Email notifications for fans

[Teddy]

Hi Arlo,

Our band has a large database for our fan emails and only one person manages it.  It's a hassle because if one of my face to face contacts wants to be added to our email list I must rely upon a chain of people to get it done.

I was watching the video about the scheduling feature and the built in function for band members would work great for fans as well.  Each member of the band (me and 5 others) could update fan emails to be "pushed" a notification when our gigs are confirmed and we could specify "monthly" (selectable) email reminders also.  Similar to member confirmations.  This would solve a lot of problems for our band.  Last night, we had over 200 fans in attendance and a lot of new faces.  Then today, on Facebook, some fans complained that they didn't know about the gig.

[arlo]

It's on my wish list and I'll add a vote for you. The biggest problem is when one of your fans marks a message as spam, which flags my server and risks breaking the email functions for everybody. So I'd probably have to integrate with a third-party mailing list system to send the messages and manage spam reports and blacklists, and that would create additional costs.

[Teddy]

Thanks again for your quick response.

Is there any way that we could use BH as an organizational and input tool for band members to use and save time?  And then when reminded by BH, we could send out a batch merge from our own email server using only BH for organizing and saving time only?  It seems to me that this is what web pages do on their "Contact Us" pages.  After clicking the widget, your own default email provider (Outlook, Gmail, Aol, etc) opens up in a separate window.

[arlo]

You could enter your fans as contacts in the Contacts section, then set up reminders from the Actions section, but then you would need to export your contacts from the Contacts section and import them into your email program when you want to send a mailing. Isn't it just as easy to shoot a quick email or text message to whomever manages your mailing list, when you have a new address to add?

[Teddy]

I was wondering if adding them to Contacts would work, and you answered my question.  Thank you, I think that will work for us.

We can easily do the export/import into our email system.  The beauty, and time savings, is in using Band Helper for input, notes, and reminders.  By using BH, each member can input the contact information into one central location for batch export to our email process.

The more I use BH, the more I like it.  Thanks again.

[arlo]

Okay. Thanks for looking for new ways to use my product.