How to Build a Fan List Before Your Next Tour

Short version: start collecting fan emails a tour cycle early, and collect where people live while you're at it. A list of 400 fans you can sort by city will sell more tickets than a list of 4,000 you can only blast all at once.

I've been the guy loading out at midnight with a damp sign-up sheet in my gig bag. I know exactly how this goes. You tell yourself you'll type them in on the drive home. The sheet lives in the bag until the next run, by which point half the handwriting has gone soft and you can't tell a 5 from an S.

So let's talk about doing it the other way around.

Why does a tour even need an email list?

Because a tour is the one time your promotion has an actual deadline.

Most of what we post is open-ended — new song, go listen. A show is different. There's a date, a door time, a room with a finite number of seats, and a promoter watching sales. You need a specific number of specific people in a specific city to see a specific message in a specific week.

That's the exact thing social is worst at. The algorithm doesn't know you're playing Tuesday and it doesn't care. It'll happily show your Denver poster to somebody in Dublin three days after the show.

Email goes where you send it.

How far ahead should you start?

A tour cycle early. Not a month — a cycle.

Here's the math nobody does. If you start collecting at the on-sale announcement, every name you gather is already inside the window where they needed to hear from you. You're building the list and using it at the same time, which means the list is tiny exactly when it matters most.

If you'd been collecting on the last run, those people would already be on it. Every show you play is a chance to add to the list for the show after it. The tour you're promoting now should be getting promoted to people you met on the tour before.

Collect on this run for the next one.

Where do you actually collect emails on the road?

Three places, roughly in order of how many you'll get:

The merch table. Put a QR code on the table — printed big, propped up, not a sticker on the corner of the tablecloth. People scan it while they're already standing there with their phone out paying you for a shirt.

From the stage. One sentence, once, usually before the last song. "If you want to know when we're back here, there's a QR code at the merch table." I've seen artists make a whole entertaining bit out of their list announcement — one of them framed it as a conversation, and ends up in a lot of back and forth with people talking about life. I thought that was amazing and engaging, and a real connection. How far you take it is up to you, but I found that an inspiring example.

The paper sheet. Tried and true. Some rooms are dark, some crowds are older, some venues have no signal. Keep a clipboard. I scan mine into Dispatch with my phone rather than typing them in, which is the only reason my sheets don't still live in the gig bag.

What's the one field everybody forgets?

Where they live.

This is the part I got wrong for years. I collected emails like they were all the same email. A name, an address, into the pile. Fine for announcing a record — a record comes out everywhere at once.

Useless for a tour.

If you don't know where your fans are, every tour email you send is a blast to everybody. Which means the Boston fan gets four emails about a Portland show, learns that your emails aren't about them, and stops opening. You didn't lose them by emailing too much. You lost them by emailing them about things that had nothing to do with them.

Ask for a ZIP code or a city at signup. One extra field. People fill it in without thinking twice, because "where are you?" is an obviously reasonable question from a band that plays live.

Extra credit: grab phone numbers too. Texting and WhatsApp are coming to Dispatch, and when they land you'll want the numbers already in hand — especially if you play outside the US, where WhatsApp is how people actually talk. One thing to get right now: make sure whatever they're signing up on actually says they'll get messages, not just emails. A number on its own isn't permission to text somebody. A line that says "we'll email and text you about shows" is — on the form and on the paper sheet.

What do you send, and when?

A show isn't one email. It's a small arc, and it's the same arc every time:

1. The announcement — dates are up, here's the link
2. A reminder — a week or two out, when people actually buy
3. The week-of — doors, time, who's opening
4. Show day — short, warm, see you tonight
5. The thank-you — the day after

That last one is the one almost nobody sends, and it's the best email of the five. Somebody came to your show. They're never going to like you more than they do the next morning. That's when you say thank you, point at the record, mention where you're headed next.

The reason that arc is worth writing down is that it's identical in every city. Same five emails, different city name. Which is exactly the kind of thing that should not be done by hand twenty-two times.

Can you automate this without it sounding automated?

This is what we built tour automation in Dispatch for, and it's the feature I use most on my own runs.

You write the flow once. Five emails, or three, or eight — you set how many and how far apart. Then you point it at your tour calendar, and Dispatch builds that same arc for every city on the run. Fill-ins like [City], [Venue], [Date] and [Tickets] swap themselves in per show, so one flow covers the whole tour.

Two things make it not feel like a robot wrote it.

Each city's emails only go to fans near that city. You set the radius. Boston doesn't hear about Portland. And if somebody happens to sit between two shows, they get the nearer one's emails only — not both.

Any single city can be overridden. If Nashville needs a different line because your cousin's band is opening, you change Nashville's email and leave the other twenty-one alone.

It also handles the things that actually happen on the road. Flip a show to sold out and the ticket emails for that city stop going — but the thank-you still sends. Cancel a show and you can email just that city's fans, pointing them at the next date instead.

Tour automation is a Pro feature, and the emails count against your plan's monthly sends like any other campaign.

And here's the catch, which I'd rather tell you now: the radius targeting only works on fans who have location data. Fans without it only get tour emails if you've put them in a group yourself. Which brings the whole thing back around to where we started — the tool is only as good as what you collected at the merch table last spring.

What should you do before the next run?

Four things, and none of them take an afternoon:

1. Put a QR code on your merch table. Today, not the week of the first show.
2. Add a location field to your signup. ZIP or city. One field.
3. Go back through the fans you already have and fill in locations where you know them. Even partially sorted beats not sorted.
4. Write the five-email arc once. Not per city. Once.

Do that and the next tour announcement goes out to people who already know you, in the cities you're actually playing.

The best time to start was the last tour. The second best time is the merch table at your next show.

More from the blog: Why Every Independent Musician Needs an Email List and Mailchimp Cut Its Free Plan in Half.