Working with bands isn’t that far off from working with small businesses: budgets are tight, and while stakeholders understand that all things online will help their business, they’re frequently looking for ways to get the job done as quickly and simply as possible so they can get back to what they’re best at doing. This is why a lot of businesses and brands stopped growing and updating email newsletter lists in favor of growing followings on Facebook and Twitter.

The problem with having your fans and customers on platforms you don’t own, however, is that you don’t own the online relationship with your fans and customers. This idea started coming home for many of us working in social media at the end of September, when suddenly each post only reached a fraction of the fans we had been reaching — that is, unless we pay to “promote” each post. So how do you continue to reach your customers? Email.

It’s never too late to start an email list if you don’t have one already. MailChimp is a great tool to with a full-functional free version for lists up to 2,000 people. Aweber is a great platform that makes it easy to send mail to highly segmented lists, but I’ve found that for most small business applications, it’s a little more power than necessary.

There are many more email platforms out there, so I encourage you to do some research and see what works best for your needs.