Email Marketing for Podcasters: A Starter Guide

Links

• ⁠Is Pinterest Right for Me? Checklist⁠
• ⁠Porch Group Media: Email Usage Stats⁠
• ⁠Kit email platform⁠
• ⁠Get 50% off your first year of Flodesk using this affiliate link⁠
• ⁠Connect with me on Instagram⁠
• ⁠Connect with me on Threads⁠
• ⁠Connect with me on Pinterest

Connect with me

• Instagram
• Threads

Unedited transcript of the episode:

 So I’ve been keeping a secret from you. Okay. Not really, but I haven’t told you about one of the quieter but essential parts of my marketing, and that is email. Hi, I’m Andy Smiley, your friendly podcast guide and the podcast coach For women who want to grow their podcast without burning out.

I share practical podcast tips, stories from my own journey and wisdom from some of the smartest podcasters out there. I think I might have felt you rolling your eyes at me when I said email is part of my marketing strategy, and honestly, I get it. Using email as part of your marketing strategy might feel like it’s not worth it, but I’m here today to convince you to give it a go.

At the end of this episode, I’ll share just one simple step you can do to move toward using email as a part of your marketing strategy.

But first, a quick story about the other major part of my marketing strategy, Pinterest, This summer, I had a big aha moment around podcast marketing. I realized I could go completely Instagram optional just by leaning into Pinterest, and it was a total game changer. I wasn’t stressing about posting and new listeners were still finding my show.

One Pin has more than 7,000 views and is still sending new listeners my way every week. If you wanna find out if Pinterest could work for your show, I created a two minute is Pinterest write for me checklist In two minutes or less, you’ll know if Pinterest is a good fit for you and your show once and for all.

Grab the checklist at the link in the show notes. Now we can dive into the part of my marketing strategy that I’ve never done an episode about.

First, I wanna tell you why email is awesome for podcasters. First of all, you own your email list. Unlike other platforms that can change or disappear, when people join your email list, you have access to their inbox without any algorithm getting in the way. I think we forget how absolutely amazing that is.

I know I do sometimes.

And according to research done by Porch Group Media, 99% of email users from the US check their email at least once a day. I’ll link the article where I found that stat in the show notes, so we should probably be taking advantage of the fact that practically everyone who has an email is checking it daily.

Another amazing part about emails is they can be scheduled ahead of time so you can create them without feeling rushed or overwhelmed. I usually batch create my emails and it makes it so much easier. So when I’m in a really good Headspace, feeling super creative and excited about my podcast and my business, that’s when I write all of my emails.

Then when I’m having a not so great day, I don’t have to worry about it because I know that the email’s already scheduled. It is so awesome and pretty essential for my life as the main caregiver for Three Littles. email also helps you build a relationship outside of the podcast app and off of social media and in case you forgot the number one way podcasts grow is still by word of mouth your listeners telling other people about how awesome your podcast is. So your listeners are much more likely to share your show with their friends if they feel connected to you.

email can help you build that connection.

Okay. Now here are some specific ways to use email to support your podcast and your listeners, first , is a weekly episode update. This can just be a short summary of what your episode is about, and then a link to listen so that people can know that your latest episode came out and they can go and listen to it.

One of my podcasting friends isn’t really on social media anymore and she told me once that the only way she knows that I have a new episode.

Because she’s got a lot going is my weekly emails that tell her, Hey Andy, put out a new episode. You can go listen to it now. So I promise those emails actually work and you’re not wasting your time. Another way you can use email to support your podcast is bonus content you could do something like one extra takeaway I didn’t share in the episode or the behind the scenes of creating that episode. Those are really fun and help build that connection that we talked about earlier with your listeners.

Something else that can be really fun is q and a emails. So if you feel like you’re getting a lot of the same questions from your listeners, you could put together a q and a email or a q and a series. So in every email you have one question and your answer to that as another way to connect with your listeners and help them feel seen and.

Special.

So I’ve given you a couple of examples of what you can put in your emails,

but I wanna cover some of the like nuts and bolts part of writing emails so one of the most common questions I get is, how long should your emails be? And you might not like this answer, but it depends on your listeners.

I know that my listeners are here to learn in quick and straightforward ways, so I keep my emails pretty short and to the point. But there are other podcasts with listeners that listen because they just want your opinions and they want to know more about your life. So those listeners probably want a longer email.

It just kind of depends on your listeners and what they would like. So if you’re not sure what your, what your listeners, like,

You could ask them, you could do that via social media or the listeners that you already have their email. You could reach out to them and say, Hey, can you hop on a quick call? I wanna make sure that my email is exactly what you want it to be, or if that feels like a lot, you can just experiment with your emails. So maybe you do one month where you just write shorter emails and then the next month you try writing longer emails and you see which ones get opened more.

And get more replies and then you can kind of move forward with that knowledge. There are a lot of different ways to figure this out if you can’t tell and you just kinda have to figure out which one’s gonna be best for you. Another common question I get about emails is, when you’re creating your emails, should you use images or keep it text only?

So I’ve noticed that when I used to use a lot of images in my emails,, it would get put in the promotions tab, and I like to avoid getting put there. So. If you also would like to avoid getting put in the promotions tab, I would recommend sticking to text only emails. Then you’re more likely to land in the primary inbox on Gmail.

One last common question that I get from clients is, how often should I be sending emails? This is another, it depends. Um, how often do you want to write emails? How often can you do it while staying consistent? These questions will help you determine what works best for you And then you can go from there. I personally have found that weekly emails work really well for me and my listeners, but that has come from some trial and error. I have never done daily emails, but I’ve tried weekly and I’ve tried monthly monthly was fine.

But Weekly has helped me feel more connected with my listeners. And so that’s where I am right now. And honestly, it’s fluid.

It just kind of depends on your season of life and on your podcast. So I would recommend picking a rhythm that you think will work for you. Try it out and then assess if it’s actually working for you or not. And if it’s not, tweak some things and try again.

So you’ve listened this far and you might be thinking, I don’t have enough listeners yet, or Email seems like too much work.

Or maybe no one actually reads emails anymore. Andy, I hear you. And honestly, I thought all of these things before I started using email. So let me just respond to all of these thoughts that you were thinking. So the first one, I don’t have enough listeners yet.

I hear you, and that is a very frustrating place to be because you want to share your message with everyone who needs it. Yeah. Yes, I hear you. The best way to grow your podcast is still through word of mouth, like I said earlier.

And one of the best ways to get your listeners to tell your friends about your show is to treat them like your best friend. Sadly, you cannot call up each listener and tell them about your life and connect with them that way, but you can do something similar via email. You can tell them about what’s going on in your life, what’s going on with a podcast.

And help them stay in the loop and help them feel connected to you. And that’s when they’ll be so excited to share your show with friends. Okay. The next thought that you might be thinking is email is too much work. And honestly, at the beginning it can definitely feel that way. I hear you and that makes sense.

Email can feel super daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Just start by sending an email that tells your people about this week’s episode. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You just need to start practicing sending emails. If you want help zing up your email,

you can always copy and paste your email straight into an AI chat bot to give you some ideas on how to add more personality or quote, I’m the expert unquote vibes to your email. I may or may not be speaking from personal experience. Another thought you might be thinking is no one reads email anymore. Andy, why are you even talking about this? I can see how you would think that, but in that same article that I referenced earlier. It also says that about 90% of people in the US have an email. So if you couple that fact with the fact that 99% of people who have an email check it at least once a day, I would say people actually do still read email, even if it feels like email is like archaic and.

Boring people are still reading email, so we might as well take advantage of somewhere that most people are checking every single day.

I know. The idea of emailing your listeners can feel daunting. So here’s one simple thing you can do today to start the ball rolling. Send a quick email to your listeners telling them about your latest episode. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t have to be clever.

You’re just getting yourself. Back on the horse or on the horse for the first time. When you send that email, will you hit reply to one of my emails or DM me and tell me how it went? I would love to cheer you on and send you all of the good vibes because it’s a big deal sending an email.

If you don’t have a way to email your listeners yet, don’t sweat it. There are platforms like kit or flow desks that make it super simple to set up an email list. And next week I’m gonna walk you through exactly how to start growing your email list.

If this episode helped you feel more confident about email, will you share it with another podcaster who could use the same reminder? The best part about podcasting is that we don’t have to do it alone. Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you next week.