Case Study: Warner Music Benelux x I AM POP

I AM POP provides artists and their marketers with an easy-to-use tool that simplifies direct-to-fan messaging and allows you to reach fans directly.

In our Case Study series, we chat to the people who regularly use our tool, and see how they feel about it. This time round, we spoke to Thijs Verhulst from Warner Music Benelux.

Can you tell us who you are and what your role in music marketing is?

I am Thijs Verhulst, Channel & Playlist Manager at Warner Music Benelux.

Why did you start experimenting with Messenger marketing?

We have seen that with Facebook cutting down the organic reach of posts, it has become harder to reach fans. At the moment, you are lucky if you reach 10% of your total followers on Facebook. For example, if you have a page with 30.000 likes, you will most probably only reach 3000 of your fans organically.

Feed marketing will thereby become less important in the future. So how are you able to reach all or at least most of the 30.000 fans who are interested in you? (since they have shown at least a little bit of interest in your content by liking your page). That is the question we have been asking ourselves.

Which role does Messenger marketing play in this?

When we look around, one of the bigger trends we see within the marketing field is personalization. Marketers should find a way to communicate with fans on a more personal level to keep them fully engaged. Direct messaging, through messaging channels, might be a good way to reach this level of fan engagement.

Not only is this way of communication interesting from a marketing point of view, it is also the only way of communication the youngest generation, generation Z, has grown up with. They expect companies to be reachable 24/7 through for instance Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. So why shouldn’t their big idols like Dua Lipa and Ed Sheeran be reachable in the same way?

Who is likely to join an artist on Messenger?

According to the 90–9–1 rule of thumb, only 10% of the fans within an internet community tend to interact with your content. This rule states that normally only 1% of this community are very engaged fans. These fans are interested in literally every piece of content you share. So if we would be able to convert at least 1% of our followers to a Messenger channel, we would be able to reach the core fans on a very personal level. And that would be good.

What is your experience with I AM POP's tool in this?

With I AM POP, we have seen that it’s already possible to convert more than that 1% of an artist page followers to the Messenger channel the first time we promoted it among them. So we were able to communicate with core fans straight away. Stuff that works really well to onboard fans is an incentive like a ticket giveaway. But it didn’t stop there. With a new action we converted another 1%. So these figures show that there is a big interest among fans to interact with artists on a personal level.

In the end we managed to convert around 3% of the artist’s 35.000 Facebook followers towards the Messenger channel, which means we had a fanbase of approximately 1000 fans within the Messenger channel. In the figure below, you can see what happened when we sent out an exclusive pre-order link for an album. Immediately after the link was sent, 200 of the 1000 followers clicked on the pre-order link. This is a Click-Through Rate of 20% within minutes after sharing a link through Facebook Messenger. A CTR of 20% is a percentage which is rarely seen among newsletters. And over time we reached a CTR of 50%.

What are the most important lessons you learned?

Of course the first lesson is the potential Messenger marketing has to offer in direct-to-fan contact. It's immensely valuable. But another thing is that it remains important to see every medium in its own right. Use chat in a conversational way and don’t share the exact same content on your Facebook page as on Messenger.

The core fans require a little bit of extra attention, so make sure you are able to share some artist exclusives with them through Messenger. Only that way will you be able to create a valuable and long-term artist-to-fan relationship.

By the way, we've collected and uploaded our most popular resources. You can download these resources for free!

Or why don't you connect to I AM POP directly through Messenger at https://m.me/bypophq