Bear Music Fest—Email Marketing

The Bear Music Festival is a small, boutique event that takes place every September in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains not far from the Truckee Tahoe area. (Disclosure: I usually go. It’s super-fun.) BMF uses two different taglines that express its guiding aesthetic:

1. “Summer camp. House party. Music festival.”
2. “Bear Music Festival: the best bands you’ve never heard of!”

For a certain kind of music fan, these are pure catnip.

“It’s like summer camp? AND a house party? AND i get to discover cool new bands?? Where do I sign?!”

For the other 90% of the ticket-buying public, however, the anonymity of the lineup and the somewhat unfocused identity neatly expressed by these dual slogans is a little less compelling:

“If we’ve never heard of the bands and we don’t know whether it’s a summer camp or a music festival, well…maybe I’ll stay home and organize my fidget spinner collection that weekend…”

So: if BMF wasn’t going to adjust their program to be more marketing-friendly—if they didn’t want to be any less of a summer camp, or a house party, or book bands that were familiar—what could we do to get music fans excited enough to buy tickets and come to the show?

Elevation Works worked with BMF to design an email campaign that would simultaneously reactivate recipients’ memories of (awesome) past years of the festival and effectively introduce the artists on this year’s bill. Oh, and we also slipped in the marketing messages and calls-to-action that would actually sell tickets…

Headline/Subject Line

Your subject line is actually the most important part of any email. If the headline doesn’t connect when someone’s scrolling their inbox, the rest of your painstakingly-crafted email never even gets opened. Simple as that.

Call To Action

Once you’ve hooked your reader, it’s often a good idea to go straight to your email’s reason for being: “you should buy a ticket to the festival, right now—here’s how you do it”

Pullquote

An intriguing quote serves a function similar to the headline; it’s an easily digestible snippet that shows the reader what kind of email this is going to be and whets their appetite for more.

Layout

Email design and layout is in kind of a weird place in 2025. The fancy, code-heavy designs that characterize today’s web sites don’t work in email; they often won’t make it past peoples’ spam filters, and in many fields or industries, recipients are far more likely to read and take action on bare bones emails that resemble messages they’d receive from friends. This means that super-basic design choices like plenty of whitespace, tasteful boldface and scannable formatting punch well above their weight.

Results

How’d things turn out? Well, these emails had open rates ranging from 30% to 52.9%—consistently outperforming the industry standard of 21.8%—and, less quantitatively, festival attendees remarked on how the interviews had really made them feel connected to the artists in advance of the festival.

Integrating deep dives into artists’ creativity and identity in marketing emails is a pretty unusual move in the festival industry, and it’s consistently garnered BMF a lot of positive word of mouth in the artist community—which improves their chances of booking cool bands for future festivals.

Finally, on the super-nerdy backend, the email system we set up generated actionable engagement and segmentation data on BMF’s subscribers to guide future marketing efforts. Which is always nice.