Why doesn't anyone customize the experience?

I've (Jack) recently been giving some thought to why music artists don't offer up merchandise to their fans that is truly unique, limited quantity, and customized. I'm intrigued with two dynamics that seem to make this a no-brainer. First, the cost difference between a limited run item and the unlimited run is inconsequential and easily covered by the fan. For example, a simple T-shirt on one website at $12.95 for one is $10.36 each for 50 and $8.40 each for 250. The $1.96 cost difference between a limited quantity of 50 (and therefore rare and collectible) and unlimited run T-shirts seems small and, to me at least, is a minor risk set by the likelihood that your true fans will want the limited run T-shirt, likely in addition to other T-shirts they buy there also special, rare, and one-of-a-kind.

Second, of course, is that your fans would much rather have something from you that was unique and personal to them, even something that they had to "work at" to obtain. These simple dynamics drive fan loyalty and also can significantly increase revenues for the artists, who can charge more for special run, rare items.

Artists that are selling merchandise on their mobile fan clubs through the Adva Mobile service are increasingly putting personalized, rare, one-of-a-kind items up for sale. Fans appreciate the personal connection they have with their favorite artists through these unique products, and the artist has a virtually unlimited supply of personal relationship building and fan connecting experiences to offer the fan.

To learn more about selling merch, click here.

Tweet, Post or Share?

You may have noticed that recently the footer on your mobile website has changed. Specifically, we've removed 'Share' and 'Post' and replaced those by 'Tweet'.

'Share' meant that fans can tell their friends about your mobile website. It was a tweet that went on their account and carried your friendly name (preceeded by a hash sign) and a link to your site.

'Post' meant sort of a message board where fans would ramble about the band, music or whatever.

Since both of them were really about sharing the experience, and both end up on Twitter (in addition to the mobile website), we've figured it's best and less confusing to merge them into 'Tweet'. Those tweets would go on the fans' Twitter account, tagged with your friendly name and contain a link to your mobile website. When fans come on the mobile 'Tweet' page, we'll present them the Twitter search result on your friendly name.

BTW, if you wanted to substitue the hash mark that preceeds your friendly name with your actual Twitter user ID and '@', you can do that on the 'Fan Posts' page on the artist portal.

Weekly Update 5/14/2009

It's been a great week for us at Adva.

The response for the newsletter last week was overwhelming (>70% of the recepients read the newsletter and many had clicked through to the articles on this blog) mainly due to a new level of quality articles this time.

Even more exciting was the ArtistData partnership announcement, that helps bands leverage their assets (gigs, news and blog posts) from ArtistData to their mobile fan club. And then we announced the partnership with CPN, who are using mobile fan clubs for their musicians (see Joyce Sims' club) and sport entertainers.

There have been quite a few features we introduced this week, some of which we didn't even blog about:

• Uploading exclusive content to grab fans' email addresses and zipcodes (read);
• We've introduced a fix that helped iPhone users to view pages w/o the iPhone hanging on them (read)
• We've also introduced a way for you to create a customised automated email that will get sent to fans who purchased merchandise from you (read)

We had nice media coverage this week from Mobile Entertainment, which was exciting.

There's a lot going on, getting ready to be launched or announced...keep with us: it's gonna get interesting around here =)

Send a custom confirmation email to fans who bought merch from you

Following up when fans buy your merch is important, because it gives the fans confidence that this new mobile system really works. The money is going where it should go (that's you, the musicians) for your merch, and the merch ends up with the fan. It also motivates your fans to buy from you again, as you give them personal attention while you're trying to "deliver the goods". Simply put, it's all about good service.

We've introduced a new feature on the artist portal that allows you to define a custom email that will automatically be sent to the fan once they bought merch from you. You can specify the subject, 'From', content of the email in rich text format, and add an attachment.

You can create a different email for every merch item that is sold, or, you can define an email that will serve as 'master' for all the items sold.

This new feature comes in addition to the email you get (the musician) once an item was sold, which also contains the fans' email address to coordinate the delivery of the goods.

To setup this email, when you add or edit a new merchandise item, see the new blue line at the bottom of the page titled "Confirmation Email".

Hope this all make sense and is helpful, we're open for your feedback!

Now's the time to sell merch on your fans mobile phones! Go sell!

Give your fans exclusive content, in return for their email++

A common misconception is that you need to deliver your fans only the best mastered content. If you think about it, though, try to remember what you did when you discovered an artist you really liked? That's right, you went and bought a bunch of their music. And then you did some research on the web, to know who they are etc.

You fans aren't different, they want to be "in the know" about you, get early access to your mastered music as well as your interviews, basement gigs etc. And they'd be happy to tell you about themselves in exchange.

Why would you care about that? because if you find that you have many fans in NY, vs. Boston, for example, perhaps you want to focus your shows there a bit more. Or, if your fans are the college crowd, perhaps you should plan for more college shows to take off.

So this was a long introduction for a new feature we've launched this week: Exclusive content. This is content your fans can download to their phones after they entered their email (so you can add them to your mailing list, in addition to the mobile fan club), their zip code, and optionally, their age and gender.

Setup is really simple: 

1. On the artist portal, go to the 'Web Pages' section and underneath it choose 'Exclusive content'. Here you can upload new exclusive content (images, music, YouTube videos etc) or control existing stuff.
   
2. You want to set a promotion message for the exclusive content so your fans know about it, like: "Get 'Love to run' new release exclusively here". We will place that message on your mobile home page, with a link to the exclusive content page.
3. (Optional) you may want to send an SMS blast to your fans with a direct link to grab the new content.

Here's how fans will experience it:

1. They'll see your promotion message on your mobile home page, or they get the SMS blast you sent them, and click on the link.
2. If this is the first time they're here, we'll ask them for their email and zipcode, and optionally their age and gender.
3. Once they got through the form once, they never have to go through it again, they go straight to view the exclusive content items, sorted by the date you uploaded them.

And once they do that, we'll send you an email with the fans' email address so you can add them to your mailing list.

Pretty neat huh? If you have any comments, suggestions or questions, always feel free to write to us at advamobile.uservoice.com.

Why don't you get started, upload some exclusive content now! 

 

Paging brings relief to iPhone users, hopefully

Hi everyone,

We had some reports of iphones hanging when viewing large-(er?) mobile webpages, where there's many gigs, posts or items on sale.

We've introduced a number of optimizations to resolve this, reduce the wait time for pages to download, but specifically we want to highlight the paging we've introduced:

currently the page size is 10 items (whatever the context is), and you'll see prev/next links at the bottom. Simple and easy for you and your fans.

Keep telling us how to improve our service, we love your feedback!

Bang! ArtistData - Adva Mobile integration in action!

Check it out! After a few launch hurdles, the integration with ArtistData is now working smoothly, thanks to the giants over at ArtistData, lead by Brenden.

Are you on ArtistData and want a mobile fan club, get your gigs, blogs and news mobile automatically every morning? check out the Adva Mobile activation button on ArtistData.

Bands, since we originally took gigs from your MySpace page, you may have some duplications now. You can delete duplications on your gigs page on Adva Mobile.

As always, let us know what you think, if you're having any trouble etc.

Have a great weekend all!