Live from DMDNY: The Segmentation of Shelby Lynne
Music fans may not have heard of Shelby Lynne before she took the Grammy for best new artist in 2001 — unless they were married women with children who were older than 25, living in suburban or rural households with incomes between $40,000 and $75,000.
This was the core demographic Universal Music Group found when it analyzed 1,018 records culled from an opt-in online fan site. Overlay data from Acxiom revealed that 60% of her fans were homebodies who had lived in their houses for at least five years (as well as a host of other attributes).
But there were problems pinning Lynne’s appeal within a single musical fan group. Her music bounces between country, soul and pop. Country’s fan base tends to be male, with older children than Lynne’s base. While pop music fans skew more female, they also tend to have higher incomes and are more highly concentrated in metropolitan areas.
Absent a clearly defined fan base, Universal Music Group’s task of finding lookalike fans was daunting. But the record company did have a 7-million-name e-mail database of music enthusiasts taken from across its various labels, which include Island Def Jam, A & M Records, Interscope and Geffen, among others. The Santa Monica, CA-based firm also had permission to contact them with relevant musical offers.
The record company set up a series of rolling e-mail campaigns designed to draw attention to Shelby Lynne. Respondents were encouraged to fill out a demographics, musical taste and lifestyle questionnaire, and to indicate their likelihood of purchasing Lynne’s album. To sweeten the pot, respondents were offered a free CD, as well as a chance to win a trip to the 2002 Grammy awards.
A “click here” option even allowed site visitors to obtain the location of the nearest retailer that carried Lynne’s work, stemming off complaints from brick and mortar sellers that the Internet was cannibalizing their sales.
There was also a viral element, in which recipients of the e-mail campaign were encouraged to get friends to visit the site and sign up for the sweepstakes. While Joe Rapolla, vice president of Universal Music’s consumer marketing services division did not offer final numbers, at one point the Web site had recorded 10,734 visitors (a 3.21% response rate directly attributable to the e-mail) and 32,764 ancillary visitors. Universal discovered that one in five e-mail recipients shared the message with at least one other person, with many sending it out to several.
The additional data the site visitors provided allowed Los Angeles-based SourceLink, a database marketing consultancy, to provide a much rounder picture of Lynne’s fan base. While the direct respondents to the e-mail campaign, having been selected based on pre-set criteria, matched the original fan base, the viral campaign tended to bring in younger fans, although in both cases the fan base skewed two-to-one female.
They also tended to be located more heavily in metropolitan areas, but SourceLink president Robert McKim observed that contests tend to pull somewhat disproportionately from larger areas.
As for musical tastes, fans tended to prefer groups akin to the Dave Matthews Band.
The campaign yielded other information useful in guiding marketing efforts on Lynne’s behalf. Half of the respondents indicated they learned about new music from the radio, and 68% said they bought music in chain stores.
To date, the ongoing campaign has generated a 960% increase in Shelby Lynne’s registered fan base. As an added bonus, the microsite Universal Music set up sold $30,000 worth of her CDs. Universal also added more than 40,000 names to its master file e-mail database.
