How to Grow and Monetize Your Podcast Using Email Marketing

If you have a podcast, don’t overlook email marketing.

It’s one of the best ways to speak directly to your listeners and promote your podcast. Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter.  It’s also profitable. For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $44 in ROI.

In this blog post, you’ll find out how email marketing can help you monetize, grow, and build a more engaged audience. We’ll also show you how you can get started TODAY.

1. Grow Your podcast Audience by Growing Your Email List

Unlike social media, when you use email marketing, your message lands straight in your subscriber’s inbox and you can decide when and how often you want to communicate with your subscribers.

Here is a list of ways that email marketing can help you grow your podcast:

• Capture future listeners. If you have a website or social media presence, you can capture the people that visited your pages and stay in touch with them: all you need to do is collect their email addresses. Many ESPs include forms and landing pages that will help you do this. You can embed the ESP’s form on your website to collect emails. If you don’t have a website, don’t worry about that – many ESPs, including SendFox, offer free landing pages. A landing page is a website specifically designed to collect email addresses. You can share the URL on your social media, podcast, and more.

• Use lead magnets. Lead magnets consist of offering a long piece of content such as an ebook, podcast, guide (almost anything you can think of) in exchange for a person’s contact details. This will increase the chances that a person visiting your website or social media channel sign-ups to your mailing list and becomes a listener.

• Create a referral program just like the Morning Brew! This is rewarding your most loyal subscribers for getting more people to sign-up for your newsletter and potentially becoming new listeners. You can also make it a milestone system, where your subscribers get different rewards depending on the number of people that they have referred.

2. Increase Your Audience’s Engagement using email marketing

Email marketing lets you directly message your subscribers so it’s also a great opportunity to build a relationship with them. Your subscribers have signed-up to receive emails from you so they are also keen to read your emails and know more about your podcast.

Here are some techniques that you can use to improve the engagement with your subscribers:

• Send regular content. Many podcasters send a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly newsletter to their subscribers that contain updates on new episodes, guests, and topics. You can also include other resources that your listeners might find useful.

• Ask listeners for feedback. Email is not only a way for you to directly contact your subscribers; it’s also a way for them to directly contact you. At the end of each email, you can ask subscribers to give you feedback on what they thought of the episode, guest, or topic. Pro-tip: this also helps improve your sender reputation. This is because if email clients see that people are not only opening but also responding to your emails – they will categorize you as a great sender and make sure that your emails land in the inbox.

• Create a welcome automation series. Automation is a sequence of emails that you can automatically send to your subscribers once they sign-up. After someone sign-ups to your mailing list, you can continue the momentum by sending them an automation series that includes emails welcoming subscribers to your mailing list and also re-sharing the best content from your podcast. Subscribers who receive a Welcome email show 33% more engagement with the brand.

3. Monetization Opportunities

It’s worth mentioning again: For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $44 in ROI! There’s also another statistic, based on data from Sumo Group, that says that every subscriber on your list is worth approximately $1.

As a podcaster, email marketing is a no brainer if you want to expand your opportunities for monetization. Here are three ways you can do this:

• Sponsorships. Using email marketing, you can sell more ad spots and sponsored content. You can speak to your current sponsors and advertisers about your email list to let them know you can put their product or service in front of hundreds (or thousands) of subscribers. You could also add the company’s logo at the beginning, middle, or end of your content, just like the example below:

• Promote your other products and services. Once you’ve done the hard work of building an engaged audience that trusts you, you can easily promote any other products or services that you might want to expand into like merchandise, online courses, and more.

• Paid newsletter. Another way you can monetize through email is by creating an exclusive paid newsletter. Many paid newsletters work on a subscription basis (i.e. $5 per month) and provide subscribers with exclusive content such as non-public videos, behind the scenes content, exclusive Q&As, etc.

Podcasters Using Email Marketing:

Modern Jeeper is a podcast about the new and growing world of off road adventure and Jeep ownership. They send a weekly newsletter to their subscribers with their latest episodes and other information they think their audience would love.

Love Line for Business is the podcast all about helping entrepreneurs love their work again. In their weekly newsletter, they share details about their latest episodes and recommendations on books and tools that entrepreneurs should check out.

Pacific Atrocities is a podcast with the mission of increasing awareness about atrocities committed in the Asia-Pacific Theater of World War II. They use SendFox to send their weekly newsletter with updates of their new podcast episodes and resources that their audience will find interesting.

Step by Step: How to get started with email marketing and grow your podcast audience

Now that you know why you need email marketing for your podcast, we are going to show you how to get started

1. Create a SendFox account

Go to our website https://sendfox.com/ and sign-up for an account. Follow the onboarding process that takes less than 5 min.

2. Start collecting emails

Next up, start collecting subscribers.

We’ll start by creating a SendFox smart page (basically what we call our landing pages). You can follow the steps in this video on how to create a SendFox smart page.

When it’s ready, copy the URL of your smart page and share it on your podcast show notes, social media channels and add it to the footer of your email signature.

Let’s create a SendFox form, check out this video that includes the instructions on how to create a SendFox form. If you have a website, make sure to embed this form to stop missing out on subscribers.

3. Build a Welcome Automation Series

Automations are a great way to start engaging with your audience as soon as they sign-up. SendFox makes it very easy for you to create one using our automation assistant.

After clicking Start with a template, follow the steps of the automation assistant.

When you’re done, you’ll see an option called Welcome Series. Click on this option and SendFox will automatically create an automation for you.

This is what the welcome series created by the automation assistant will look like:

4. Set up your referral system

A referral system is a great way to grow and engage your current subscribers. To set this up, follow the steps in this article.

5. Create and send your first emails

Last but not least, send your first email to your subscribers. If you don’t know where to start or what to include use SendFox’s Smart Campaigns.

With Smart Campaigns, SendFox automatically creates an email for you in less than one minute with the best content from your RSS feed.

Find out more about how it works and how to set it up in this video tutorial.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Email marketing is an important tool to help you grow, engage, and further monetize your podcast.

You’ll get to know your audience on a deeper level, engage them in new and creative ways, and maximize your ability to grow your show, and business.

Get started today with email marketing, get the SendFox lifetime deal here.

And once again, if you have a podcast, don’t overlook email marketing. ✌