Taylor Bradshaw is a singer-songwriter out of New York who's has been doing music for about fifteen years. He's seen immense success in the last four years using digital marketing to sell his CDs and vinyl. He's been able to reach a larger fan base through very specific steps, which he has graciously offered to share with us.
We've manufactured tens of thousands of CDs for you in a day and age where people don't really think that anybody buys CDs. So how are you managing to sell so many? What's the secret to your success?
Well first off, thank you for manufacturing tens of thousands of CDs for me. I took music marketing really seriously the last four years or so. One of the main strategies that I've been using, which I learned from a company called Indepreneur, is a "free plus shipping" campaign. Basically, I put out ads on Instagram and Facebook of me performing songs, and then I offer a free CD. All they have to do is cover shipping, and they go into a funnel where they can buy some more CDs or vinyl or something. All in all, it breaks even while making my fan base grow a lot, and then I can monetize on the backend and build this wonderful career that I'm seeing.
Here is an example of an ad that was pretty successful. You see just me performing in the forest with lyrics. I use live audio for this stuff. Some people do better with lip syncing. And then I say, "I want to mail you a free CD with some extra stuff." When they click the "Learn more" button, they bounce over to a page on my website, which is just a big sales page, so they can get my free CD.
Once they're on my website they can either just click that button to get the free CD if they're totally sold, otherwise, if they keep scrolling, they'll see more stuff I'm selling. I show more of my music, tell them exactly what they get, share what people are saying about it, and include a mini-doc. It just keeps going with more stuff and buttons throughout.
And this is primarily being shown to people who's seeing me for the first time from these ads. And from there they go on this journey with me.
So on that page, you have multiple links to the same place, right?
Yeah. So every button goes to the same checkout page. The reason there are so many buttons is that if they're totally sold, they'll just click the first one. If they're not, they'll keep scrolling. If you looked at this on a phone, you'd see there's about one thumb swipe worth of content before each additional button, giving them more options. There are no other buttons on this page—no header or anything like that—because I really want them to either take this action or just exit out.
Right! Because you're very clear on exactly what you want them to do. Just get the free CD. And when they do this, they give you their email address, so they're signed up to your mailing list.
Yes, I have a series of emails that goes off once every few days, just giving them new stuff. You know, the day after they purchase, I say, "Hey, thank you. Here's a treat—an unreleased song that I am performing that you only get because you took this action. It's a gift for you." Other things like that. And what's really wonderful about it, too, is I now have all of their addresses—like physical addresses—because I'm sending them physical merch. I actually have a spreadsheet with all their zip codes, and from there, I can see what cities have what number of customers in them. That's really useful for touring. As soon as the number hits over a hundred, it's like, "Okay, I could book a solid concert there."
Very good. So do you look at your analytics and know which of those buttons get the most clicks?
I don't know which button they click, but I do know how many people see the ads, how many people click through, how many see the checkout page, and how many of those actually check out. So I see the numbers that are most important.
I've looked at your website and seen that it's five dollars in shipping to get your free CD. So that barely breaks even, right? Or do you make a couple of pennies on it? 'Cause when you account for the cost of the CD and the envelope and the postage...
Right. Also the cost of serving them an ad to get them to go, that's actually the biggest cost. So if they buy a CD, I don't make money, and if they just do the five dollar shipping thing, I don't make any money off of that. In fact, I lose money because I spent money on ads to get them to this point in the journey.
However, where this starts to work is that they can leave a donation if they want. It's automatically filled with zero, but they can add more if they want to.
And then from there, they can also add this other CD as well, just like, "Oh bam, it's only seven bucks." Once they complete that, they see another CD where it's like, "Hey, you can't actually stream this live CD. It only exists in CD form, and I'll give you a digital version of it as well if you buy it."
Then after that, I'm like, "Do you want this original album that I was gonna give you Twine? Do you want that on vinyl?" You know, I'm adding some products farther down, which is called upsells. That's where the money really starts to come in. The point of this whole campaign is really just to break even. So that adds a lot more revenue when people buy these other things. My goal is overall just to break even, and if it's a little bit more than break even, then I increase my daily ad spend. From there, I just sell a bunch of stuff, and then I can sell to them again in the future using email. That costs me nothing—it's pure profit.
And you have an automated email sequence set up once people give you their email address. How many emails is in that sequence and what do they contain?
There is a total of four emails, not including shipping confirmations. First, they get one that's like, "Hey, thank you so much." I wanted to share a few things and ask some questions, so I just ask them a few fun questions about themselves and say, "You can reply right here, and I'll talk to you." People really love that. Then I share my answers too; it’s just a little bonding thing. They receive that unreleased song the next day, and then some other stuff a few days later, and so on.
After that, I have a 30-day—actually, I think it’s a three-week timer—before they enter my general mailing list, so they're not getting spammed with too many emails. They have a chance to actually receive the product. From there, I'm sending emails about once a week. Every roughly month and a half, one of those emails is going to be an offer series where I sell something new to them. But in the meantime, it's all just nurturing and bringing them into the world.
That's great. So, back to the free CD that you're shipping out. Can I ask you what kind of shipping method you’re using to keep your costs down?
Sure. I'm using media mail for everything that I can, which is very affordable. However, I may switch to a different form of mail because it actually is almost the same cost. With media mail, if there's a problem with the address and it ships back to you, you actually have to pay USPS for the shipping to get it back to you, which you wouldn’t have to do with other shipping methods. So I might switch that, but it’s not very expensive, especially for vinyl. I mean, shipping vinyl would be very expensive without the media mail option.
Right. Since it's pretty big, that brings up the price. So, with all of these automated features you have, what kind of apps are you using to make this all work? What’s your website built on, and what email marketing platform are you using?
I use a bunch of things that are all integrated and talking to each other. I built my website on WordPress using the Builder Elementor Pro. When they go to checkout, they go to ThriveCart, which is my funnel builder. From there, ThriveCart communicates with ShipStation, which manages all the orders and buys all of the shipping labels. They also get entered into Drip, which is my email system.
Very cool. So, another big landing page you have on your site is the Escape into the Evergreen. Do you run ads directly for that, or is that something that people get funneled to after they've gotten your free CD and gotten to know you a little better?
So, Escape into the Evergreen is a five-day EP experience where they see a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff and really get brought into the world, with an email and a landing page built for each day—all the stuff that people wouldn’t see normally.
That was actually an effort I did before I did the "free plus shipping" campaign for CDs. It was to celebrate the release of my EP at the time. It was a way to get a bunch of opt-ins; they get all this stuff for free, and at the very end of it, I offer them a cute little bundle to commemorate the whole thing. Some people buy it, some people don’t. That was a really great way to, one, just get the tech built out and try my hand at this stuff, but two, also really nurture a lot of people.
So today, that's not something that I run ads to. It's more of something that if somebody doesn’t want to buy a CD right away, they can join Escape to the Evergreen for free. I get their email and zip code, and they get all this awesome free experience stuff. It’s a good way to scoop up some people who aren't ready to buy yet.
It's also a good way to give more to the people who have bought because, you know, I send them a button that says, "If you click this button, it'll start escaping into the Evergreen for you." It just brings them further into my world.
Yeah, it’s very community-based. It feels like you have created a community, and it really allows us to get to know you personally. Do you ever feel like you're giving too much of yourself? Is there enough distance between you and your fans? What’s your comfort level there?
It can be overwhelming sometimes. I think what gets really overwhelming is trying to answer all the emails because I try to stay on top of those. There are definitely times when I have to draw boundaries with people. Some people, especially with my music, which is more emotional, are looking to fix something in their life by engaging with it. When they find that the thing isn't fixed, they sometimes lash out in certain ways. So, I've had to learn to keep a bit of emotional distance in that regard.
That being said, that's the tiny minority of people. Most are just so appreciative and wonderful. I really welcome the possibility of forging relationships with people and getting to know my fans. For example, I'm going out for a concert in Indiana this weekend, and the people there feel like an extended family. I really welcome those kinds of connections; I think it’s beautiful.
That's awesome! Do you have a team that you work with, or are you doing all of this on your own?
I’m doing most of this on my own, but I do have help with shipping and fulfillment. I hire my cousin and, actually, my grandma to handle orders. Initially, it was just my cousin, and then my grandma said, "I want in on this." I'm like, "Okay, Grandma!" She loves it and is amazing at it, so that’s my main help there. I also have a mentor from Indepreneur, which is the agency where I learned how to do all of this. Jesse is amazing and really helps me navigate some of this stuff because I'm in the advanced stages of what you can do with music marketing.
Let's look at the landing page for the Escape into the Evergreen and the offerings in that sequence?
Absolutely! There’s a little video about it, they can click to claim their invite.
There’s a bit more information that shares everything that happens, with a picture. When they do that, they enter their first name, email, and zip code. I let them know upfront that I'm collecting their zip codes because I want to play concerts near them. People are willing to provide their zip codes if it means I’ll come to their town and play for them.
Yeah, exactly! That’s another point I’m sure Indepreneur talks about: don’t ask for more information than you actually need.
Right! The zip code is very useful because I’m going to tour, but I don’t necessarily need their phone number and full address for that purpose. You don’t want to create any more friction than you need to to make it as enticing as possible to sign up.
What do you have on the homepage of your website and what is the purpose of that?
My homepage is really serving as a place where it scoops up anyone who maybe didn't go to the place that I intended to direct them to. Most of my ads send you to just this one place like get this free CD or do this action. My homepage is supposed to be a bunch of other stuff for the people who end up here, because a lot of them do.
And so it starts with the most common thing that people are looking for, which is to get the free CD because maybe they didn't see the button or maybe they didn't have the money at the time, but now they do. And so that's the most common thing. So there's a button for that. Now I organize this in just the most common to the less common.
Say they're not looking for the cd, this is one scroll down. You're more of a vinyl person because that's the next most common thing I hear. People say "I don't want a CD, but I would love this on vinyl." And so that's the next thing.
Then after that you can re request a concert in your hometown because people are constantly asking me about touring and when I'm coming to their town. So there is a button where they can request a concert. That pops up a form where they can add their name, email and zip code. And that way, it adds up more people to my mailing list. If I see a hundred people in an area, I know I can book a concert.
And so then there's escape into the Evergreen, which we spoke about. There's all these different buttons and options and every single one is either selling them a thing or getting their email. That's why this is organized from the most common, to the less common. And it's also all based on fan DMs and comments and stuff. I see what people are asking about and asking for the most. That's what I use to organize this. And so that's what the homepage is. It's like all the different actions that can bring them into my world.
What you won't see on here is any link to Spotify or social media, because social media is how they discovered me. I'm not gonna send them back there since I tried so hard to bring 'em into my world. Let's go deeper, not more shallow. So that's the purpose of the website is really to bring people deeper by either selling them something or, getting their email address or, just sharing more information. Looking at lyrics and things like that. Get people to actually get deeper in. They're looking for more info, but on all of those pages, there's always gonna be a button somewhere on the page where they can at least enter their email address. And so that's the whole purpose of my website, is to bring people in deeper.
If they hit the contact button in the upper right there, what kind of contact information are you giving out? Is there mailing address there?
It's a contact form which goes to my email inbox. I don't put my actual address on there only because of bots. This filters out the bots. But when they fill out the form, it goes to my actual email. And then from there I'm just emailing back and forth normal. So just a one-on-one personal conversation. I'm getting emails every day from fans.
Would you be willing to share some of your numbers on the back end of your ads? How much are you spending to get this working?
Yeah, so right now, I think I'm around $200 a day in ad spend. The only reason I'm able to afford that is because people are actually buying stuff and paying it back in real time.
A huge side effect of running these ads is that most people don’t buy the CD when they see the ad. However, a ton of people are becoming fans because they’re seeing my music and getting exposed to it for the first time. Maybe they don’t buy this CD, but perhaps they’ll buy a vinyl later or come to a concert. A huge number of people get exposed to my music.
When I got this up to its largest point, it was overwhelming this winter. I reached close to $1,400 a day in ad spend and was selling over 150 packages every single day. That was wild; we got absolutely steamrolled when that happened.
That’s pretty awesome, but that’s a lot of money to spend. How did you start? Even $200 a day is a lot for many people. How much did you start with? Did you build it up slowly?
Sure! When I was trying to make one of these campaigns, I actually started with $10 a day, and it didn’t work at all. Then I tried it again at $20 a day, and it kind of worked a little bit. But a lot of that was just testing, workshopping all the pages and the ads to see if anyone would take it at all.
What I found was that once I dialed it in at lower spends, I took a leap of faith and tried $50 a day. That’s when I started seeing some real success. What’s interesting is that $50 a day doesn’t equate to just five times the result of $10 a day because Facebook can then access people that are more expensive to reach.
There’s always a bidding war for ad space, and some people who are more likely to buy cost more to target with ads. We don’t make any decisions on the backend; we just tell them our budget and go along with it. But if Meta doesn’t have enough money to properly show the ad to people likely to buy, it’ll show it to a bunch of people who might not buy.
There’s a breaking point for giving it enough budget to generate enough sales in a week for the campaign to learn what it’s doing. So, it requires a bit of a budget. I would recommend people just starting out to try it at $10 a day, workshop it, and keep tweaking.
I did about 30 campaigns before I found one that really hit. But when I did, it was life-changing. Now I start at $100 a day if I'm launching a new campaign because I’m confident in what I’ve built and know it’ll work to some degree. From there, I scale, increasing the budget by 5% if I'm making money, keeping it the same if I'm breaking even, and decreasing it by 5% if I’m losing money.
I keep these rules to avoid making emotional marketing decisions, which never help. It’s easy to get emotional when you're running ads, especially when you lose hundreds of dollars in a day. You hope that doesn’t happen again tomorrow.
How long have you been doing this?
I started with music when I was 15, so over 15 years now. But I started my solo project in 2018, releasing my first single and then my first solo album in 2020. That’s what made me want to learn marketing because I needed to get my music out there. I tried playlists, blog posts, and other strategies that I thought would help, but they didn’t move the needle.
In 2020, I found Indepreneur and learned music marketing focused on building real fans, one-to-one relationships, and selling directly to them without worrying about numbers. I strongly recommend checking them out. They're one of the very few people in this industry that I really completely trust and it's changed my life, doing music marketing like this.
Like what really matters is having a bunch of fans that are real fans and growing that. And so I've been working on that since and it's definitely been a journey. Sometimes I'm more motivated, sometimes less. About a year and a half ago is when I started really getting serious about this. And a year ago is roughly when I had my first success with the free plus shipping campaign with CDs that grew my mailing list from 400 something to well over 9000 people and it's growing every day.
And those are very targeted people who's actually shown an interest in you. You're not just throwing it out their on social media, it's people who's actually interested.
Right almost all of these people have spent money on my music. They're very interested. They're very engaged and I'm starting to get playful with some of the results of this campaign. Finally, you know, I'm doing a house concert tour this summer.
Yes, I saw that. That looks cool.
It's gonna be so much fun. It's just started, I was amazed that people would be willing to spend $1500, $2500, $3000 on one of these concerts. I just didn't think that anyone would do it. But actually plenty of people will do it. When you think of percentages, hardly any of 'em. But when it's a percentage of 9000 well now you have enough to fill up an entire summer and get paid really well for performing original music, which is wild.
So is this your full-time gig, or do you have a day job like most other people?
Yeah, so I'm kind of on the, in-between. Every time that I think I'm full-time with music, I'm like, oh, maybe not yet quite. So I'm also an audio engineer. I edit podcasts and work on movie sets and stuff like that.
Well, that's fun too.
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a great day job. But it's definitely a day job. And so I'm, I'm in the awkward in between where I don't really have too much time to work on a day job and hoping that this music thing keeps up as it is because at this rate it should be my full-time thing this year.
How many hours a week do you think you're spending on your marketing efforts?
A lot. I don't know. I'd say at least ten. It really depends on what kind of project I'm working on. If I'm doing a big push, then it could turn into a forty hour week. If I'm just maintaining things and stepping back a little bit, then it could be as slow as five to ten hours. I'm including responding to fans and having conversations with them as part of marketing, 'cause it all kind of one thing. Anything that's not the act of making music I'm putting into that bucket.
So what would you say to artists that are relying only on digital streaming who don't really see the value of physical media anymore?
I would say that if you're making a living from streaming, good on you. That's awesome. That's the case for almost nobody though. I hear a lot like, "Oh, people don't buy CDs anymore." And they clearly do. We've shipped out this year, like tens of thousands of CDs, they buy them. I'm sure a lot of them don't even have CD players. A lot of them buy CD players in order to play my CD. A lot of 'em don't have any interest in doing that. They just like the package that they get, and they wanna support, and they want everything that is coming into this world. The fact that it's autographed, you know, it's just a point of connection. And I'll say my streaming has absolutely skyrocketed over the last year and turned into a significant source of revenue for me. And that happened because I started ignoring streaming and selling CDs. And because I was doing that, people will look it up on Spotify and they stream. But it's a side effect and not actually a direct effort from me. The best thing I've ever done for my streaming is ignore it.
About the physical aspect of media and the connection, like you said, you are taking it quite far, which is really awesome. There's a pressed flower that comes with your CD, you're putting a lot of effort into it and making it very unique and special.
Yeah. It's very important to make this feel like more than just a CD. Other people add other fun things. My friend adds a Pokemon card to his, just silly things that increase the perceived value of this thing and make it feel like a real experience and not just a CD.
For anyone considering this, whether you feel stuck in your musical journey or just want to explore new possibilities, I highly recommend diving into digital marketing for your music. If you want to go on tour but don’t have enough fans to support it in different places, or you just want to reach more people, digital marketing can be a game-changer. It will transform your career—and yes, it really works.
But here's the truth: it’s a lot of work. Don’t believe anyone who claims there are five easy hacks to success. It takes effort, but it's absolutely worth it. As you start seeing the results, you’ll find yourself able to tour, build real connections with fans, and get feedback that truly matters. For example, I’ve received tons of physical fan mail from people telling me how much my music has impacted their lives in positive ways—something that wouldn't have happened without digital marketing. Without it, people simply wouldn’t have been exposed to my music.
I learned everything from Indepreneur, and I highly recommend checking them out. If this seems overwhelming, don’t worry—they break everything down into easy, step-by-step lessons that you can follow along with. That’s exactly how I got started—learning their methods and applying them to my own journey. So, if you're serious about growing your music career, I can’t recommend it enough.