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You just started teaching music privately, or you just decided to add a virtual aspect to your communications with your current and prospective students and their parents. No matter how long you’ve been teaching, you’ve decided to up your email game. Or at least… you’re thinking about it.
I’ll start by saying: email marketing is one of the best things you can do for your business.
Why Email Marketing is Good for Private Music Teachers
Email Uses What you Already Have
Email Marketing uses subscribers that you already have – current and prospective students. Instead of looking for more leads, you capitalize on the ones you already have.
Email is Personal
(Almost) all of the advertising and contact you get with potential clients online is impersonal. Paid ads, posts in Facebook groups, you name it. Email is different, though. It is direct communication that builds relationship.
Email is easy to Automate
Things like Welcome sequences, lesson reminders, and recital prep emails are incredibly easy to automate – giving you some of your incredibly valuable time back.
On top of all of that, it is something you can use to grow your business, build relationships with your clients, and increase value to your clients… either for very, very cheap, or free.
What is Email Marketing?
While the term “Email Marketing” sounds business-y and technical and scary, it really isn’t. All it is is the use of email to promote a product or a service, and give some extra value to your current customers (or students).
While the term technically refers to emails specifically geared towards generating more sales, I would argue that, as Private Music Teachers, every email we send is geared towards more sales.
When you are emailing your students or their parents, you are connecting with them. You are going above and beyond to show them that you care about them – and that, in turn, makes them more likely to keep buying lessons with you – and recommending you to their friends.
So we at C&S Music like to think of our emails as additional value for our students and their parents – each one demonstrating that we care!
So. We are going to walk you through how to set up a simple email marketing system to foster your private music business!
Here we go…
1. Pick your Email Marketing Provider
If you use a scheduling software like Square or MyMusicStaff, email marketing is built in to those programs, and they are linked to your student/client database of emails and other contact information. While the emails can be exported and then imported to a different system, we recommend staying within your scheduler just to keep things easy.
Looking for a Student Scheduler?
Here at C&S Music, we use Square. They offer online booking, schedule management, invoicing, automatic appointment reminders, and more – all for the low, low price of free. They have an email marketing add-on that is usually $15 per month, but you can click the button below to get your first month free!
If you aren’t using a system with built in marketing, there are several options for you:
MailerLite
MailerLite is a popular option because it is free for the first 1,000 Subscribers with unlimited emails per month, so many private music teachers don’t ever have to pay for it. Their editor is intuitive, and you can create multi-step email sequences.
MailChimp
Mailchimp is another popular email marketing tool that allows for up to 2,000 subscribers and 10,000 emails per month on the free account. They also have a great editor, but they do not allow you to create multi-step sequences on the free account, which pushes many users to a paid plan before they reach 2,000 subscribers.
Mailerlite and Mailchimp are the two most popular email marketing tools right now (other than those integrated into scheduling softwares). If you want more options, check out this list of the top 13 free email marketing tools.
2. Make a Plan
Figure out exactly what you want your emails to do. Provide information, yes, but what else?
Do you want them to…
- Sell something from your store?
- Encourage student referrals?
- Sign up for a camp?
- Send them to your social media?
- Engage with your social media?
- Visit your Website?
- Sell “lesson add-ons”?
… or something else completely?
Decide on your end goal, and the steps towards it will become much clearer and much easier.
3. Set up a Welcome Sequence
What the heck is an Email Welcome Sequence?
We’re glad you asked!
A welcome sequence is an automated set of emails dripped out over a certain number of days that is triggered by a client action. That could be clicking on a product in your store, inquiring about prices, or – the most common for private music teachers, and the one we’re going to talk about – attending their introductory lesson.
Sidenote: We conduct our introductory lessons more like student interviews than lessons, so our email sequence is designed to get them ready for their “interview”, help them get to know us, and set expectations for lessons, scheduling, and communication. Take a look at our piano intro lesson plan to see what kinds of things we do in our introductory lessons!
What should I talk about in my Email Welcome Sequence?
To make it easy for you, we made an email welcome sequence checklist that outlines exactly when to send emails and exactly what should be in them – so you can just set it and forget it.
Some of the necessities:
- Lesson date & time
- Lesson books to purchase
- What needs to be brought to each lesson
- Policies: makeup, late payments, etc.
- Social Media
- Website
- Manage expectations for future communications (how often will you be emailing them?)
- Important dates: vacations, recitals, etc.
- Special offers (refer-a-friend discount, pay-by-semester discount, etc.)
Can you include more? Absolutely. Do you have to include a website if you don’t have one? Absolutely not. Since we are all individual businesses that operate in different ways, the welcome sequence will look somewhat different for everyone. Just make sure that they are getting all of the information that they need.
4. Play with It
Like I said, this is not a one-size-fits-all game. There are best practices, there are good ideas and there are bad ideas, but email marketing will look different for each and every one of you.
Try out different sequences. Maybe do one leading up to a recital that includes a discount for bringing a friend. Maybe do one for a holiday. Maybe set one up for old students that got too busy or overwhelmed for lessons.
Maybe set up a monthly or quarterly newsletter.
Be creative, and don’t be afraid to try new things!
Have any questions? Need help setting up your emails? Just want to bounce some of your ideas off of someone? We are here for you! Shoot us an Email or leave a comment!
