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Business News Education & Events The Great Escape 2014
Ignore email at your peril, says fan engagement panel at The Great Escape
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 15 May 2014
One of the key messages to come out of the Building A Fan Business strand at the CMU Insights-programmed Great Escape Convention last week was the continued importance of email as a key channel for communicating to fans.
And honing in on that point was Kevin Kiernan from rGenerator, the direct-to-consumer agency that grew out of Sony Music and which now works with music and entertainment clients from across the industry.
Asked for a speedy list as to why the gathering of fan email addresses should remain a top priority for artists and their business partners Kiernan identified a number of reasons: email provides better insights and analytics, the artist owns the data and doesn’t have to pay Facebook to ensure their whole community sees a message, and perhaps most importantly, email is simply a more commercial channel than social.
“We don’t count on Facebook and Twitter to create commerce”, Kiernan explained. “But rather to drive people into the funnel, ultimately to drive them to email. People still trust email for hearing about and doing business. They use the other channels for community, but when it comes to buying things they want a little more focus, and you get that from email”.
Social networking, of course, remains important for building awareness and nurturing a community, and may well continue to generate more traffic than email, but assuming a key component of the fan relationship is ultimately selling products and services to fans, then the inbox remains an important touchpoint.
You can hear Kiernan’s insights on the importance of email in full here: