183 | The Email Hack That Led to a 2000% Increase in Podcast Downloads

This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Tritlin, and today we are going to be talking about email, specifically what links you should have in that email when emailing your list. Now this episode is brought to you by a moment I had with one of my one-on-one clients in the Grow the Show accelerator program. So this client is a multi-million dollar CEO who runs a successful consulting firm, and that consulting firm has an email list with several thousand email addresses on it. Now this client of mine has a podcast, and he came to me because his podcast only gets about 50-ish downloads per episode, and if you've been listening to this show at all in the past, you know that's what we call the Friends and Family Zone. So you've got this multi-million dollar CEO who has an email list with thousands of people on it. He's got thousands of followers on LinkedIn, and yet his podcast only has about 50 downloads per episode. Now whenever I see this, whenever I see a creator or founder or CEO who has a podcast, they have a online following and or an email list into the thousands, and yet their podcast gets virtually no downloads, I know we have a disconnection issue, meaning you have multiple audiences in multiple places and they are disconnected. And really is no reason for somebody particularly who has tons of email subscribers to get such a low downloads number on their podcast. So as I do whenever I work with somebody one-on-one, I dove into his download history. So I said, pull up your hosting platform, I want to see how your downloads have performed with time since the show has launched about a year ago. We did that, I scrolled, and I found something insane. Like I said, this podcaster has averaged about 50-ish downloads per episode for the life of his podcast except for one month, October of last year. That month, four episodes in a row, his show got more than a thousand downloads per episode. So I had to know what it gets. I asked him, what was different about that month, why did your show get so many downloads that month and never again? He said, honestly, I have no idea, my team helps me with this. So we dug in a little bit further. First thing I asked was, are you emailing your list telling your audience that you have new episodes of your podcast available? He said, yes. Every single week, I sent out a newsletter and I mentioned this week's podcast. I said, okay, that is good. What that tells me is that there's something off because they have been emailing their list every single week with new podcast episodes and it has not translated into downloads. But before I investigate that, I want to go back to see what happened in October. Anytime I see a huge jump like that, that starts and then stops. If it's more than one episode that this happened, that tells me that the podcaster was doing something to promote the episode that worked and then they stopped. This makes sense because this particular CEO does not check his analytics himself. So there was nobody looking at these numbers to understand what are we doing that's working and what isn't working to promote the show. So we go back to October and we look at the daily downloads of each podcast episode. So not only how many downloads did that podcast episode get, but how many downloads did it get on each day after it was released. So we looked at the first seven days of each of the four episodes that got over a thousand downloads and what did we see? The third day after publishing is when all the thousand downloads happened for each of those episodes. So I said, what day do you publish your episodes? He said Wednesday. I said, what day do you email your list? He said Friday. Uh-huh. Day three. So we know that this huge jump in downloads happened from the email newsletter. At that point, I had a hunch as to what was going on here. I looked at the emails that he's been sending over the past few months and they were doing what most teams and people do when there's new podcast episode available. They say, check out this week's podcast, listen here on Apple, listen here on Spotify. But here's the thing. When promoting your podcast episodes, you need to think about the context that your audience will receive that promo. What do I mean by that? Well, this is the CEO of a big consulting company. It's a very business focused email list and podcast. The people who subscribe to the email list are likely getting that email to their work email and they're likely receiving the email at their desk at work. So what do you think the odds are? These thousands of people will see the email saying, hey, new podcast episode available. You should listen and pull out their phone, open up Apple podcasts or Spotify and stop working and go listen to the podcast episode or even just listen to the podcast episode on their phone right then and there at their desk. The odds are low because they're not going to click, listen on Apple on their work computer because they might not even have Apple or Spotify on their work computer. They would have to pull out their phone, open the app, search for the show, click on the episode, press play and listen, too many steps. So that is why they're sending an email that people are getting on their work computers that say, hey, go listen on Apple podcasts and go listen on Spotify and nobody's taking them up on that. However, there were four times where people did download the episode when they got that email. What do you think was different about that email? I said, pull up the emails that you sent in October and let me look at them and sure enough, when I looked at them, there were not two links to listen to the show. There were three. It said, listen on Apple, listen on Spotify and listen on our website. Digging further into the analytics confirmed that for those four weeks, for those four emails where they actually included a link to listen to the podcast on their website, people clicked on it and they pressed play and they listened. Now, what we don't know is how long people listened to those episodes. We don't know if these people pressed play, skipped around a bit or whether they listened to the whole episode, but that's okay. Our first job is to get people to download it. Then we can worry about getting people to actually listen. Sure enough, for four weeks, the team added a link to listen on the website and then after four weeks, they stopped. They added it just to Apple and Spotify, which on the surface I can understand because you really actually don't want your listeners to listen on a website on a regular basis. You would rather that they open it up on Apple or Spotify or whatever they're listening app is and subscribe so that they get new episodes of the show every single week. Yes, that is the ideal, but we need to build up to that point. Before we get people to subscribe, we need people to listen to at least one episode of the show. Right away, I said, okay, we need to start adding the website link back into your emails so that the people that receive these emails at their work desks will click on it, press play and then hopefully they'll get great value from the episode and then they will transfer to become a regular listener on Apple or Spotify or whatever listening app they use. Now granted, that's still a lot of stuff that needs to happen, but it needs to happen anyway and we can solve that later. But for now, literally just including that one link in their email is the difference between getting 50 downloads in episode and getting a thousand plus downloads per episode. So what does this mean for you? Well, number one, I highly recommend that you email your email list at least once a week sharing new podcast episodes that you have published. I found this for myself, my clients and even some of the bigger creators that I've interviewed where they say, look, we do not miss that email. It is a huge piece of getting people to download our episodes on a regular basis that we email our list and let them know that new episodes are available. But what I will add to that and the action for you to take this week next week and every week after that is when you do email your list sending podcast episodes include a link that allows people to listen on desktop. It should not just be Apple podcasts and Spotify. There should also be either a link to listen on the web that can be either your website or a lot of hosting providers will provide a web link or if your show is on YouTube, it should be a link to watch on YouTube because people will click on that on the desktop as well. But by not including a desktop option in your emails specifically, you are going to be missing out on potentially as we saw in this example, thousands of downloads. And again, yes, our goal in the end is to get people to listen in the listening apps because that's an indicator that they will listen on a regular basis. But we need to build up to that point. The first goal is to get people to just freaking press play. So in summary, whether you are a seven plus figure CEO or you're a solar printer or a side hustler who's just building this up from scratch, number one, you do want to email a list every single week when there are new episodes available. But number two, and more importantly, something that a lot of people miss include a link so that people can listen on desktop, either a web link to listen to the episode or a YouTube link if your show is on YouTube. So that is going to do it for today. If you do implement this hack and you see a jump and downloads, please let me know Instagram at Kevin Schmidland or you can email Kevin at GrowTheShow.com. I would love to hear that this trick worked for you and celebrate it with my audience as well. Alright, so that's going to do it for today's episode of Grow The Show. I will see you in the next one.