Sep12th

Battle of the Record Labels: The Final Results

I was hoping this was going to be an interesting battle between the remaining record labels. I was hoping to see them use some of their creativity and transfer it into the email marketing channel. Alas, it was just not the case.

I’ve always heard that record labels aren’t very forward thinking with new marketing techniques and from the looks of this, I can now agree with this statement – except for one company. We’ll get to that though.

Okay, well Sony are already out of the running. They didn’t even have a mailing list. Ninja Tunes did though, and I was really hoping that they would come through for me. I’m a big follower of the independents, the underdogs of the music industry, and really expected them to be a bit more inventive with their campaigns, but no, nothing. *sigh*

I did receive something from EMI though – I wish I hadn’t, but I did. It was a plain text email telling me that The Magic Numbers were playing a gig in London. I’m not a fan of them.

That was it from them, just that. But before we start dwelling on how utterly rubbish this experiment was for me, there is one more company to review. Could they really salvage this whole experiment? Will they make the hour I spent signing up to and then writing about all these record labels email marketing campaigns worth while? Surely…..

Yes! (good build up, eh?)

Universal have once again delivered and not made this a complete waste of time. I received 3 emails from Universal over that period of time and all really quite impressed me. They took advantage of the “Please keep me updated with info on any new artists from Universal Music, that are similar to the ones I have selected above” button I clicked and sent me an email regarding a new artists album that was coming out.

Now I wasn’t really into it, but the thought behind it was refreshing. Not only had they notified me of their new artist but also included in the email, 4 song samplers AND a free mp3 download of one of the tracks.

That was the kind of email marketing I was hoping for out of these guys. The other 2 emails were also in the same guise and were openly welcomed by me (I’m a fan of listening to as much new music as possible).

The frequency was regular and they kept the content consistent which meant that the recipients would know what to expect and would be happier to open the emails. Lovely.

The design was eye-catching and they had clearly thought about how they would conduct their campaigns and actually had a plan. No random plain text messages about bands I didn’t care about being sent to everyone on their mailing list from this lot. Universal aren’t some sort of email marketing cowboys, no no.

I think you know who won this experiment.