Indie Film Marketing Part 3: Email Marketing

This month’s independent film marketing tool is email marketing! Email marketing is one of the most effective techniques for building leads. In this case, leads are an audience for your film. In case you don’t know what email marketing is, it is as simple as sending an email to a contact list. Doing this consistently and in a way that provides value can help you build an audience of people interested in your films.

In order to start, you need a database of email addresses. You can start with your personal contact list. In order to build your list, make sure to add a section to your film’s website (or your personal website) where people can enter their email to be added to your database. Once you have an audience of more than 100 contacts, it’s time to look into a third-party email host. We recommend MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and Aweber. All of these have free or low-cost email campaign programs. With these hosts, you can also see statistics of who is opening your emails, clicks to your website, etc, so they are quite useful!

You can send all kinds of different content to your contact list, but keep in mind to provide value, because people can easily unsubscribe or label your email as spam. We recommend providing brief updates on your film, clips, or production photos, and then linking to your website or blog for more content. Longer emails usually do not perform as well as short, eye-catching ones. Important updates such production times, film festival screenings, and release dates are great examples of value to provide in these emails. You can can also share your crowdfunding campaign, if applicable. If you need extras or help with crew, you can also send a request for assistance through email marketing.

Another interesting area of content for email marketing is videos and virtual reality. If your film tells the story of another world, creating a 360-degree camera view of the world for your audience to explore could be a meaningful way to engage your audience. You can send this to your email list as a preview and they will no doubt be ecstatic to see the film after being a part of its world!

If you’re wondering how often to send updates, every two weeks is a good time frame, particularly during production of your film. This ensures that your audience won’t forget about you! You can use your email host to create emails and schedule them to send out in the future automatically so you won’t need to be near a computer constantly.

Another content idea for email marketing is links to the platforms your film is hosted on. If you are interested in film aggregators to get your film on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and more, visit us at Quiver Digital for an easy, one point of delivery service toward video-on-demand distribution.