Podcast Email List Strategy: How to Capture Listeners, Avoid Social Media Traps, and Build Owned Reach

This is Feed Your Brand with hosts Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard. Welcome to Feed Your Brand. I'm Tom, along with my co-host Tracy. And today we're going to talk about and, you know, discuss and debate, is an email list worth it for your podcast? You know, is it a secret weapon that many of you may not be using, or is it a wasted effort? And we have some strong thoughts on that.

Well, we have some strong thoughts, but there's also a lot of people in the marketplace who have very strong thoughts about it one way or the other. So we have the camp who thinks that email lists are dead. And why would a podcaster who's all audio want something that's in writing? Like it's counterproductive and, and counteractive to the media type, right? And then we have the others who are like, They make their money off their email list. They are constantly getting signups. They are building that and growing that all the time. So which is it? And are you ready to do the work necessary to make it work?

And this is one more reason why any of you podcasters out there that don't have a website are gonna have a tougher time with this one, because you really do need a website I mean, yeah, you could use some sort of page on some system, maybe of a CRM or some, you know, mass email program landing pages, you know, but you really, to not only nurture your audience and get them to actually trade their name and email for some good reason, it's going to happen much easier when you have a website that really gives them something more than what they're just listening to all the time. Right.

Right. Or you have to have a really compelling, intriguing offer. And that is something that also you have to deliver that somewhere. And that somewhere can't necessarily be— it's not going to get audio delivered to your podcast. It just doesn't work like that. Right. And if it did, you wouldn't get any information on them. And that's, I think, the key that I want to get everybody thinking about here. The reason why Tom and I are bringing this up about podcast email lists is because Today, so much of what you are focusing your attention on— your podcast and getting it out on Apple and Spotify and the things that are happening there— don't belong to you. The subscribers that are over there belong to Spotify. The subscribers belong to Apple. They do not belong to you. They may be clicking on and following your show, but that's it. It's passive. You do not get to email them. The only vehicle you have to reach them is your podcast episode itself. There's zero other connection point, but you have done all the hard work. You delivered a great episode, you made them want more, you had a great outro that told them where to go to get more information from you. Now collect that. That's what we're talking about with an email list. How are you gonna collect that connection point that you've created? That audience listener intimacy needs to go to the next level, right? And One of the best ways to do that is an email list. Now, many people think that you should send it out to social. Tom, what have we been seeing in social?

Well, you may get, you know, a lot of interest and activity if you post, let's say, a video clip from your episode or you post some graphic. And we do agree, podcasters, you should all be sharing your show on social media wherever you engage and are likely to be found on. So you definitely should do it. What we see, even you'll have a post that gets shared or liked and amplified by someone else, a company that you mentioned, maybe we see this happen with podcasters where they blow it up on social and you think, oh wow, this post got so many likes and shares. And then you go look at the analytics of that episode and say, you know, I really didn't get many more listens because of that. And that's what we see on social is that there may be a lot of activity, but it's not necessarily people. interested in being podcast listeners, or at least not regular ones.

Right. So it's talking about both directions. So what some talking about is using social media to send people to subscribe and listen, right? And that doesn't work very well because they tend to not want to leave their social media platform. They want everything to be within there. So that's one way that it doesn't, it doesn't go one direction into it. It does go, it happens. Somebody sees something and that's just the podcast they've been looking for and they're happy and they subscribe, but it just doesn't happen at the rate at which You wish it would. And it doesn't happen in a click-through model. It just, just doesn't work like that. People will go to their favorite app and find your show more than they will click a link in social media to go to that show because they don't want to be tracked. So they're smart enough to know that, that it's just easier for them to go find it on their favorite app, especially if you didn't give them the link to their favorite app. You gave them the link somewhere else. So that's one way that it doesn't work, but it also doesn't really work very well. To send someone from your podcast to your social profiles and have them get more and have them join you, have them be able to be reached, because there's diminishing returns on that. Because again, the social media algorithm controls something that you're not in control of. They decide how much of your information is pushed to your audience. So even if you get a subscriber who says, I totally wanna follow Tom on Instagram, Don't follow Tom on Instagram right now. I'm just telling you that. He never posts. That's not where he spends his time. Yeah, don't, don't do that. So go follow Tom on LinkedIn. You go to follow Tom on LinkedIn and he's posting all the time and it's great, but only 13% of the people who follow him get his posts. So the social media algorithm is hurting your connection point to someone where it took a lot of effort to get them off of the podcast, Send them to LinkedIn, get them to go over there, follow you over there, friend you, and then you can't reach them as easily. Now you can still DM people and there are lots of other things like that, but again, it has its limitations. It's not as direct a path, right? But if I get you to go to my website or my landing page and give me your name and email address, now we're connected. We're directly connected. And now I'm in control. as the podcast host of our connection. Now you got to do something with it. Don't get me wrong, like that's a whole nother podcast episode, like to talk about what you're going to do with the email list. But once I've gotten that, I'm in control. I'm the owner of the connection, not social media, not Apple, not Spotify. I'm the owner of that connection.

And so as podcasters, What we need to start thinking about is what is the good reason why my listener should be willing or would be willing or could be willing to trade their name and email to give that to you? What's the good reason why? You got to think about that because you can't just say, go sign up for my email list. No one's just going to do that from you saying that or asking for that. What's the good reason why? Hey, you know what? Our email list, we go live every Wednesday, like we are doing now as we're recording this. And everyone on our email list knows before this session what it's gonna be about.

They know what it's gonna be about, and they have a private link to join us on Zoom. So that might be one compelling reason. It might not be enough for others. So you may need to have multiple, and as our good friend Dustin Matthew calls it, irresistible offers. You gotta have multiples of those to send them to them. In a couple of weeks, we're gonna do our social media guide update for the year. That is one of our biggest growth for our email lists and our biggest downloads because we don't give them the download unless you're already a member of our community. You guys get it. But if you're not a member of our community, there's no way for you to get the download for it without signing up for the email list.

So there, right away, a very good reason why this social media guide, just as one example, and in your business, in your industry, or for your niche of your podcast, There's probably something else that you could create one time to then deliver when anybody signs up to your email list. But ours is like, hey, this guide on social media today, here are the sizes of that you want to create of videos or graphics and all sorts of different things that the different sizes that work best on all the different platforms. And there's even more than that, but even just understanding that so that when you're creating material to go out on social, you're doing it in a way that's optimized for that platform. That's, that has value. And I know most people who, you know, are engaging in social media to raise awareness of their podcast, to help let everyone know what's happening with their latest episode. Even if you think you're doing it right, you're gonna go and trade your email and sign up to get that download to make sure you're right. And by the way, things change every year and they have changed again this year. So it's, even if you had it from the past, cuz we do this pretty much every year.

Yeah.

You're gonna want to get it this year. But so what do you have? Do you have a white paper? Do you have a new book coming out and you could have a preview chapter of it? Do you have some other offer of a sort of semi-private group you let them into one time? I mean, what is it? There's gotta be something that either you already have or you can create without a whole lot of effort to give as a reward. To your listener for trading their name and email to be receiving communication from you, whether that's a random, you know, individual communication at times or an email newsletter.

Well, that's where I want to stop you, Tom, because this is the other part of it. It's like you're going to spend a lot of effort. You built a, you know, like we build this big social media guide once a year. You're like, you're going to build something that is the irresistible offer to get them to come to join this email list. Now, once you've got them, what are you gonna do with them? And this is the thing, is that if you're not gonna do anything but give them your weekly episodes, just don't waste your time. It is not worth the effort if all that you are going to give them is a, is here's next week's episode, or here's the episode you missed last week. Now, it's good to put that into something that's a part of something else, but you have to do more than that. So when we started our 3D Print Podcast, Tom and I hated email. I mean, like, we— I mean, we use it all the time, don't get me wrong. Like, I mean, if you want to reach me, you're more likely to get an answer from me in email than you are any other way, right? Like, this is just because it's in my inbox and I like to clear my inbox. If you want to get an answer from Tom, don't send him an email. Like, it is like a black hole of constant inbox messages. It gives me— my grandmother used to call it ajna, right? It makes me anxious. And so—

I am not one of those people that is feeling the need to get to inbox zero. Let's just put it that way.

Right. So anyway, so, you know, people are very different about it and they have the completely different approach to it. So, but we were just like, we're not doing email. So when we had our 3D Print Podcast, people would sign up like all the time because they liked email because most of our listeners were engineers and they wanted the details. They wanted more from us. They wanted white papers and they wanted how-tos and they wanted us to send them stuff. We just didn't do it. And so like the best we could do was we would have this automated, it would send out a notice every time a blog posted in our blog and it would send them an email. Like, that's terrible. So if you're not going to use your email list for good, it's a lot of work to capture them. So just don't bother. Be honest with them about it. Like, I'm really honest. Like, if you wanna message me on Twitter, I will never see it. And I'm X, whatever. That's, that's how old it is since the last time I really used it. Like, I have an X, but I will never look at it. So it's not going to happen, right? I put that right in my description of it. I'm upfront about it. So be upfront about your email list. Are you really going to use it? What are you going to use it for? Tell them. We use our email list for Podcasters United, which is also our email list for Podotize. We only use one because I'm— Tom and I are not going to do this separate. There's so much more greatness from collaborating with the other partners and the other sponsors. of Podcasters United for us, we could do this more easily. We created an AI newsletter that has so much more. It does have our weekly episode. It has what's coming up next week and those private links and those special links for everybody. But it also has what happened last week or what happened in the past that you might have missed. And it's only serving up the ones you might be interested in. So it's not inundating you with our messages. It's giving you what you're looking for. And we have 5 other partners. in Podcasters United that might give you information on YouTube, information on running newsletters from Rasa.io, which is the service that we use for that. We have Restream. I'm trying to think. Juliet Clark and Superbrand Publishing over on the author side of things. We have so much more in there that is filling out the information that you might be getting. We have AI, we have AI flipboards, and we have all kinds of other things feeding in information. That it becomes really useful for you to be able to use a consolidated source that is focused on anything talking to podcasters, right? Anything about podcasting or podcast hosts might find useful. That's how it's curating it and that's how it's working for you. So use it. That's what we do with that. We do not send out funnel emails. We chose not to do that at this time. Will we do it in the future? Maybe. But right now we're not. So we've chosen how to use it as a service. You've got to decide for yourself what you're going to do with that email list.

And I want people to understand that are listening and thinking, oh my gosh, I need another thing to do. Like I need a hole in the head. You know, it's all I can do to get my podcast out. I really don't want to have to also figure out how to do a regular email to my group or an email newsletter. Uh, I'll tell you the reason why Tracy mentioned Rasa. And we've got a link to it in the blog post for this episode at, you know, podcastersunited.org. And I recommend you use that link, um, because you'll get to exactly the right place. With the RASA newsletter, it's a set it up once, or it can be a set it up once and forget it type of thing. Now you can always curate content or add one thing to it that you need to, that you want to make relevant or pin one thing to the top, but it's, you don't have to compose this newsletter. to go out every time because the system composes it for you. And the good reason why it does that is anybody who receives it and clicks on anything, it learns what they like, it learns what they don't like, and it's only gonna give them things they are more likely to be interested in. It figures that out on its own based on the receiver's behavior with it after, you know, a few weeks.

And I wanna say in this, this, you can control the sources as well. So it can be all your own stuff. Like we control, it's only partners and our podcasts. That's it. Like, we're not allowed to pull from the general public. The newsletter is not— the AI of the newsletter is not allowed to do it. But should you choose to do that, they do have other magazines and other things that you could choose from if you didn't personally have enough content. So you want your podcast stuff pinned to the top and then you want it to give you general industry information on your niche. Perfectly capable of doing that for you. So you also don't have to have as much content as you think you do. To be able to fill it as well. So it's just one great way to keep it going because we want our touchpoints on our email list to be consistent and constant, just like our podcast is, right? So we actually do it so that it's 24 hours ahead of the podcast episode. So our livestream here, we do that on purpose to create this mental 12:00 PM Pacific time through, you know, 3:00 PM Eastern time, whatever your time zone is, you are hitting content. That's when Tom and Tracy deliver content. Like, that's what we've been doing is sort of conditioning people to that. It's purposeful. You may want the same thing. You may want Monday morning, you may want Fridays for the weekend. Think about your delivery. Think about when it is. Think about creating this touchpoint at a time at which people are the most open in their email box, 'cause that's important. And think about time when it's very relevant to something that you want to maybe insert in in the future. So maybe it's the time slot that you want your podcast to air, or it's the time slot you want your live streams to air, your webinars, your other things. So be thinking about how you're working through that, and then you can make time adjustments later. But consistent and constant is the number one point to this. The other thing that I really want to be careful of is, is there's a— we're going to talk about this coming up very soon because we have Fran Acero joining us, um, to talk about YouTube channel branding. And when we're going to talk about consistency and other things in the, in the future, we're seeing a lack of consistency across what we're delivering here. So while irresistible offer, the gift, the thing that you're compelling them in to join, it may not necessarily be a direct connection to the topic of your podcast. Like, we're talking about podcasting here. So what does social media have to do with that? Well, it's a marketing tool. It's what's missing. So it's still really relevant and useful, and it may be something that they'd have to go elsewhere to get. And I want to drive them back in here and make it really relevant to them as a podcast host. So that might be something to think about is like what your irresistible offer is should be connected back to your purpose. Your reason for being. We're here to help you grow your show. And if that means email, we're going to talk about email. And if that means social media, we're going to talk about social media. We're here to grow your show. That's our purpose on it. And so everything needs to drive back from a consistency standpoint to that. We also need to make sure that our home base or our landing pages or whatever that is, is not too salesy if we're just trying to capture email lists— emails. It can't be all about selling our book, so we can't just send them to sell the book. We need to send them to something where we're gonna get their email and then eventually we're gonna sell them the book, or next step, we're gonna offer them the book after we got their email address. So, you know, thinking about how your funnel works and how everything's connected, we really need to have it have synergistic results for the listeners we're attracting to our show. Or it will be not useful at all. And all you'll end up with somebody taking your, your irresistible offer, downloading the thing, and then unsubscribing. We have a very low unsubscribe rate because we're delivering what we promise from the show as well. And there's a consistency to that that has a long-term value.

Well, and we're delivering things beyond the show from our partners, things that are tangent to what we do. that are the same people are likely to be interested in. So we become more of a resource for them.

But you're always putting it in context. It's like you're curating those resources, like you're curating the options of things you're giving them. That's very useful. But keep it in context to what your business and your podcast is providing. And that, I think, is the most important thing to do in order to keep this email list not only filling with more and future names, but also keeping the attrition rate low of the unsubscribe rate low as well long-term. But consistent and constant, make sure you're creating touchpoints so that when you're ready to send them an offer, they've received a lot of value from you. When you're ready to tell them about your big live event, they're already there. When you're ready to launch that book, they're already there. One of the most important things you can do, and I hear this again and again from our good friend Juliet Clark, That if you don't have an email list before, months and months before you've built up and you seasoned it, when you go to launch your book, you will not have a bestseller campaign. It will be, you'll be unable to achieve it.

See, that's another, points out one other good reason why. And you know, Tracy, there are lots of things like this. You know, not everybody wants to write a book, although we have several podcasters that create a book from Their, what they think are their best 10 or 12 episodes that they've published in the previous year. You know, John Livesay was prolific at this. Every year he'd have a new book coming out, pick the best ones of his 50 episodes for the year, and then he always had a new book to offer.

And that was the Successful Pitch Podcast, right?

Yes.

The Successful Pitch Podcast. And then he'd write a book from it, and the book might be a subset of it. It wasn't always the Successful Pitch book. It might be like Tips for pitching, you know, your next book, tips for pitching investors. It might be storytelling techniques. Like he had all kinds of different ways.

Right. One of his books was called The Sale Is in the Tale, and it is about storytelling to sell. Anyway, yeah, he's a sales professional, but truly provided real value. And so you may not know today what you might need or wish you had that email list of real people who enjoy listening to your show, you may not know what that good reason is that you might wish you had it when you're going to launch that book or you got an event coming up. You wanna raise awareness of the event, whether it's a virtual event or an in-person event. There's, we actually have a new podcaster that's doing that, has quarterly events and they were having people join their list to be aware of those things. There, there's lots of benefits to them, but you've got to, first of all, Figure out some reward, get their name and email, and then you gotta warm up that list, nurture that list, have touchpoints, send them something of value.

Be creating long-term value from that list so that they do not want to unsubscribe, right? I hear people all the time talk about these tactics for burning your list, like to see who's the action takers in it and everything. I'm not a fan of that. I'm a fan of delivering continual value. Now, if people are never opening, never looking at it, Yeah, just dump that part of the list. But I'm not a fan of burning through the list to try to see who's gonna buy and who's not gonna buy. That— you're not in the list building technique, you're in the business building, you're in the podcast building, you're in the growth of something that has a different value. Every single funnel tactic we've ever seen, every single thing you might wanna do from a business standpoint, get investors, do a crowdfund, sell a book. Launch a book, sell a product, any one of those things, every single tactic will run with a friends and family round to seed it. It always starts with what they call a friends and family round. That includes your private email list because your subscribers chose you. They are your friends. And if you are counting on the passivity of social media to make that work for you, you better have millions of followers out there. Because the low percentage rate is so low that it won't work unless you have millions of followers. So those do not work in terms of a friends and family round and taking action. But your email list who's opening stuff from you every single week, those are, they consider you your friend. They wanna reward you for delivering them value every single week for free. So there's an opportunity for you to really grow that. Now, I do wanna say there's like lots of technical things. We could make a whole show about the technical side of email lists. We're not email list experts. Experts. If you're starting out, and we just recommend this to people, if you're starting out and you decide you're going to do like what we recommended, a Rasa newsletter, Rasa will hold the email addresses for you. You don't need a separate search, you don't need a separate CRM, you don't need a separate engine for retaining those email addresses. You can have them in, in an Excel spreadsheet, like drop them in, right? You know, and you can take the list of people you have right now and move it over. So you could take it from your invoicing, you can take it from wherever you have it now, and you can start using that as your only source. And then when you're ready and you feel like you've grown your list to a size, you can go get something else like Mailchimp, like Freshdesk, like, oh gosh, I mean, there's so many out there.

ActiveCampaign or something.

ActiveCampaign. You can move them somewhere else where you're going to really use them when you're funneling.

Very true, Tracy. But also with most of these systems, including Rasa that we've been talking about, You can have a form from that system and put it on your webpage on either the contact form or a special landing page to let people know the good reasons why they want to sign up for your list. That then when they sign up on your website, it goes right into that system automatically for you. So this can be, again, set up to have, you know, all of the real busywork done for you. Leaving you to do just the really important things, whether they're the creative things or the curation of things, whatever it is you want to do, that spend the minimum of time to provide the maximum benefit to your list. So that's, you know, I just want people to understand this doesn't have to be complicated.

And the sooner you get started, the better, right? Because you have listeners every single day, like, So if we can make this really simple and make it a way for you to capture them, then do that, okay? So newsletter signup is one thing, but you can also embed in that form that then as soon as they sign up, you send them an immediate email as a reply to, you can send them an immediate email to the download. So you can promise it on the page and still use one of these newsletter capture forms if you want. It doesn't matter, it can work both ways.

No, actually it makes a lot of sense warming an email list to give the reward through email. After they've signed up, they get the email and then they open it and that helps you open. I mean, there's lots of logic, but again, we're not, um, the email list and email marketing people. We're like you though, we're using it to our advantage as a podcaster and as business people. And whether your podcast has a business or not, I mean, hopefully it's becoming clear that I get people asking me all the time when they start a new podcast or when they're preparing to, how can I communicate with my subscribers? Well, you have a podcast and that's the number one way you communicate with them. They're listening to you. You gotta do that. But they mean, no, no, how can I know who they are and reach out to them? And if you already don't know this, if you're a newbie, I'm sorry to say you cannot, because none of the apps will tell you who your listeners are. The only way you're going to know is when they are willing to identify themselves to you one way or another on social or through an invitation to get some reward, to join a list, to be communicated by you. So you have a lot of power as a podcaster. They're coming back and listening to you every week again and again. They like you. It's not a big leap. It's not, not a heavy lift of an ask. Or you really, and if you position it right, you're offering them the opportunity to not be left out of one thing or another or many things. And so, you know, there can be a really good reason why the reward they're gonna get by going to your landing page and signing up for your list. You just have to figure out what that reward is, what makes the most sense for you, create that. And then, yeah, a little bit of work. It won't be as difficult as starting your podcast was. I'll put it that It shouldn't be. It really shouldn't be. It's not that hard. And, you know, if you really need support for it, there are people that can do this sort of thing for you if you really want.

So here's one of the other things that I'm gonna recommend is that it's like when you're doing an ask for an email list, when you're doing an ask for providing an irresistible offer, a download of some kind, use it like an ad. Test it. Do not be offering this in the outro to your show unless you know it's working. So use it, put it in, take it out. That's what Poditize does, right? We've had an episode about that recently. We just did a livestream within the last month and a half about that. So we'll link to that in the episode blog post on podcastersunited.org for that. But in addition to like thinking about it like an ad, it gives you this opportunity to circulate it and test out the links that you're using too. So is my landing page working? Is my capture working? And you know that it's then coming from your podcast episode or which ad is coming from it. You're able to track and do all that. Make sure you're following that model because you want to narrow in on the one that works the best for you. And once that one works the best for you, or you think it has the most general excitement that it generates, the most general irresistibility for your podcast listener base, that's the one you could put in your outro. Because then you capture them all the time on that in the general, and you can make different offers, very specific offers as you move forward into the sophistication of you're launching a book and you're doing these other things, you're having a live event. You can use your ads then, your ad positions for those things instead, and just keep the general if you want to connect with me. And of course, I offer this free gift. You can leave that in the outro because that's where someone who isn't your loyal listener waiting for your next thing But someone who wants to make that connection point with you will go. They'll listen to that.

You know, you're reminding me of one thing, Tracy. I think it's important when you make this offer or this ask, depending how you look at it, you got to be very specific about what the offer is and where they go to do it. Is there a link in the description? There should be. You should hopefully understand that. Or on the blog post on your website or some other landing page, be specific about where they're going to go. I actually was just thinking about this. Tracy, because I'm listening to a relatively new podcast to me lately, and every episode they make an ask at the very end, let's get to 5 million subscribers, which, you know, obviously it's a big show because they have millions of subscribers, but they never tell you where they're wanting you to subscribe, which I find very interesting.

I think that in that particular case, they're just looking for more downloads because they make all their money off of ads. So they don't really care where you listen to it. So that's why they don't tell you because they don't know if you're listening on an Android device or an Apple device. They just want you to hit subscribe, which really is called follow nowadays. So they're, they're actually, their terminology is slightly outdated, right?

I wonder if they're talking about YouTube because they also have it on YouTube, which is a subscriber, and that may be where they're looking for it, but they're not telling you that. They're not. So anyway.

Right. That is a little generic, but that's what they're hoping that that word means to you, that you'll do whatever it is that you want to do, which is maybe you will subscribe to their email list, right? Like maybe you will do that. You will take that term and run with it. But For most part, most people are really specific about what they want. You need to be specific about what you want them to do and what action you want them to take and what you're going to deliver to them on the other side of that. So that is really important. And so while I do— I'm a big fan of a very simple outro and sending them to your website, you can also make that offer on the page right when they come up. And you can come up with a pop-up of like, hey, thanks for visiting us. And, you know, and here's our special offer for podcast listeners. And what it does when you do that way is that if they came to the website and they aren't a podcast listener, now they know you have a podcast. And so they think about this and they're like, oh, I'm going to take that special offer because I'm not a podcast listener, but I want that special offer too. They won't walk away from it. So if you have a pop-up, subscribe to the email list and get that, and you mention your podcast in it, you're giving yourself multiple messages without having to crowd it and have a pop-up for subscribing to your podcast and a podcast and a pop-up for Getting on your email list and mixing it all up. You can do it all in one.

It makes sense. And so obviously by this point in this episode, you realize we're, we're in favor of it. I mean, email, it's really the cheapest way, I believe, the least expensive way for those of you on a budget to have more touchpoints with your audience. And you're already podcasting to make that invitation or that ask. You know, anything you do is going to cost more money if it You know, if you advertise anywhere or, you know, just anything else that I can think of as a way to reach out is gonna be more complicated and cost potentially more.

Or be less effective.

Yeah, that's true too.

Right? Because like social media circulation right now is so much less effective than it's ever been before. And that is hurting everyone. So whether you're paying money and running ads, the effective rate is way down. Whether you're just posting there, the effective circulation is way down because the readership or the viewership or the listenership, it's all way down everywhere except for podcast listening. Podcast listening is up. That is the only area that we are seeing growth in. And YouTube viewership is up. But there's still a question about whether or not the amount of videos and the amount of viewership, it's like, you know, still creating a diminishing return for your average person, you know, your person without a giant, you know, MrBeast-sized Audience. So that's a topic for another day though.

Yeah, let's not go down that rabbit hole. There's a lot to think about.

So as much as I hate email, right, as much as I hate it, its effectiveness has stayed steady. And for those who think that emails— like, you look, there was a big dip, don't get me wrong, there was a huge dip. 2022 to '23 was a really rough year for email, but it has started to level out and be a much better place because of opt-in, because of spam tools. So if you're using them right, you're getting someone to opt in, you're getting someone to click and open it. It's following all of those great rules. They download something from you. Now you're really in their inbox. You've really got this connection point of which you can— you've got an easy unsubscribe. So when they get bored, they unsubscribe themselves so easily nowadays. You don't have to scrub your list as much. So all of those things are really working in your favor. And the honestly, the AI tools are making it so that They've not gotten as aggressive as they could in email because they're just making it work on a one-off basis as to whatever your inbox is like. Tom's going to keep everything in his inbox. I'm going to scrub mine clean on a daily basis. And the AI starts to learn that and know that for you. And it works for you to do that. But like the emails that I, I read all the time, they never miss my inbox.

The ones you've opted into, the ones you interact with, the systems learn. And that's the same thing of your listeners. It will. You know, and, and actually, Tracy, our open rate on our email list, isn't it very high? Roughly, what is it?

Double digits.

Well, I know it's double digits, but it's like, what, 40% or more?

It's 40 to 60, depending on the topic.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Depending on the time of year too, like some months are lower than others. And so, but on average, we're, we're, we're average right around 50%.

Of open rate. And then the delivery rate is another thing, which is—

The delivery rate, well, it's over like 90%. Like it's really high.

Right. Because people have opted in and that's the point. You're getting in past the spam filters and into the inbox.

Yeah. Well, the question is whether or not it ends up in what you call like focused and other, if you have an Outlook email or something like that. It's, it's where it's going into your inbox. You may not be seeing it on in your active and that's your choice. You've made those choices on a personal level and there's nothing we can do on our end to program it otherwise, but it considers it delivered either way. So just keep that in mind that number is kind of falsely high for, for most people to actually have put their eyeballs on it, I think. Now then, our click-through rate though is really the number that matters. So if we've got 50% opening and we've got well over 15% to 18% on the ad, it was kind of where we end up with on a very much click-through on our coaching call, this call, this live stream that we do on it alone. There's always also lots of numbers on the other articles that get served up, but everybody gets a different one, so the numbers are very low in terms of looking at like 100 people might have checked out this article, but only 200 got served it, right? Instead of 1,000 people. So you have like a very different model on the rest of the articles that go through. But the one thing that is consistent is that everyone gets whatever our next week's topic is. And so our click-through rate is really high. And we did that by putting in the link to the Zoom for this. So because we have the link for the Zoom or the link for the Zoom event, if you want to call it that, we have that link in there. People are using it not just to see what it's about, but they're also linking through when they want to go in. It's an easy little like bookmark for them to be able to join us live. And so because that happens on a consistent and constant basis, we created a much more dynamic interaction with the newsletter, which helps us get into the inbox more.

And that's also another reason that all of you podcasters, once you start one, you want to make sure people are getting your emails. You should, you know, casually mention In every episode, hey, those of you that signed up for my newsletter, make sure you double check that it's not going into your junk folder. And then, you know, open it up and click on something in it so the system knows the next time you get it in your inbox. You can keep making little reminders like that that are going to help yourself.

Or sneak in a surprise.

Yeah, you can have another reward that you let people know about. Hey, did you all get last week's newsletter? Remember there was a special There's something special in there for you. Make sure you go check it out. You can motivate people to go open it, which is going to help you too. But anyway, that's getting a little more into the sort of how to make it more effective. Because right now you'd really, if you don't have one, you're really going to start with building the list.

So the number one regret that I do hear from whether it's someone wanting to sell a product, wanting to sell a course, wanting to sell a, wanting to get signups for a webinar, wanting to Sell a book. I, the number one thing I hear is they wish they started their email list sooner.

Of course. Same thing, honestly, with people that think about starting a podcast for similar reasons, to have an audience to either to serve or to market to and all this stuff. When's the best time to start a podcast? Yesterday, if you haven't done it yet, because the longer you wait, the longer it is before you build your own audience, the longer before You will benefit from that. So start it as soon as you can.

All right. We will be back next week with another topic focused on podcasters and how they can grow their shows, grow their businesses around them as well. Thanks, everyone, for listening. We'll be back next week.

Heard something valuable today but didn't get a chance to write it down? No worries. We've got you covered.

We partnered up with Podcasters United Where podcast hosts like you can get free resources, free masterclasses, the largest podcast tip library assembled, and free promotion opportunities. While you're there, don't forget to follow us on YouTube and on social @UnitedWePod so you can get Feed Your Brand live. Until next time, keep podcasting.