Case Study: Green House Group 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 Alex Lee Thomson from Green House Group about the direct-to-fan messaging campaign they launched for Shed Seven.

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

I’m Alex Lee Thomson, director of Green House Group, a music marketing company that works with bands and festivals to help them reach fans.

Why did you start experimenting with direct-to-fan messaging? How does it fit in with your marketing strategy?

I first started experimenting with direct-to-fan messaging because I had wanted to create this little micro-world for a while but had to wait for the technology to catch up.

I wanted to start migrating audiences away from Facebook a little, create a fun call-and-response mechanism that worked in-app on platforms people were already using, and I wanted to create sub-groups of audiences for much better, targeted messaging.

You have been using I AM POP's tool with the band Shed Seven. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

We initially launched Shed Seven’s Messenger channel with a standard set-up. It was designed to offer information on the band from live shows to stream links. It had a lot of the band’s personality behind it, and was very much made with them — in their way.

We had a great initial launch, but wanted to keep pushing new users here and use some of the capabilities of Messenger more.

Where did you take it from there?

We re-designed after a month to include an old school Teletext-style game. The game offered ten questions with multiple choice answers — each answer was a quick reply button.

Each button would either take the fan further down the rabbit hole, or to an “incorrect” screen where a video of the band’s front man would question “call yourself a fan!?”

If you made it to the very end you were segmented into a winners circle where a random person was selected to win some merchandise.

When we launched the game we had around 1,000 fans playing simultaneously. The ticker for people engaging with the messenger app was around 2,000 engagements per minute for several hours and also created further conversation across all of the band’s social channels. That’s a level of engagement I wouldn’t expect to see on a standard post, or even a more interactive Q&A or poll message to usual channels.

We’re currently seeing a 96–99% open rate on all messages sent by Shed Seven within the Messenger channel.

I think what this game mechanism showed was that, if you launch your Messenger channel with a purpose, and not just to have it for having it’s sake, that people will be far happier to sign up, engage and then ultimately you’re increasing your audience size.

To you, what makes direct-to-fan messaging different from other communication channels like social and e-mail?

The ability to create user journeys, and have those journeys completely customisable is what makes direct-to-fan messaging different from other communication tools. I see this as being a very important part of the social landscape over the next five years.

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