How email newsletters help podcasts grow in 2023

I got this DM the other day that was asking about how you use email lists and newsletters to grow your podcast.

It was something they read in an article or saw in a video and it just didn't make sense to them.

It didn't add up if nobody's able to find my free podcast and they don't have to give me their information for it.

Why would somebody give me their information to get more emails on this list?

It just seems kind of backward in 2023, but I will say I have been following this stuff since 2015. I've taken courses online. I've seen what different people are saying in their free stuff and their paid stuff in different genres.

And all of them, for some reason, keep coming back to having an email list.

So you start to wonder, “Okay, why is there some truth to this?”

Everybody recommending it. There are two main ways that this is going to grow your show.

Having just a newsletter that you say, “Hey, it's a newsletter. I'm sending stuff out every week.”

That isn't going to get anybody to sign up.

It's not going to make you any money. An email list is a group of people that are hyper-targeted.

So if you were to put out, “Hey, this is a three-day free workout sample. You give me your name and email, and you get added to my list and I send you updates from time to time when the show drops when I have new cool stuff to talk about stuff.”

So what happens now is I can assume that the person who signed up for this free workout sample, might be interested in my longer six-week, eight-week workout program, but let's say that somebody just signed up for my newsletter who could be interested in any number of things, they may not be the ideal candidate for signing up for your program, so this breakdown happens a lot when people try to make money from their email lists.

I spent all this time accumulating hundreds of people onto a list that wasn't aligned with the product or service that I was trying to offer them.

Using email lists and newsletters as a way to filter through to your top fans.

So the people that are listening on your podcast, youTube, they're fans. Of course, they're watching your clips, but then who are the people who are ready to take it?

Maybe a step further, right?

They heard that you're giving out a free workout sample. They've been listening to your stuff for a little while now. Maybe they've done some stuff with it. Maybe they haven't, but when somebody gives you their name and email and signs up onto your list, whether it's It's usually a trade in today's day and age when somebody signs up for something and gives you their email for 15 percent off or they get a free download free workout sample.

It is pretty well-known and understood what's happening here.

You're trading your information. They're going to reach back out to you in a couple of days.

They're going to try to maybe sell you something.

It's not as new and novel as it was 10, 15, or 20 years ago.

But what's cool is we're all aware. That's what's happening.

As long as you're not spamming people, email lists are a way for you to hyper-segment a group of people who are interested in something.

So if somebody is interested in a workout sample for three days, the biggest mistake that I've made when building an email list is having hundreds of people sign up for this thing.

And it's not at all aligned with the product or service that I want to offer.

So one of the things that I recommend doing is starting with something free, if you're a comic book podcast.

You might even have like “All right, I have these top 10 recommendations or top 10 places that you can go buy these comic books for free” or whatever you know best, what's going to appeal to your audience to where they would give you their name and email for the next step.

Somebody giving you their name and email in 2023 is the equivalent of them giving you their phone number.

It's a very private thing that we don't just hand off and give to anybody. It isn't the same as following or subscribing to YouTube.

Yes, those are feeds, those are lists that we keep kind of clean when we don't want to hear from somebody any more.

But at the same time, an email is just a little bit more coveted. It's a little bit more personal.

So it's a huge step when somebody raises their hand, signs up for your stuff, and goes, “I'm interested in your stuff a little bit more than everybody else. “

So just the trainer who has a podcast and they have a free three-day workout sample, they're trying to sell a longer program or some type of service that's like coaching.

They're trying to do some online coaching with this person.

If that is your goal, then having that sample, that's almost a no-brainer to download, to give your information. Is a way for you to filter down, the people who are listening in the podcast world on Apple, and Spotify, who out of all of these people, have the highest intent to work with me and learn more about my services.

When you paste the link to this list in your descriptions and you point that out in your episodes, “Hey, make sure to sign up.” You tell people that you have this thing going on, what you're giving away. What do they need to do for it?

All of a sudden, even if it's 3 people, 10 people, or 15, once it gets to a hundred people, now you've got a hundred listeners that somehow discover your show.

And that's a little community. You could ask them…

Hey, how'd you discover my show?

What do you want to hear more about?

What's something that you would pay for with a workout program?

You can do a lot of research that you just didn't have access to before. And again, these people are not just a hundred random people who signed up through a Facebook ad or something.

These people are interested in what you have to say because they came from either the podcast or your YouTube channel or something where they've consumed your content already.

So there's a lot of value in filtering and getting the names of these people. If you could get the names of every person who's listened and downloaded to your podcast or subscribed to it, wouldn't that be amazing?

I'd pay a lot of money for that just because I'm curious who is the person that's listening on the other end before they DM on Instagram, leave a review, they reach out on a website.

You have to poke for that type of information to figure it out.

Email lists are a great system that you can set up once and you can start to see who's the most interested, who's downloading my stuff.

2. Using email lists and newsletters to promote your show.

Now, the second way that I've seen a lot of clients grow their podcasts, and I've seen some people hack their way from a couple of hundred downloads to 20,000 downloads an episode.

How does that happen? How does somebody climb that quickly? It's usually the fact that they have an email list that might be, let's say 10, 000 people, 15, 000 people, maybe it's 50,000 people.

And now what they do is they go, Hey, I have a podcast. Here's the link to it. I think you'd love it here. You can review it on iTunes here. You can listen on YouTube.

And all of a sudden you've got an influx of a thousand, 500 downloads, a couple thousand downloads, something extra that if you think about it, I didn't send that email to the list, I don't have the list.

I'm not getting that influx of automatic 5,000 downloads when it's released.

So it's a massive advantage that you have when you grow a list of people who are connected to you.

They like you they want to hear from you. They trust you.

Email list is just another asset It's a little bit more valuable in some ways and it's a way that you can have control of the connection to your audience.

So before it was kind of like there was a middleman that was in the way if you wanted to reach out.

Let's say Instagram changes its algorithms, which they've done a lot recently and your post is only getting shown to 2% of your entire following or 10 percent of your whole following your stories, let's say it's doing the same thing.

All of a sudden it doesn't feel so good versus email is something you have direct access to. You have direct access to sending this person something, and as long as you don't land maybe in their spam inbox, you're good to go.

3. Using email lists and newsletters to make money

Now there is a third way you use an email list and newsletters to make money and you can grow your show simultaneously with this, but again, it's coming back to the product or service.

Remember before you go starting an email list and getting involved with just managing something extra per week, now really do some thinking about what role this plays in your business, in your content machine in your content ecosystem. How does this help the user experience and how do you want to utilize it?

So don't just say, sign up for my newsletter and start building it that way.

Take some time to think, okay, I have a service that's already working. I sell insurance. I've done it over 10 times. It works. If I use that as an offer on the back end, a free quote, a free, whatever insurance people do. Now, all of a sudden, out of all the insurance-related podcast episodes, I've been doing all the things, free stuff I've been given out when somebody is ready to move forward.

When somebody is ready to move forward to the next stage from awareness to okay, let me now actually consider my options and I might be ready to buy. You are there, your stuff is there, ready to go, ready to impress. And you didn't have to send that email manually.

You didn't have to send them a bunch of links and your best-crafted stuff every time. You can set this all up so it's happening automatically. So it is an extra value add. For your existing podcast listeners and viewers.

And again, it's about you being able to build that community without feeling like you're just talking into the ether.

When you have 100 names and an email, you're like, “Oh, okay. These people are listening to what I have to say.”

And I'll tell you something that's motivating, even with a small list when I had maybe, let's say, a hundred people or less.

I think it was when this list had fifteen people on it, I remember when I sent out this email, I got back two or three responses, some were from existing clients and some were from people that I hadn't talked to in forever, but they saw my name pop up.

They thought whatever I said was valuable and it just reminded them, “Oh, Hey, sorry. I forgot to reply to you. Like I still want to start that podcast.” and now my service that I was ready to offer.

I now have a qualified lead that came from just the free value that I was offering.

The response rates and the quality of people that you gather on your list an assets in itself.

There's a big company out there and how that eventually can make you money is if you grow enough people on that list.

I know there's a company that was it's software company Related to this niche for a client that I'm working with have 48,000 people on their list, and if you want to create a piece of content, share a YouTube video, have a link to promote back to your thing on their list, because they send out great content, also like a 48 percent open rate, it costs about $400/mention or feature.

So if you had a video you wanted to share, it costs $400 to advertise in this newsletter. So as you can see, in the same way podcasts can make money with advertising, you have now extra slots that you can offer that are more expensive on an email list once you grow that asset.

In all, that's changed in content and media and how we consume this stuff over the last 10 years, one of the things that's still not going away is email.

Yes, people might be more connected on Instagram to you. That's where they might talk to you, from an internal perspective, from a business foundation’s perspective. I don't know if there's a single person out there who would tell you, don't have an email list built just in case have it as a safety net.

That's like, the core of who is interested in you, and your database of people is usually an email list.

So if you have any questions on how to build this, or what software to use, I'll be making more stuff on it, but make sure to drop a comment and, or check out the links in the description.

ConvertKit is a software that I recommend and use. So click the link in the description below. If you want to. Test them out, try it out, and see how it would work for you.

If you have any questions, make sure to drop them in the comments or an email to hi@podmahal.com