This month on Inflyte we launched our much-requested Promo Scheduling tools. When we are working together to market and promote music across different regions and different time-zones, delivering promos at a time that is relevant to your contacts improves open rates, listen rates and overall creates a good impression; we’re all guilty of overlooking emails or promos that are sent out-of-hours. So we want to give you a few tips that will increase your hit-rate, maximise your campaign engagement and save time in the process.
1. Set Your Time-Zone: It’s vital that you set your time-zone in the Promo Settings menu of your account if you are planning to start scheduling campaigns. Campaign pushes will be scheduled based on this time-zone.
2. Map Your Subscribers: Your Inflyte account can store location data on every subscriber so you can see where they are located. Some of this data will be pre-populated, but you can also add this data yourself. Add a City or a country to the address box in their contact card in order to Map any subscriber. A map with location will then appear on their contact card. If you want to schedule a promo to deliver at mid-day in a recipients time-zone – it’s very easy to do so. Here’s a post which explains a bit more about Geo-Mapping.
3. Use Tags To Create Country Specific Pushes: So now that you have mapped some subscribers, create a Tag for their country. So for example, you might create as a tag “USA – East Coast” and a separate Tag “USA – West Coast”. When you go to schedule your campaign you can schedule these tags to deliver promos to these regions at the same time of day, but allowing for time-zone differences.
4. Staggered Campaign Schedules: Traditionally, record companies would stagger the release of their promos in groups. Print media would receive them first, radio a week later and club DJs a week after that. Depending on how you have tagged your subscribers (eg Print, Radio, Press, Online etc), you can easily build a delivery schedule like this and customise it to your exact requirements.
5. Premieres: So you have a campaign that’s being premiered on national radio at 7pm on Friday or being published on a world-famous music blog and you want to deliver the promo immediately after the premiere. You can schedule your campaign to send just as the embargo lifts AND you can even rename the Subject line of your emails to suit each push eg – “BBC Radio 1 – Hottest Record In The World”
6. This message will self-destruct: We said this post was about five ways to use promo scheduling. It was a little lie. Let us not pretend the REAL reason you can now schedule your promos on Inflyte, is to create the impression we are all actually working, when in fact we could be device-free, sipping on mojitos, half a world away.