In my German article on Facebook Marketing for Bands I mentioned that part of your good online marketing (not only on Facebook) is the communication with your fans. Especially answering fanmail and answering their questions is important. One comment on my article said that caring about all fans takes a lot of man power and is thus inefficiant. The person said that there is so few money made in music industry anyway. In the following article I give you an elegant solution to this problem. But I want to make a personal statement first:
If you don’t make money in any business or industry the first thing you should do is ask weather your customers are satisfied. So communication with your customers should be the single most important thing in your business. No matter if it is music or something else. In music industry you even have the advantage that a lot of customers come to you on their own and want to talk to you! Other companies make a lot of effort to be able to talk to their customers! So use that Chance! Later on you can still talk about your product or business model!
Ok enough personal opinions here: Let me give you my solution and tell you why it works:

Answer all Questions in your Fan mail on a regularly basis (maybe weekly) on your website!

Answering fanmail one by one is really taking a lot of power. You could rather answer them publicly on your website. So if someone sends you an mail and puts some questions inside you will extract the question and post it in some section of your homepage. you order the questions and answers by date to show that you are actually answering questions regularly and thereby show that you are happy about more questions. you write something like

2011 August 30 – Bob asks: Hey band, I was always wondering could you do a show in ….
Musician from Band: Dear Bob thanks for your question. We would love to do a show in …

If there are more and more questions you can later on think about grouping them by topic and make it easier for your fans to navigate through them!
And by the way you can also extract questions from social media. Whenever you answer a question you should sent a quick reply to the person that asked the question notifying him or her that you answered it at the following link…

There are several reasons for this process:

1. For your fans it is really great and interesting content and they will visit your homepage more frequently. Especially because you also have several updates.
2. You don’t have to answer same questions several times. Which saves you time!
3. It shows that you actually answer to questions (especially if you post the date of the question!)
4. it is better than answering on facebook! because you controll the content and people are on your homepage (where one can also find your shop!)
5. it is content around your band name that will make your page also relevant for longtail queries for search queries. Which will in turn bring more natural traffic to your page.
6. Since you answer the question as a response it it still a pretty personal way to communicate.
7. you can later on refere to what you wrote!

I have seen an author of a book doing something similar 3 years ago and it worked perfect. She just answered 5 or 6 questions a month. I am excited to see what my bandmates from In Legend think about this idea!
By the way I am doing nothing else here in this blog. Earlier days if I had an idea I sent an mail to In Legend and later we discussed the idea and eather followed it or threw it away. That is time consuming. By blogging my ideas they are available for the future. If in Legend can’t follow the idea hopefully other people and bands find it useful! This is is a philosophy! The internet has shown in many great examples that open source and openess in general works amazingly fine!
The whole topic is by the way part of Customer relation management! I have never learned that in theory. So if you have some great resources on CRM (especially in music) I’ll be happy to get your reading recommendations.