Unveiling The Power Of rasa.io: Transforming Podcast Communities

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works today. Get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard and I am going to talk about newsletters. I know it sounds like so archaic to say that, right? I'm going to talk about newsletters, but I am. I'm going to talk about AI driven newsletters and how we're using it to build our community. When we talked about trying to keep our team and our community updated, we wanted to educate them and update them. And there's so many changes going on in the podcast industry. So it has a lot of new things that come up at any given time and there's new tactics that didn't work yesterday, that worked today, or stuff that been working, that stops working. And you have a lot of that that you need to discuss and share. And it's really hard to get your community to pay attention to a social media post about it. So how do we do that? How do we keep them informed? And let's face it, our emails are inundated, so we ignore 90% of what comes through an email. So are we really going to pay attention to a newsletter? It was a big question I had and then I thought about the amount of effort for the amount of people paying attention to that newsletter. Didn't seem worth it to me. And so we'd put this off and put this off and not thought about this. But there got to be such a model of so much content and information that we needed to convey to our community to help them transform their podcast, help them grow, help educate them on what's going on in the industry, keep them informed and updated, and then add that in keeping them informed about the AI impacts into podcasting. Like all of those things were confusing things to the point at which we really needed to make sure that we were keeping them up to dated in some way, shape or form. So we felt that the newsletter was the best model for us to be able to keep them informed, but let them to decide how to communicate, how to access that, how to engage with that, how to view it. But with the AI driven model, it went one step further. If they did engage with it. If they do engage with customizes and gives them more of what they're looking for. And so that's how we decided to approach this. And so it wasn't until really these AI newsletters came in that I started to say, okay, this is going to do what I want it to do. It's going to create this proper weekly roll up and it's going to feel like it's giving me the information I need. So if I'm in exploration of deciding to publish a book for my podcast, then I can do that and I will get more information. If I click on some of those articles or if I'm solely interested in growing my YouTube and I start clicking on more of those articles, I'm going to get them back from me.

So. Hey Tom, glad you jumped into the episode. As you know, we're talking about newsletters and we're talking about why we chose the AI driven newsletter.

I'm really have enjoyed experiencing it. I have to tell you, it is completely different. Newsletters used to take so long to put together and then is the content really going to be of interest to everybody? There's so much about this new program that makes it easy and more valuable for the recipients. I mean, it's sort of customized to everyone, right?

Absolutely. And it's that customization that added that extra edge for it to me. Because this is the thing, I'm not a beginner podcaster, so is everything that's going to come out there going to be too beginner focused? Like that's an edge, or am I going to be talking over the head of somebody who's new? So by really being able to allow the AI itself to customize that, it's given us the ability to make one newsletter and make it work for more people in our community.

And we actually use it now. And I don't know if you mentioned this already, but we used it to use it to announce our topic for our upcoming weekly coaching call, which is also the topic for this podcast episode.

Right, Right. So every week we do pin that and adjust it. It's kind of the main announcement, but when we used to send the announcement about the coaching call, we used to get all these people writing back. They're so annoyed, they don't need it, they don't want these emails, like it's just too much. So it wasn't enough relevant, useful information. But here, by pinning that and adding it into the newsletter, we're able to make that announcement, but also provide additional value. So it makes those Kinds of email announcements. More read, right? Like more commonly read. Because they'll take a look at that. So that's one of the other reasons we needed to have a vehicle to announce what the coaching call topics are. That's what you're listening to right now. And if you're listening to the live stream. And so we had multiple things that we wanted to accomplish, and it really wasn't until we had this AI customization that was able to come in that we were able to do this at a reasonable cost. Right. And that's also something to consider. So for under $200 a month, and that's if you do bells and whistles, right? Like, you don't have to pay that much. There's cheaper versions of it, but we do two different versions of our newsletter. We actually do three, but there's two different versions for two different audiences. And so we have a couple of versions. So we're running multiple newsletters, which you can run. There's also the number of people you have in your circulation list that goes into the factor of, like, how you max out. So whether or not you have to buy a really, you could start with a small one and then as you get a larger newsletter subscription base, you can grow up to it and expand. So that's one of the areas we were looking for, was keeping the cost low on this. The second thing for us was really making sure that we felt that the company was going to last. Right. Because a lot of these.

Oh, you mean the provider.

You said the provider. Yeah, because a lot of these AI companies are all only in it to get bought out, Right? Like, that's the thing. They want to create one killer app and then get bought by a bigger company, and then you're going to lose all the things you built in all of this. So we really spent a lot of time and it took me about four months to review all of the different options. And one of the things that I came across is that I found that about half of the people I was meeting with were reselling the same thing. So they were actually not creating. They were managing a newsletter service, but they weren't the provider of it, they weren't the actual source. And so it eliminated a lot of these newsletter AI and like a bunch of these companies that were just like popping up left and right to be able to do this stuff. And we instead went straight to the source that we found most of them were using. And so that's Rasa IO. Now, the thing about Rasa or I think that's how you say it. That's how I say it.

That's how I've always said it.

I've always said it. Rasa IO yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how you say it. But the thing about Rasa is they also just got a huge influx of capital and I think they've been doing everything right by what they're doing. We've been with them at least nine months now and set up all the way through. So we've been doing this for a while, but we've actually been now about five months in actual execution of sending it out regularly to some subscribers. We obviously grew up our list and then added everybody at the beginning of this year. So we're really talking about three, three and a half months into it at this stage. So we chose them because of a few things that they have. First off, the sales process was great. The people there were fantastic, hands on. They have a really great onboarding process and simple and easy to set up, test, play with, use and learn from. They have a great emails, so they do a great job of sending emails with suggestions and they drip them at a point at which you're ready to address these things. Somebody did a really great job psychologically here of planning out. So like, we get a new suggestion and it's not so frequent that we can't, we can't deploy it. It comes at just the right moment where we're like, oh, we could change that. Okay, that sounds great, let's try that and see if that works. And so it's like right at the moment for us to be able to experiment. So they've done a really great job of dripping that out to us as well. And, and then as was pointed out by our marketing assistant, the customer service, when you ask a question, gets back to you and is great about helping you figure things out. So that says a lot about that. And like I said before, this is not a high cost to deliver this. It's under $200. I think we pay under $150 right now. So that's why we chose Rasa. But mainly we chose it because it has two features to the curation process. And here's the key. If you want a great newsletter, you've got to curate a great list of content sources.

Content, content, content. I mean, this is the big red flag and point, I think, to this. You need, if you want people to not opt out of your newsletter, you got to provide them good content. Right.

And Tom, what do you think the key is to Good content.

What is the key to good content? Consistency? Volume. Is that what we're talking about?

Consistent and constant?

Right.

Like it's the same thing we say to our podcasters. It's consistent and constant. If you are consistent doing something weekly and you are constant about it, the AI will reward you in the process. So that's the one thing we found. We found that if it's current new information, it's more likely to serve it up. It's more like it looks at that first and then it looks at relevance. So because it wants new information, because if it's something new, if we're talking about the changes to Apple standards or something in the podcasting industry, this is relevant information, but it's also current information that we need to disseminate as fast as possible. Right. Everyone needs to get to it. So the AI will reward that by putting that in more newsletters. So this is something that's like having good sources for that, but also not having only your own voice. I think that that diversity in your.

Content, that's, I think, the big point. I also want our listeners to understand you don't have to create all this content yourself. In fact, you really don't want to because you want a variety of content. Right. Hopefully not a direct competitor, but somebody complimentary to you of vendors that you work with or that you and your community might all want to use. There's lots of ways to bring in other really meaningful, valuable content for your community. Right?

Right. So if you watched our coaching calls on live streams or you're one of our clients, you know that we don't let people into our community to speak to our community lightly. We take it very seriously. We work with them for a while. We make sure that they're also podcasters so that they have a sense and understanding and empathy with how hard it is to podcast. Right. So they understand the system of what we do, and so they've been clients or work with our clients. Right. That could also be the case. And so we also then make sure that the content that they're putting out is more than just what they talk about on the air with us. When we have them do a coaching crasher come in and give some advice on air, we want them to have their own set of content that is educational, that is informative, that's not bunch of webinars, that's not irrelevant. Now, they can have that content in video, so in a video library on YouTube, they can have it in a podcast, and they could have it in a blog. So it does not have to be podcast only. I want to be clear about that. Like, you could have it in any one of those formats, but I also want them to be consistent and constant because I can't help and promote them and I can't provide their useful information and services won't show up if they're not currently posting. Right. They're not adding to that information regularly. So that's our requirement. So we're really careful about it. So really, you won't see in the potatoes weekly newsletter. You will not see see anyone who isn't a joint venture partner if you're joining us on Podcasters United. So in the nonprofit that we've donated our podcast here, feed your brand. And we do all of our live Streams through podcasters united.org if you're in the Podcasters United one, it might have some, what we call sponsor founder members. So it might have some members that serve the podcasting community, but aren't necessarily podcasters, but they do mostly have their own content in some way, shape or form, or it doesn't work right. So there's some expansion into people who provide SEO services and webinar services and other things that might make a more robust podcasting business than things that we would present to our own client base. So there's a little bit of diversity going on there in what we've offered and do, but they have to be a sponsor member or their content's not getting served up over there. So those are the two newsletters we have. If you're not one of our productized clients, that's okay. So you can subscribe to the Podcasters united, go to podcasters united.org and if you fill out the form there to join the membership there, you'll automatically get enrolled in the Podcasters United newsletter. It's free. There's no charge. There's like, that's the only emails we send. We don't send a bunch of emails otherwise. So that's the only thing you'll get a weekly and you can check it out and see how this rasa newsletter thing works. It's amazing. So we have a lot of fun with that.

So, Tom, have you read some of the newsletters that have been coming to your inbox and have some of them caught your eye?

Oh, absolutely, yes.

Why do they catch your eye? Because you're not a reader.

Yeah. That's not the primary way I like to consume information, but it gets my attention, I'll tell you that.

Right. And you get hundreds and hundreds of emails you're always backed up on email. I know you are. Right.

It's the subject line in the preview text that get my attention.

Exactly. And that's the two things that we've really learned and played with some. So I'm just going to read a couple of examples of some of my favorites just to give you a sense of it. It says if you don't read this, your eyeballs may explode. Why risk it? So we've had a lot of fun with it. Right?

We're trying anyway.

Yeah, yeah, we're trying to have a lot of fun with this. What is this week's. Let me look at this week's. Let's see. This week's was. Do you know how long it takes to write a good subject line? Dot, dot, dot me.

Which I thought was really funny. And then we have on Podcasters United. This week it was every day thousands of newsletters go unread. Won't you please help? So, like, you see, they're very cheeky. They're very fun. And then what we discovered, and this is, Tom, your key, you brought this to our attention. If you don't insert a preview line. And what we do with our preview line is we put the topic for the coaching call in the preview line. And the preview line doesn't really show up when you get to the email. It's when you're looking at it in its preview mode. Right. So mostly on your phone, you'll notice a preview line. But if you do not put a preview line, what happens, Tom?

Well, so here's what I learned. Yeah. Because of the changes with if you've done any mass email or received any. If you don't send a lot of mass email, and I send a lot of mass emails out to people that are not a part of our community yet. Podcasters. Because I have a live session usually every week about how to grow your audience and provide real value. But you're sending emails to people that don't know you really very well. And now with the new standards, the very first thing at the top of every email needs to be an unsubscribe link. And if you don't do that, your email is going to get filtered out by Gmail, which is a huge number of emails on this earth. Now, among other spam filters. So you have. What I found is if I don't put preview text in, the first thing somebody will see. They see the subject line in the preview text. The first thing they see is unsubscribe in the preview text. You think anybody's going to open that email if the first thing it says is unsubscribe? Like, oh, that's a mass email. Forget that. I'm not forget that right on the next one. So what I found is not only do I need to put in a, not only do I want to create a meaningful a preview text that's going to build anticipation and get people to want to open the email now, but if I don't have a preview text line of a certain number of characters, then. Because what you're trying to do is use up the mat. There is a maximum character count for preview text and you want to use all of it. And the reason is so in every situation and it's different on every device, it's going to be different in your mail up on your phone than on your laptop or in one email program versus another. But you want to use all that preview text because it pushes that unsubscribe, which is the very first thing in the body of the email, pushes it off so it will never appear in the preview text. That is what I learned. And that's a free tip pro tip for any of you doing mass email. That is a new change that occurred here in 2024 with the new email standards. Was did Google establish that with Gmail or was that just a gen. A consortium?

It's actually a broader, it's a broader consortium. So it's same thing in Yahoo, the same thing in Gmail. The same thing, yeah. So it is brought across all of, all of the mail programs. But most of us have a Gmail and most of us have some kind of thing like that. But it does work the same way in everywhere. So that unsubscribe needs to be at the top and it has to do with just the fact of so much spamming going on. Right.

Well, it's there. I mean the, whatever the powers that be about mass email have just decided, hey, if you're sending a mass email, you need to make it easy for people to unsubscribe now. So we do this. We have the unsubscribe is at the top, the very first thing as it needs to be. But then we also have a one click unsubscribe link in the footer of the email. And now can I share one other thing and mildly gripe a little bit about people who receive mass emails? You would think for anybody that really does not want to receive the email and does not want to be subscribed to your emails, it's Pretty darn obvious. The very first thing at the top says unsubscribe and there's a one click unsubscribe in the footer of my emails. Anyway, can't even tell you how many people reply to the email and say, please unsubscribe. I don't want to be a part of this list. Okay, let me click that unsubscribe link for you and unsubscribe you. I mean, I'm really surprised how many people actually take the time to reply and send me an email that says please unsubscribe me. And sometimes it's not that polite. And when all they have to do is click that unbutton themselves, because that's all I do, They've replied to the email, I click the link for them and unsubscribe them.

Okay, so there are those people who believe, and it is a false belief. I'm just going to say that out there. If you're one of those, stop doing it because it's not good at practice. There are those people that believe if they click any link in an email then they will get a virus on their phone, that any link is predatory and damaging. Right. Like that. Follow them around the Internet, whatever it is. They believe that. But it is worse to respond and email back to an address than it is to click the link. Because you now have told in your mail service that that's a valid email address. So you actually validated them by doing it instead of hitting unsubscribe. So I'm just going to tell you that that that's a mistake.

But the way the rules of mass email and all of the different companies that you send it out through, I mean, if they unsubscribe, that's like a cardinal rule. Boom. They're on a permanent do not email list. Right. So if you don't want to receive it, you need to unsubscribe now. Okay, maybe there's some people hacking it and doing different things, but.

Okay, so let's talk about unsubscribe. So this is also something that I just discovered this week. Right.

I didn't know if you wanted to share that, but. Oh, you're going to. This is fun, folks. Hang on.

So I had to unsubscribe and because we have a bunch of test emails that we'd been running for a while and I realized it was getting like three copies to the newsletter, which.

Of our own newsletter.

Of our own newsletter, Yeah. I was getting three copies. So I needed to unsubscribe one of them to do it. So I tested the unsubscribe process, and I don't know why I hadn't done it before now, but I did do it. And so we had the most boring unsubscribe message. It says, we received a request to unsubscribe you from our newsletter. We're sorry to see you go like, that's it. I was like, whoa, we don't have to do that. So I went to the good old trusty AI and said, give me some options for unsubscribe that have the same tone and intention as our subject lines do, but giving them a little fear of missing out, making them regret, opting out, unsubscribing. That's what I said. Yeah, that's what I asked it to do. That was simply my prompt. It was that. And I gave them some examples of our subject lines. And so I got some that are so hilarious. So I got, oh, it seems you've initiated the unsubscription protocol. Please note this may cause a decrease in your daily dose of AI podcast insights. Are you sure you want to risk becoming less informed than your robot vacuum? Like, totally hilarious. I love that one. I just think that was hilarious. This one's guilt. It actually named it and it calls this one Guilt trip with a twist. We understand our AI powered wit can be overwhelming. If you reconsider, our algorithms are always here, learning and improving for other podcast hosts. This is a little twist the knife right in at the end here. So, and then it has like others that appeal to the ego, like, honest but funny. And then the last one is passive aggressive approach. Your unsubscribe request has been processed. Please allow three to five business days for the feeling of full regret to set in.

I, I, you know what, at that point, if they've really clicked to unsubscribe, we'll comply, but you may as well have some fun with it.

That's right. Right.

It might actually make them think twice about unsubscribing. Right.

So here's the other great thing about Rossa and one of the reasons we chose it, they actually use AI within the system so you can get suggestions for subject lines. And the more you've done over time, the better it is. Right. It starts to learn your tone, it starts to learn suggestions for copy. It does these things so you can utilize some of those features as well. And they're new, they're relatively new features, so not all of them are working perfectly. But the more you use them, the more you'll understand how to use them to get good results. And I like to use Gemini Bard. So I also do output things into Gemini Bard and see what happened. That's where those came from. So anyway, just thinking about those things, you can have some fun with the all everywhere, not just in your titles and your preview, but also in your unsubscribe area as well. And then the other thing that we really like is in order to make sure that we get appropriate attention for the timely things that we have going on, like our coaching call that's going to run for next week, the topic that happened, or if we have an offer that is running out, you want to pin something about a webinar that you're running, anything like that, you can what they call pin it. And when you pin it, it goes into every single newsletter. So every single person who is subscribed gets a different set of content from your curated library. But if you pin something, it goes to everyone, right?

Well that's what we do. Event topic, right?

Yes. So that's how you do it. And you can pin something at the top, you can do it in the middle, you can do it at the end. So you have an opportunity to do that and you could pin multiple things. So like you have an opportunity to turn the newsletter into a sales vehicle without being too salesy, mind you, but providing value in between. And I think that's really important for you to think about is like how that works for yourself. And remember that if you're going to deliver a newsletter to people, a newsletter is inherently current and important information and something educational and useful. If you do those things, then any offer that you make needs to be relevant to that and keep that in mind as you're writing them or putting them in there. And so I think we've done a really good job on here. I think we've had like relatively considering our client base, email open rate is horrendous. Like it's really bad in general. In general. Right. And that's because our clients are really busy. That's why they hired us. Like they don't. But if I look at our kind of, I'm going to call it our do it yourselfers, the ones who are self supporting themselves on the platform, self publishing via potatoes. If I looked at them as a subset in the newsletter and I can segregate that to take a look at that, I'm seeing a much higher open rate. And that means that they're really getting value of Things that they may not hear about because they can't join every single coaching call or they missed a bunch that happened two years ago, but now that they click something about YouTube. But five other past ones have shown up for them in the newsletter and they're able to now navigate through the content to find that. So you're really helping people help themselves by doing a really good job of providing a vehicle for which this occurs and then doing a good job of being consistent about it so that they can get current content and older content as they need.

It sounds logical to me. Modern newsletter using modern technology to provide greater value. It seems win, win, win to me.

Yeah. So it's solving all of our community engagement problems. It's solving the education and growth that we're trying to do. It is really transforming the community to being one that we can continue to serve them, but in a way that isn't too time consuming for us and too repetitive. Because that's also another problem I think a lot of us find as coaches, right, we end up repeating things to our community again and again and again. And that means that we don't serve those who have been around the longest as well. And that's something that I don't, I don't want to leave anyone behind, but I also really want to serve those that have been loyal to us. And so by having something that helps to customize to where they are, you're going to be able to create that richer experience. Well, I hope you start reading our newsletter, Tom, you especially. But all of you out there, even getting it in your inbox or if you sign up for it, try it. Because the more you play with it, the better it gets. It can't learn you in one click. You've got to click it more often and you've got to check out an article. And when you see something that attracts your attention, even if you don't have time to watch the full video on the other time, click through it. Because the algorithm is learning by the mere fact that you click through it, it can't see if you watch the video on the other side. It's not that robust in terms of tracking. I mean, we might be putting UTM links in some of our blogs, but unless they're in the content itself, it's not going to be happening that we're watching. You watch it, right? But the clicking of it, the fact that the title caught your eye, the topic caught your eye, that was something worth doing. Spend two seconds just scrolling through the newsletter and clicking on the few things that are important to you, and then AI is going to learn to give you more of that. I had been subscribed to Wired magazine's newsletter for about a year, and it took their newsletter was not smart and it just shifted over in the last three months. So they had been doing it where I'd been getting it and like not interacting with it. Now I started interacting with it and all of a sudden it is giving me articles I'd missed, things I didn't know, things I wished I had read, and now they're coming up for me there. So all kinds of big companies, media companies, are using these methods. Why not use it for your business? I guarantee you have a lot of content in there that no one's gotten to see yet. And wouldn't it be great if they could find it right when they needed it most?

All right, that sounds fantastic. Obviously, I've been so excited about this. I hope our listeners got a lot of value out of that. And remember, go try it out. Go to podcasters united.org and then become a member and you can test it out right there. Right?

Yeah, we have links to everything and links to rasa, of course, so that you can make sure you get into the right process. And actually, I think we managed to get a special link. So it's poditized.com rasa that if you r a s a if you use that link, it gets you to the same team we have, which is kind of like, we managed to structure that so that our. Our link gets you to the same salespeople that we already worked with and use. So that's kind of fun and nice because we know they're good.

All right. Words to the wise. Well, hey, we hope to see a lot of you getting value through the either Podcasters United newsletter or obviously feed your brand, which you will also find@podcastersunited.org all right, and remember, if you were a member of the podcast community, you would be able to stick with us in after we get after our recording or episode here to ask questions. So. But until next time, spend Tom and Tracey Hazard on feed.

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