Podcast promotion with email marketing

What is email marketing

Email marketing is one of the more interesting and efficient marketing channels. It can be used to promote all different kinds of products and services, so it can and should also be used to promote your podcast.

How to start with email marketing

The very first thing you need todo is start building your email database or email list. This is the most important step. The email list is the list of all your subscribers that allow you that you send them emails. How do you do that? We put a form on our website where our website visitors can subscribe to your email list. This can be a pop-up or a form on the side of our website.

Please, don’t to the biggest mistake everyone does. Don’t put your email subscription form in the footer (at the end) of your website. Put it somewhere where it is obvious and every visitor sees it. And you need to tell your visitors why they should subscribe to your email list. Tell them that they will receive every episode of your podcast. Maybe they can receive special episodes that others dont get to see or they receive them first. Maybe, you can have a special gift, an ebook or a special audio recording only for people that will subscribe to your email list.

Also, use your podcast and invite your listeners to subscribe to your email list. They are your best clients, they already love your podcast. So they should subscribe, tell them about the email list and where they should subscribe in your podcast episode. In the same way you ask them to subscribe and rate your podcast.

What email marketing software should I use?

This is a hard question, but I will answer it in two ways.

If you are just starting with email marketing

Go to mailchimp.com

MailChimp is probably the most used email marketing software by small businesses and website owners. It is simple to use, it will connect to a wide variety of website CMSs and if you need support, you can find literally thousands of articles for every Mailchimp problem. MailChimp will give you the subscription form that you embedd into your website, it will handle all the subscriptions and unsubscribers, it is GDPR proof and you can send and track the sucess of all your email campaigns. It is free in the beginning and not too expensive when your email marketing list grows.

If you are an experienced email marketer

or if you have a large podcast following, don’t use MailChimp. It can be too expensive. The cheapest way for you to do email marketing that is still easy to set up is Sendy and Amazon SES. Sendy is a self-hosted email marketing software. You buy the software once and you don’t need to buy it ever again. No subscriptions, no nothing. It is robust and it can work in all different kinds of ways. The support is not that widespread as with MailChimp, but there are articles out there that will help you and the official forum is full of threads that will help you to use Sendy.

But unlike with MailChimp, you need an email sending server. Sendy is just a program where you can keep all your subscribers, and prepare the emails,  ut Sendy has o idea how to send those emails.

You will need a server for that and the cheapest option to use is Amazon Simple Email Service, also called Amazon SES. It can send a lot of emails fast and efficient, and it will grow with your needs. The best thing here is that you only pay what you send. So if you send a low number of emails one month, you only pay what you used.

Download Sendy Here.

How to grow your email marketing list

Your podcast marketing email list will have 0 subscribers in the beginning, and growing the e-mail marketing list can be one of the biggest challenges in e-mail marketing. I’ve mentioned that you should use your podcast to promote your e-mail list. But you should also do more.

People love to get things for free. And this is the best way that you offer something for free to your subscribers. The one thing that everyone does are free e-books. When I say an e-book I actually mean a 10 – 15 pages long pdf. If you are able (and you should be able) to generate a 10 pages long document with something worth knowing, your podcast subscribers will fight for it. And they will give you their e-mail address freely!

Podcasting means that you can give them something else too. Can you prepare a very special episode only for those people who subscribe? Than do that. Make it important, make it big and tell them “Subscribe now and receive a 1 hour long episode that is available only to subscribers. It is a SECRET EPISODE!”. Or something simmilar.

What should you send to your subscribers

Now your e-mail marketing list is growing. You have 10, 100, 1000 subscribers. You should use this list. There are a couple of ways how you should do that.

1. New episodes. Send your subscribers an e-mail when you publish a new episode. Tell them something about your new episode. Make them open the podcast app and listen to the episode.
2. Upcoming episodes. Do you have a very special guest? Or maybe a horror episode, a special episode? Tell your people in advance. Share a picture of the recording with them. People love to hear from you, so let them hear from you via email.
3. Ask them for feedback. We always ask for feedback on the podcast, so why don’t you do that via e-mail. Don’t do it every week, but you can do it every quarter. Create a form in google forms and send a link to the form to your subscribers.

Peter

Hey, my name is Peter and I’m the owner of this website and a couple of other podcasts. I get my experience from making my own podcasts.