Background
One of my clients is a very famous artist, with a very active email list. Generally, an open rate of 10% is considered a good outcome, which means that 10% of people to whom the email is sent open the email. Of those, a very small percentage of people actually click on any link on the email and then take some action. In this particular client’s case, the email list was very active with nearly 50% opens, and 25% of those people actually clicked on the links.
The client was looking to have a steady ongoing income rather than the lumpy income artists usually get from shows or new music releases.
Solution
One solution I came up with was to create a subscriber model where subscribers would pay an affordable subscription fee every month and get very good value for money in return. The subscription would include an interactive webinar every month, with singing for half of the webinar and a live Q&A session for the other half. The entire thing would get recorded and put in an online library. That way, if someone missed a live webinar, they could always log in later and watch it. There were several other features to keep subscribers interested and engaged. Every month, there would be a lucky winner chosen at random from the pool of subscribers, who would win a personal, one-on-one interaction session of an hour with my client. That entire session would also be recorded and added to the library.
In addition to this, the library would also have some recordings from live shows available for subscribers to watch. Subscribers could also watch certain live music events streamed live. We’d also have a quota of special reserved tickets at live events for subscribers. In effect, the subscription would give subscribers plenty of rewards to make them happy, and feel that their subscription was value for money. And as time went on, subscribers would get an ever-growing library of content to enjoy. We also planned to add more features in further phases to make the library even more interactive and engaging for subscribers, such as subscribers being able to upload videos of them singing the artist’s songs, a “best singer” prize every month and so on.
Result
We aimed to get 4,000 subscribers onto the list as the first goal. We also wanted to make it very affordable, so the price was set at just $15 a month. The income from achieving the first goal of the subscription model would be 4,000 x $15 = $60,000 a month. The total amount of time the client had to put in would be just 3 hours every month: 90 minutes for the webinar (30 minutes to prep, 60 minutes live) and 90 minutes for the one-on-one call. Making $60,000 for 3 hours work means an hourly pay rate of $20,000. That’s a really good pay rate, don’t you think? Of course, there are some expenses like video editing and hosting, but they’re quite small compared to the income.
The great thing about this model is that income keeps growing as new subscribers come on. Because the subscription is so engaging with fresh new content and activities every month, most people continue their subscriptions, and there is a very low drop out rate.
