.
The Perfect Subject Line
Someone opens your email, you’ve written a subject line that sparks their curiosity. Next step they scan the email to size it up. They just scan it quickly and ask themselves, does this look of interest to me? Does this look like something I want to read? It’s a split second decision. If they open the email and the first sentence fails to deliver with a strong or thought provoking sentence…delete.
You want your subject line to create a story gap; an incomplete statement or question that sparks the reader’s imagination on fire. If I walked up to you and I said “the craziest thing happened to me yesterday” and then walked away, you’re sitting there thinking, hey, you can’t do that to me! What happened to you yesterday? I’m dying to know. The curiosity is killing me! This is exactly what you want your subject line to do. A story gap makes someone think- I wonder what this is about. Careful now. This can feel like a trick-you have to deliver on how you respond to that subject line.
Make Your Email Look Like Email
Your email has to look like an email…a real email. Not some html fancy design sales piece. No one wants to read that. They just delete it. Look at your own behavior. How many of those hard selling “25% off” emails do you actually open, read and act on.
So marketers write their subject lines in all lowercase. Why? It’s a signal to the reader that this email is friendly, not salesy. If an email can be enjoyable, thoughtful or just curious-you’ve got yourself a winning email, so let’s dive in a little bit.
Summer dropout students who were in your school in the spring and they dropped out for summer. You could use this as a template and then manually plug in the kid’s name, or you could do this as a mail merge and just hit everybody at once. Again, there’s going to be no design.
1. SUBJECT: does this work for you?
This opens a story gap. Does what worked for me? Well, you’re going to have to open the email to find out. You open the email and it says
I’m finalizing our fall schedule this week. I wanted to see if (child’s name) could start lessons back up on Aug 14 at 4pm?
This is simply an invitation for a conversation. An opportunity for you to be top of mind for your spring students.
2. SUBJECT: interested?
I would send this next email to people that inquired about music lessons and never signed up. This is my take on the Dean Jackson 9-Word email. It serves the same purpose of the first email. It’s an invitation for a conversation. It’s eliciting a yes or no response.
Are you still interested in music lessons for your child?
It’s a yes or no question. I’m not selling at this point. I’m asking a question that is easy for them to respond to.
3. Subject: did you hear tomorrow’s weather report?
Now I’m going to go into some story based marketing. The email is going to have a little more substance and story. I’m going open with something completely unexpected. My first sentence is going to continue on with this unexpected, unusual theme and then I’m going to gradually transition into the sale.
They say tomorrow will be so hot you could fry an egg on a sidewalk, but why waste a perfectly good egg. Have no fear fall will soon be here. A log burning in the fireplace. Kids playing music in the living room. Everyone can play an instrument. It’s easier than it looks. Sign up for music lessons today.
PS. click here for $40 off lessons offer expires August 20th
This email subjected creates a story gap with an unexpected question? “Did you hear tomorrow’s weather report?” The first sentence responds to the subject using storytelling with images “they say, tomorrow will be so hot, you could fry an egg on a sidewalk.” Well, that’s unusual, conversational and fun. Easy sentence pushes the story along as it transitions from summer to fall and ultimately thee offer “$40 off”. This is sales email that tells a story and allows the reader to dream a little.
People who open and click this email are signalling to you that there is some level of interest.
