If your blasting 100s of thousands of people...maybe. How many people from 16-23 or so are office workers?
I've always worked with having every person I've met from a show in my phone. Me and my band would personally take the time and call everyone when we were having a show.
I did a write up a while back on another site for some new marketing for newer bands and in particular a part concerning the "mailing list" and got some great feeback from it. The "Golden Rule" that I keep referring to is the idea that just because someone takes the half a second to like a fan page, does not mean they are an actual fan and will come out to a show.
Article:
The mailing list...
I have a feeling this is going to be a little "rambling" but I have a point, the story's important so you can understand why some ideas fail hard. Mailing lists. It's going to be on the top of the simplistic little sites telling you "101 ways to market your band" ahhh such B.S. . It's usually positioned up in the top 10 ways to market and promote and is told to be one of the most important tools to use.
Maybe it's just me, but I hate traditional mailing lists and haven't used the "traditional" method of email since my first band some 5 years ago and it didn't work (it probably works great for huge bands selling millions of records...but not for your local musician/band.) Since then the idea has somewhat evolved (or maybe technically devolved, will touch on it in a second). With Facebook coming into it's own and band pages being able to mass invite people to a show, bands have gotten pretty slack in really connecting with fans. It's too easy to just mass invite the few hundred people that have taken the 2 seconds out of their measly little lives to click a like button...GO BACK AND LOOK AT THE GOLDEN RULE!!! So what's wrong with doing a mass facebook invite to a show...nothing...what's wrong is, relying on it as an accurate way of predicting the amount of people that are going to show up to your show, again the GOLDEN RULE.
So realizing the rule after my first couple shows of having 30 or so odd people supposedly coming to the show and maybe 10 showing up, something had to be done. A mailing list...well sort of.
We had decided instead of asking for email addresses, we'll ask for phone numbers and we'll text people info about show dates. Well we started off, of course, getting our friends and family and we would text everyone when a show was scheduled and then 3-4 follow ups over the course of the weeks before. And then once we played we'd go around and socialize with everyone and get their numbers and add them to the lists.
Now here in lies the issue. And thank god I have such jack ass friends to tell me I'm an idiot when I piss them off, other wise never knowing the issue we were facing. The issue...over the course of the next 4-5 shows numbers started sliding off little by little, we couldn't understand it! So the next show date we send out our mass text to everyone reminding them of the show that night. Maybe 30 seconds after the text was sent I get a call from one of my friends, the conversation was short and to sum it up somewhat nicely he said, "you are making me angry, stop sending me these texts."
And then I realized it...we were aggravating these people via mass texts. I don't know about anyone else but I HATE getting chain texts or some random spam. We were doing it, it may have had a point to it, and people may have willingly gave us their number, but we were abusing that privilege of personal contact with our fans.
So the problems that needed to be solved...stop sending things in mass bulk and make the individual feel more "special" by receiving a more personalized invite.
Well we decided to keep ONE mass text letting people know weeks in advanced about a show, but decided that within 2-3 days of a show all band members would sit down and try to make a personal phone call to everyone on our contact list. We didn't always get to everyone but we saw our numbers start to rise back up and some more people that rarely came out, come out to a show. (this is the "devolving" back to doing phone calls )
TLDR...NO SPAM even if has a point and again be personal by making an individual feel special.
And maybe it's just because I'm anal as hell and like being really organized but I made a spread sheet with all fans we had, whether they were from phone contacts, facebook, twitter, etc. (I did this once we had upwards of 500 or so "fans" to keep track of, if your completely just starting out, don't fret over this.) Fans names would be going down the left hand side and the ways of contact would be on the top, with the necessary info like phone numbers in the blocks. And most importantly, what city they lived in. (No point contacting someone from Florida if your playing in Virginia, it will also let you numerically see what your actual potential fanbase is in every city.) Then if I had someone thats only form of contact with us was through the phone, they would be prioritized and put on the top of the phone call list to make sure they were informed about a show. I'd then update it the days after every show.
