Music Festival Newsletters. 

Newsletters in any industry are a great way to engage and communicate with customers and prospects. The old paper newsletter has largely disappeared and been replaced with an electronic variant. How can music festival organisers maximise marketing and sales opportunities with their own newsletter. 

A well run and organised festival organisation that retains a core full time team will usually produce a newsletter but this can vary from a half-hearted effort to a regular professionally produce one. This frequency and quality of content will depend on the resources and skill sets of those tasked with its production. Newsletter formats can be a polished PDF that is emailed or a simple text email and to make access easier many newsletter recipients may receive a link to webpage via email, social media or SMS for example. The delivery may depend on recipient’s preferences along with the need to avoid large files or being redirected to spam folders.

CRM and Data Collection. 
The essence of any newsletter creation is the building and maintenance of recipient data and a CRM (customer Relationship Management) system is essential for this with all data being collected under the principles of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). The promotion of newsletter sign up can be made on the festival's website and social media channels with an automated process for the data collected to feed into CRM with a flag for newsletter subscription and delivery preference. The selection of subscribers for each newsletter delivery will then be a straightforward process.

Content and Frequency. 
To create great engagement a newsletter should be generated at least once a month with some organisations sending weekly if resources permit. Newsletters should have content that is easy to digest and relevant to the festival. A mixture of articles and news regarding artist line-ups and profiles or festival video content are always good core content. Festival-goers are always interested in content that gives an insight of the festival operations from a behind the scenes perspective. In addition it’s important to understand that the newsletter audience may include potential volunteers and vendors too so the newsletter content can be used to recruit them.

Leveraging for Sales Revenue.
Every newsletter should incorporate some call to action for readers which can generate revenue with a focus on early bird ticket sales and exclusive deals on packages for example. Selling merchandise in the newsletter and including sponsor deals can generate additional revenue. The newsletter is also great at generating ticket ambassadors or new subscribers with a reward programme using member get member principles which can lead to increased ticket sales.

If the newsletter is professionally executed it can be a great tool for enchaining the festival brand and also provides a good platform for surveys and customer feedback as part of a continuous improvement programme.

For festival organisers planning their events using a software management platform like Festival Pro gives them all the functionality they need manage every aspect of their event logistics. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The Festival Pro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features with specific modules for managing artists, contractors, venues/stages, vendors, volunteers, sponsors, guestlists, ticketing, cashless payments and contactless ordering. 

Photo by Kaboompics via Pexels

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