Email marketing is one of the best ways to market a business. It has a high ROI, between $38 and $44 for every $1 spent. This is usually for eCommerce brands. However, the digital marketing channel can be a great asset for a podcast. In this article, we consider whether email marketing can help a podcast and the best ways to make it happen.
Why Email Marketing is an Effective Tool
There are several advantages to email marketing a podcast show, helping hosts connect with audiences and keep them engaged. Emails can also be a great way to increase revenue opportunities with your podcast episode sponsors or advertisers.
So here are some of the benefits of email marketing for your podcast.
Improved Retention
To ensure your podcast audience grows, you need to retain listeners. Statistics state that about 70% of people visiting a website will not return unless they subscribe to a mailing list.
When you subscribe to a mailing list, send them messages about new episodes, upcoming themes, and offers. Therefore, you improve the chance they return to enjoy additional episodes.
Improved Data Collection
Many people release episodes or emails and don’t look at the results. Analyzing the key metrics can help you strategize future brand plans. For example, if you sent out four emails per month about four different topics, you could see which email had the most opens and click-throughs and which podcast episode got the best retention to determine what your audience wants.
By improving your data collection, you can determine what topics are in the highest demand.
Bring in Higher Quality Guests
When you have a large mailing list, you can attract more exclusive guests because you can offer them something new – a way to market to a pre-selected audience. Therefore, your show becomes more valuable to the guests.
The larger your audience on email marketing, the more exclusive your guests can become.
Build a Community
Building a community is simple with email marketing. You can have two-way conversations with your audience and grow an effective community where you can share ideas and collect details from your audience.
Communities can help you see insights into what excites your audience and what information they’d like to listen to. In addition, when you want to sell a product, service, or concept to your community, they’re more likely to listen to you.
Elaborate More on Topics
In addition to using the podcast to convey key concepts, you can use the email campaigns to discuss specific topics covered in episodes. Therefore, you can reinforce the core ideas, and provide examples and sources in an email that can help you build a more effective argument.
This can also help you connect one podcast episode to others that you might have published before.
Build Revenues
Email is one of the most effective sales channels. Partly, this is because they build trust with the audience. You can use email to sell your product, services, or offers from your brand.
As a result, you’re not just relying on the listener to get out their phone or laptop and check out your website after hearing about it, instead, you’re giving them a clear and easy way to find out more about what you have for sale.
Email marketing is also a great place to earn money from affiliate marketing. It is an effective way to earn money with limited costs. It can also help you to connect with other brands.
Add Something More for Sponsors
One way to enhance and build revenue from sponsorship packages is to have more value in the proposition. Having a large audience on email allows you to prove that you have an audience that will see a sponsor’s name.
Therefore, you can add the prospect of being included in the email campaigns as part of the sponsorship package. It can convert more prospects or allow you to earn more from sponsors.
You might also want to try tiered sponsorship packages, where sponsors can choose their level of investment and get more from higher levels.
Saves Time
You can automate much of your email marketing. For instance, you can have a drip-feeding email marketing campaign of popular episodes or key concepts that acclimatize the audience to your brand.
Using this technique, you can create content for your audience without having to invest any more of your time other than the initial setup.
How to Make Email Marketing Work for Your Podcast
There are several ways to get email marketing to work for your podcast. Here are some of the suggestions that you might want to try.
Consistency – Just like with podcast episodes, getting consistency within your release of emails is critical. If you’re publishing one campaign a week, be sure you stick to that schedule. Try to publish at the same time every week and monitor the results.
Segmentation – Grouping subscribers into communities of like-minded individuals can be an effective way to get the most from your campaigns. Each segment will have something in common, like customers, engaged audience, new subscribers, etc. And you can create different campaigns based on this segmentation to be more targeted.
Insert Media – Emails with media, such as a video copy of your podcast, can be more effective than those without any media. Therefore, if you’ve got the chance, add your video podcast to the copy.
Limit Text – The best-performing emails have less than 200 words in them. That doesn’t mean emails with more words won’t perform well, but you must have that text perfectly written to be effective.
Call-to-Actions – Call-to-actions are critical to the success of your email campaigns. Ensure that your call-to-actions are effective. You can use A/B testing to assess which text, color, and placements work best on your emails. Or you can use different call-to-actions for the various segmentations that you have.
Subject Lines – Don’t forget to test your subject lines. Nearly half of all recipients will open an email based on the subject line, regardless of who it is sent by. By creating compelling subject lines, you can get half the list by opening your emails.
Personalization – Personalization is critical for success. People don’t want to feel that they’re getting a copy of an email sent to thousands of people. They want to feel that the email was written for them. Therefore, ensure that you personalize the email with details that you’ve collected. This doesn’t need to be hard, mail merging technology and databases can automate a lot of this process for you.
Get Help – If you’re struggling with email marketing, don’t give up. Hire someone to help you achieve better statistics.
Grow your List – It is critical to always be looking for new email subscribers. Add popups to your website, encourage subscribers with free tools/resources or offers, and be sure to get people you meet to be added to your mailing list. The more you have on your mailing list, the better your results will be.
FAQs
Is email marketing free?
When you start with email marketing, there are some free services. Some online providers give you a free account as long as you send a limited number of emails per month to a small group of individuals.
Can I buy an email marketing list?
Buying an email marketing list is very ineffective and costly. Not only can it break certain privacy laws, it can be very outdated, inaccurate, and irrelevant to your needs. The best way is to grow your marketing list organically.
Do I need a website for email marketing?
No. You don’t need a website for email marketing. You can run your email marketing campaign from an online tool without a domain.
Final Word: Will Email Marketing Help Your Podcast?
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing avenues for your business. And podcasting has the potential to help you retain audiences. What you need to do is to attract subscribers and keep them interested through regular, consistent campaigns that will entice them to return to future episodes.
Produce Your Podcast is a full-service podcast production, editing, and marketing agency specializing in helping brands launch, grow, and monetize successful podcasts that impact their bottom line. With 30+ years of experience in both broadcasting and business development brought to every project we work on, our team of experts is a reliable partner to help you achieve your goals with your show.
Click here to schedule a conversation with our team today and let’s bring your show to life!
