You need to incorporate email into your fan mail and through the mail (TTM) autograph collecting strategy. If you’re not doing it already, then you are being left behind in the hobby. There are many artists, influencers, signers, and celebrities who have become unreachable through postal mail. That’s where the powerful email marketing service Snov.io comes in. This service is built with marketing in mind. However, it is incredibly well-suited as a tool for fan mail and TTM autograph collecting. Snov.io gives you an inside track to connecting with industry talent.
How Snov.io Works For Fan Mail
Emails from Any Domain
Let’s say that you collect autographs from a major film franchise. We know that visual effects artists, producers, directors, and more are often employees of film studios and companies. That means that they will have a work email under their company’s domain. So, if you’re a fan of a director, you can likely reach them there through their work email. Snov.io will take any domain like “examplestudio.com” and generate a list of email addresses with an associated confidence level. This indicates how sure they are that it won’t get bounced back. How it gets the addresses is pretty clever, but I’ll go into that later.
Email Extraction from LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. But unlike Facebook, many features of the site are locked behind a paywall. That includes the most important feature for the fan mail and TTM hobby: messaging. Snov.io’s LI Prospect Finder Chrome browser extension gets around this problem. It circumvents LinkedIn’s direct messaging and provides LinkedIn users’ email addresses. This information is not available without Snov.io’s plugin, which allows you to directly message users. Read more about how to set it up here.
Why You Need Email Addresses
Stop Wasting Time, Money, and Resources
If you’re doing TTM the traditional way, you may spend an hour researching, writing, and putting your request together. It will also cost $6 to print a few photos and another $6 for postage there and back. That doesn’t even include the additional material costs. Then, you send it out into the ether and hope you get a reply. If you don’t, you’re quickly out a lot of time and money when you multiply that by several failed requests. Instead, try contacting someone via email first. There is no upfront cost, and you can get pre-approval to send your TTM request. This is essential to saving time and money as it all but guarantees your success.
No More Wondering if Your Fan Mail Was Received and Read
There are also inherent advantages to this mode of communication. As we know, it’s instantaneous and has helpful features. Instead of wondering if your letter was received, email instantaneously informs you if the message is bounced. Snov.io takes it one step further with it’s email tracker. This tool helps you track when your email is opened and links are clicked, reminds you about follow-ups, and lets you schedule emails in Gmail/G Suite to be sent at a later time. Email Tracker also sends you real-time push notifications if your email is opened or a link in the email is clicked.
The closest you could get to this in the past was with read receipts. However, those required the recipient to actively send you a notification. That’s not the case with the email tracker. It’s 100% passive and unintrusive.
Cold writing celebrities with a proven track record of not responding is simply a waste of time and money. The smartest collectors with the most success use a directed, researched approach. That means doing in a bit of preliminary work to get your request pre-approved. Getting permission via email to send an item for singing will help you avoid wasting your time, money, and resources.
Automate Your Autographs
Part of the Tales From the Collection’s mission is to modernize the fan mail and TTM autograph collecting hobby. Many aspects of the hobby like searching for email addresses with Snov.io or automating research for multi-signed cast pieces can be done for you. We live in an ever more automated world. It’s time that we all started to benefit from it.
