Pixies + Interpol: A Mutual Admiration Society

Christina Dunkley (Interpol, 3D Management) and Richard Jones (PIXIES, Key Music Management) are two of the savviest marketers using the Topspin platform. Last weekend their bands headlined the Corona Capital Music Festival in Mexico City in front of nearly 60,000 adoring fans. Working with Topspin Pro Services, these hands-on managers took the opportunity to extend the experience of seeing Interpol and Pixies together beyond the festival barricades. Just before hitting the stage, both artists emailed their respective fan-bases with a message about their co-headlining slots — and offered a link to download a few of the other band’s songs for free (in exchange for an email address, of course). Pixies fans were steered to sample two songs from the new Interpol album, while Interpol fans were given a free taste of the live Pixies experience. Each band added a sizable chunk of names to their already-healthy email lists, and everyone benefited from the post-show momentum on twitter, facebook and on music blogs around the world (even BB6 mentioned the giveaways). It was a smart and fan-friendly move from two bands at the top of their direct-to-fan games. But that’s only the tip of this iceberg; the real story is hidden deep in the data.

MailChimp, a leading email-list service, published a table of benchmarks for email-blast performance broken down by industry.  In a typical campaign by a music company, 27% of emails get opened and 5% get clicked. Both the Interpol and Pixies emails hit 32% open-rates, and they saw 18% and 23% click-through rates respectively, crushing the industry averages.  That’s the power of a highly-qualified recommendation, my friend.  It’s hard evidence that fans trust their favorite bands enough to act on their suggestions, even if those suggestions ultimately benefit a different band.

That fact is supported by the astounding conversion rates on the landing pages that those emails linked to.  For those of you unfamiliar with the language of e-commerce and online marketing, “conversion” basically means “getting a site visitor to take a desired action”.  That could be making a purchase, sharing an article, or signing up for a mailing list.  The conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the number of unique visitors, and it’s a standard metric for gauging the effectiveness of a web page.  To provide some context, a typical e-commerce site (where a purchase is the conversion goal) runs at about a 2% conversion rate on an average day.  A site that has a newsletter sign-up as the primary goal tends to convert at about 8 – 10%.

Using analytics data for the landing-pages, we calculated the Interpol E4M page hitting a 28% conversion rate and the Pixies E4M page at a whopping 55%.  Those numbers blow all conversion benchmarks out of the water.  And tying it back to this post’s theme of teamwork and cooperation, the credit goes to the power of individual pieces working together in harmony.  A straightforward call to action (the email) from a trusted source (the band themselves), paired with a well-designed landing page and easy conversion process (our E4M widget), paved the way for a VERY powerful campaign. And the emails themselves weren’t even flashy or complicated: just short, simple, and clean. Check ‘em out:

We love to see our artists collaborating and thinking outside the box like this.  If you’re inspired by Interpol and the Pixies’ example, go do the same thing on your own.  If you know a band you think your fans would enjoy, and that band is willing to cooperate with you, give this “recommendation-swapping” tactic a try.  Let us know how it works — send an email to marketing@topspinmedia.com with info on your campaign. Good luck, and remember: sharing is caring!