10 Strategies to Grow Your Podcast with Email Marketing
The podcasting scene has exploded over the past couple of years. In 2020 alone more than 68 million people listened to at least one podcast per week. The best part is that this growth isn’t showing signs of waning anytime soon.
New podcasters are climbing aboard the podcast ship and the growing number of listeners has attracted loads of advertisers. Little wonder many have projected that the podcasting domain will experience even more growth in 2021.
Whether you already own a podcast or you are only just planning to launch one, you will need some insider tips that will fast-track the growth of your audience. So, in this article, I will touch on ten strategies that will help you grow your podcast with email marketing.
They are:
Create a lead magnet
Design an attractive landing page
Drive traffic to your landing page
Build an email list
Send welcome emails
Turn your listeners to happy subscribers
Personalize your emails
Exclusive content, special discounts
Collect and analyze data
Monetize
Create a Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is something of great value or importance. In this case, it could be a how-to e-book, a special podcast episode or any other digital items that your listeners will find appealing and useful. The primary purpose of creating this lead magnet is to provide value. If the value is great, you’ll be able to capture the attention of your listeners and get them to subscribe for more by sharing their email addresses.
When creating your lead magnet, you must keep the interests of your listeners at the back of your mind and allow it to guide you. Remember, it must be both attractive and useful for them. So, you must make your lead magnet irresistible to your listeners.
Design an attractive landing page
A landing page is a web page that your prospect will visit when they try to grab a copy of your lead magnet. Landing pages are usually simple but appealing so you must be intentional about the design of yours. There are many ways to go about designing a landing page. If you don’t have any coding knowledge, you can either have a professional design one for you or use a simple website builder.
Your listeners will however have to provide their email address before receiving your lead magnet. This is where an email gate comes in. An email gate is a web page that your listeners have to go through before they gain access to your lead magnet. On this page, a listener will have to provide you with his/her name and email address. It is only when these have been submitted that they can then proceed to the landing page.
Drive traffic to your landing page
Now that you have created an irresistible lead magnet and have set-up the mechanism for collecting your listeners’ emails, you will then aggressively drive traffic to the landing page. There are two types of traffic on the internet: organic traffic and paid traffic.
Organic traffic refers to the free traffic that you can generate yourself by leveraging your social media pages. Upload as many posts that direct your listeners to your landing page as possible. Use captivating pictures, captions, videos, stories and any other channels you can find on social media platforms. Get creative!
Paid traffic as the name implies is any online traffic that you have to pay for. The most popular/effective platforms to get paid traffic are Facebook Ads and Google AdWords. More than 3 million advertisers choose Facebook and more than 2 million people use Google Ads. You can use either/both platforms to send traffic to your landing page and get interested people to provide their contact details in exchange for your lead magnet.
For paid traffic, you must ensure that you send only targeted traffic to your landing page. Targeted traffic helps you to make the most of your ad budget because you only advertise to people who may already be interested in what you have to offer.
Build an email list
The importance of the email gate as I mentioned earlier is to collect the names and email addresses of your listeners. This is where all the fun begins! Having access to the emails of your listeners puts you in a better position to grow your audience because now you can send emails directly to their inbox by leveraging email campaigns.
In other words, the conversation doesn’t have to end when you stop recording your episodes. You can keep communicating with your listeners between episodes, you can keep them engaged on a deeper level.
However, you will need the help of an email marketing tool to make this happen. Email marketing tools will help you automate the process of sending emails and help you boost your email deliverability. You will be able to build email lists, segment your audience and even schedule your emails.
Send welcome emails
The next step is to ingrain yourself in the minds of your listener as an email friend and the best way to do this is to send your listeners a thank you email. A thank you or welcome email is the perfect first impression in the world of email marketing. Welcome emails have open rates of up to 50% which makes them one of the most opened emails categories. A thank you or welcome email will automatically make your listeners look forward to receiving your subsequent emails.
A welcome/thank you email doesn’t necessarily have to be lengthy, it should simply serve as an onboarding message. You can simply express your gratitude and excitement that you are now in your listener’s inbox and then explain how much more value you have in store for them.
Make sure to write the same way you speak and focus on communicating your emotions (gratitude and excitement) through your first email. This will help intensify the joy of your listeners and make them anticipate your future emails.
Turn your listeners to happy subscribers
Your next focus is on how to make all your listeners become loyal subscribers who are always waiting on the edge of the chair for your emails. This is where most people fail, but, you aren’t most people.
To achieve this objective, you must learn how to craft good emails. You can’t just send bland emails to your subscribers and expect them to lap it up every time. NO! Doing that will effectively chase your listeners away.
Good content is the way to ensure that you listeners become loyal subscribers. Good content is engaging, informative, entertaining, emotive and carries power. Good content must resonate deep within the mind and heart of your listeners for them to become subscribers.
Ensure that you always compose content with your target audience in mind. As mentioned earlier, you must have a clear picture of who you are writing for before you put any content together. This is simply because the right message and tone of voice will make your audience happy. The wrong message on the other hand, will simply piss off the audience.
Personalize your emails
Personalization is a useful tip that can make all the difference in your emails. It will help you connect directly with your audience on a personal note. Experts have found that referring to someone by their first name makes them more likely to do your bidding.
A study reported that 94% of marketers said personalization is an important part of any marketing campaign. So, start off your emails with your subscribers’ first names. It will make them feel special, convey that you pay attention to detail and make them more likely to open your emails.
Most email marketing tools will allow you to address your subscribers by their first names in your emails. You can leverage these tools to make your emails carry the atmosphere of a one-on-one conversation with your subscribers. This will keep your open rates high and before you know it, you would have built a community of loyal subscribers from the listeners on your podcast.
Exclusive content, special discounts.
Serenade your subscribers with loads of other content that they cannot get from just listening to your podcast and they will be loyal forever. Use your emails to send them exclusive content like recordings that couldn’t make it to the podcast, follow up recordings to podcast episodes, behind the scenes footage, and so much more. People like knowing that they have access to your ‘inner circle’ and this is exactly the effect you create when you dish out exclusive content in your emails.
You can even take it one step further and offer special discounts to your subscribers. It works like magic! Exclusive content and special discounts are effective ways to drive up engagements in your inbox.
If you already serve scintillating content that is personalized and exclusive, your subscribers will surely begin to market for you. They will share their excitement and satisfaction with their friends and family. This word-of-mouth marketing is one of the oldest and most effective ways to market. You will find that your number of listeners (and subscribers) will multiply rapidly.
Collect and analyze data
The first type of data that you should be interested in is data that concerns your emails. You will want to know how many subscribers open your emails, what type of subject lines work, what time is best to send emails and so on. Most email marketing tools will automatically help you gather this information so you know how to better structure your emails to maximize its potentials.
You can also use your emails to collect data concerning your podcast itself. Emails are a great way to send feedback surveys to your listeners. You can easily ask specific questions in your emails or ask your listeners to tell you what they like or don’t like about your podcast. You can then use this information to improve your podcast and better satisfy your audience. Growth!
Monetize
The final one is to monetize. This is last on the list because not all podcasts are ‘for profit’. But, if you plan to make money from your podcast, email marketing will help you actualize that dream. If applied correctly, you can leverage email marketing to generate revenue and grow your podcast financially even before the sponsors come in.
You can use your emails to sell memberships, merchandise, coaching classes, e-books, video courses and so much more.
Conclusion
Email marketing is one of the oldest and most effective forms of marketing on the internet. More than 100 billion emails are sent every day and 99% of all users check their emails every day. The ROI on every $1 spent on email marketing is up to $41 making it the most profitable marketing channel on the internet today.
If you plan to grow your podcast in terms of listeners or even financially, email marketing is the channel for you. The strategies outlined above will guide you every step of the way. You will be able to successfully build email lists, connect with your listeners on a deeper level and even significantly generate revenue for yourself.
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Jacopo Mauri
As Maropost's Senior Director of Demand Generation, Jacopo Mauri oversees the global demand and pipeline generation strategy to support the company's continuous growth and success. He has more than 10 years of experience in the B2B SaaS Marketing sector with a focus on strategic growth and scalable demand generation.