Podcasting Q&A

Why your podcast needs an email list

December 24, 2023 Buzzsprout
Podcasting Q&A
Why your podcast needs an email list
Show Notes Transcript

What's the best strategy for connecting with your audience and scaling your podcast?

In this episode, we'll give you three reasons why email beats social media every time.

Need some help with your podcast? Join the Buzzsprout Podcast Community on Facebook to get the help you need from podcasters just like you.

Travis:

Today on five minute Monday, I'll explain why your podcast needs an email list. Welcome to five minute Monday where we bring you the best tips and strategies for building your podcast in five minutes or less. So if you're new here, consider subscribing. Now as your podcast grows, as it, you start to reach your goals and you start to get some success, some positive momentum, you're going to want to multiply the number of ways you can stay in touch with your listeners. Because if there's one thing that your diehard fans want more of, it's you. Now, most podcasts, your start to branch out by creating Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter counts, posting frequently to both promote new episodes and engage their existing audience and they do work. I'm not going to say that they don't work, but there's one strategy that trumps social media every single time. And that's email, right? It's not the sexiest thing in the world, but it does happen to be one of the most effective marketers or know for years that the number one strategy to consistently engage and contribute to your community is through email. And there's really three big reasons why, and I'll break those down for you to help you understand why email is so much more valuable and so much more powerful when it comes to continuing to reach out and engage your audience. Number one, not everyone sees your social media posts, all right? If you didn't know, that can come as a shock, but when you post something, not everybody that follows you is going to see that post, right? Imagine that you are putting an hour into crafting the perfect image and the most catchy description to update your Instagram feed and you publish the post and flowers later. It only has 50 impressions, maybe 15 likes. And you're thinking, I have over 2000 people that follow me. How come only 50 people have seen my post? Well that's because Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all use algorithms to predict what people want to see. And so when somebody who follows you on social media logs into the app, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are trying to figure out what they should show them and if they decide for one reason or another that your post isn't valuable to that person that's logging in, they're not going to show it, and the posts that they do think they're going to want to connect with or want to see or engage with, they're going to push those to the top. What this really means though is that every post you make will only reach a fraction of people that follow you. On the flip side, when you send an email, 100% of your subscriber list gets your email, right? Sometimes it gets filtered into their spam or promotions folders, and there are strategies to fix that, but you can rest assured that when you send an email to your list, a majority of your subscribers are going to see it every single time. The number two reason why email is more powerful than social media is that you have 100% control, right? What would happen if Facebook, for instance, decided to shut down your page? You'd have to start from scratch. You couldn't reach back to those followers and say, hey, by the way, Facebook ticked this page down, so come over here, follow me on this new page. You don't have access to those people anymore on social media, those companies, Facebook, Twitter, and the like own your followers, you're just borrowing them from them temporarily. But with an email list, you own your list, you control the access to the people that want to hear from you, right? And you can take your list to any number of email marketing, software solutions, and never lose a single email. That's something that you cannot do with social media. And so your email list is an asset that you cannot lose. And once someone gives you permission to email them, you can continue to serve them until they opt out. And then the number three reason why email is really important as a podcast or is that after you start to see success with your podcast, you're going to want to branch out into other things. Maybe you want to start a blog around a similar topic. Maybe you want to start selling ebooks or merchandise or even get into the online course game. Your email list becomes the goto mechanism to instantly communicate with your subscribers to instantly communicate with your audience and you continue to follow up with them, send them more information, connect with them on a deeper level. Your email list becomes your number one weapon for doing that and so by having an email list, by cultivating one, you can execute it, leverage it later on as you continue to branch out and try new things. There are many email software solutions that you can choose from if you want the best one right out of the gate. We really like convert kit here at bus sprout. That's what we use for our emails and if you want to get started with a free solution than MailChimp is a good platform as well. That's it for today. If you're new here, make sure to subscribe to the channel. If you're watching this on youtube or subscribe to the five minute Monday's podcast and your favorite app to squeeze even more podcast related content into your life. Thanks for listening and as always, keep podcasting.