The Power Of A Sticker

One of your primary roles as the Program Director is to shorten the runway between when a listener discovers your station for the first time and the point in which your station becomes their favorite station, choosing you as their first preset, and perhaps even supporting you financially.

Obviously, well-researched music, engaging on-air talent, minimal interruptions, and exciting events and promotions are all must-haves.

You know what else helps? Free stuff.

This week, spend an hour designing a way to give something of value to your listeners in exchange for their email address. A listener’s email address is a new form of currency and is something that individuals are willing to give in exchange for something they perceive as valuable. Hear me when I say this… email that adds high value to people from a brand they are fan of does work, so getting listener email addresses matters.

For us, it is logo stickers.

At STAR, we invite listeners to “text the word STICKER to us, and we’ll send you a STAR sticker.” We actually send 2 stickers, along with a note from the on-air team, and instructions to share the 2nd sticker with a friend. A high percentage of those people opt in to receive further emails from us. Those opt-ins then go into an email drip campaign in which they receive more valuable content from us, get information about all the cool things our station offers, and eventually receive an invitation to support our business partners, and support the station financially.

Stickers are low cost, easy to mail, and most sticker shops can even print something on the back of the sticker paper (like an ad or coupon for the business partner you get to cover the cost of the printing!). We made ours smaller than a car bumper sticker, and perfect for computers, water bottles, briefcases, lunchboxes, etc..

While stickers have been great for us, your offer can be anything, including stuff that won’t cost you anything other than time/energy. It could be a prayer calendar you create, a devotional series, a special limited edition podcast, anything of perceived value to the listener. (Careful, don’t make the initial offer your station’s newsletter, unless there’s something in there that the average person will truly think is valuable).

We’ve sent out around 6,000 stickers in the last 12 months – we have added hundreds of names to our email list, and while I don’t have specific numbers, I am confident that we have developed a number of them into donors.

You can do this too. Need help? Please reach out to me at 206-552-6848, or put your email address in the comments on this post, so we can connect.

Cheers to a productive programming week!

Matt Stockman