206 | Why Every Podcast Needs an Email List

This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Spidlin. I am your podcast growth coach and today we are going to talk about the power of email and how focusing on collecting email addresses from your listenership is going to translate not only to more monetization, aka more leads and sales to your business, but also it's going to grow your podcast downloads. Now, as a audio podcast guy who's been podcasting since 2018, I did not focus on email at all for the first four years of my podcast life. So in the Philly Who days in 2018 and 2019, I didn't do anything with email and even in the first two years of this business grow the show, I really didn't do much with email at all because I'm a podcast guy. I make podcasts, right? I'm an audio guy. This is what I do. I didn't get for a long time how powerful email is and how it can be one of the key reasons that a podcast grows and is fully monetized where you're maxing out the amount of brand deals and sponsorships that you get and also you max out the amount of leads and sales you get from your podcast audience to your business. Back in December of 2021, my business was doing about $50,000 per month on average. So from February 2021 to January 2022, grow the show average $50,000 per month in revenue to my coaching business. And at that point, I had three employees. My only offer then was the Grow the Show accelerator. I now have two. There's the accelerator and the Academy, which confuses everybody, but that's a topic for a different day. And so I had three employees. I had one offer and I was doing about 50K in revenue per month. Now I throughout this time had a masterclass and when people clicked on an ad to access the masterclass, they gave me their email and people got to the masterclass in other ways as well. And every single time somebody wanted to access my masterclass on how to grow and monetize a podcast, they would give me their email. So I had this list of emails that I wasn't really ever emailing. I want to say it was like maybe five or 10,000 emails that I had accrued over time and I really wasn't doing that much with it. Now I was speaking with a mentor at that time who told me, dude, you are probably sitting on tons of revenue on that email list and explain to me the power of email and why it is so just so freaking powerful, which again, I didn't get it. I didn't have experience with email, my experience with podcasting. So I said, okay, fine. I'm going to commit to emailing my list once a week. And that's the only change that I'll make. And so I did that. In February of 2022, I started emailing my list every single week. Nothing else changed about my business. I still had three employees. I still had the one offer, the offer was priced the same. And over the next four months with still no changes to the business, my revenue went from an average of $47.5,000 per month to an average of $107.8,000 per month. This was a 226% increase in revenue with no increase in expenses just by utilizing email. After this happened, I became a bit of an email freak. So there's a very good chance you'll be hearing my voice right now. You are on my email list or you used to be on my email list. And it has been a key part of my business ever since. And probably because of that, it is now also a key part of the help that I give to other business owners with podcasts. Because again, it's super counterintuitive, but what I have found now after working with over 450 entrepreneurs to help them grow their podcasts is that the podcasts and the businesses that utilize email are the ones that have the most growth and make the most money. And so this episode was inspired by an onboarding call I did for the Grow the Show Accelerator this week. I onboarded a business owner who has a mastermind business. My business is already doing over six figures per month and most of their sales calls come from their podcast. And when I reviewed the onboarding form for this business owner who's now going to be working with me one on one, it made it clear that this business was not utilizing email. And so I said no one on the onboarding call. I'm like, hey, listen, you are here to grow your podcasts and we are absolutely going to do that. But first, the first thing we're going to do is we're going to work on email because this business owner gets tons of sales calls from his podcasts already, which is really impressive when you aren't doing email because it's actually really hard to get a podcast listener to book a sales call because think about it, what are you doing right now? Are you driving? Are you working out? Are you on a walk? Are you doing chores? If I asked you right now to book a call with me to talk about the Grow the Show Accelerator where you would get to work with me one on one to grow your podcast audience and get more qualified lease and sales. And so if I said, hey, you should book a call with me right now to talk about what that would look like and how we can grow your podcast in 2025. What would you have to do in order to book that call? Would you have to pull over on the highway? Would you have to put down the barbell in the squat rack? Would you have to stop your run? Would you have to stop folding laundry? Whatever it is, there's a lot of friction, right? You're going to have to pull out your phone, you're going to have to find the link to book a call with me, you're going to have to look at your calendar, pick a time, there's just a lot that has to happen. And that's not to say that it won't happen. And it can happen. And who knows? Maybe because I just said this stuff, maybe I'll get some calls from this episode. But the fact of the matter is, if my business had to rely alone on you right now stopping what you're doing and booking your call, I wouldn't make as much money, which is what used to be the case in 2021. However, if I instead said to you, hey, I've got an email course that's going to teach you everything you need to know about how to grow and monetize your podcast. Or, hey, I've got a 60 minute recorded masterclass that is going to give you the lay of the land. And so if your podcast isn't growing, it's going to show you why. All you got to do is go to this page and give me your email and I'll send you this information. I'll send you the email course or I'll send you the masterclass. You're actually more likely to do that right now and you're more likely to interrupt what you're currently doing to take me up on that because you're instantly going to get something out of it. And that's the key. So if you've ever listened to my podcast before, you have already heard me have CTAs about my 12 days of podcast growth email course or my Grow the Show masterclass. And I make sure that those CTAs run on almost every single episode of Grow the Show. Because I know that if I say to you, hey, I have this thing that's going to make your life easier, all you have to do is give me your email, you are more likely to interrupt what you're currently doing to grab that thing. Then if I said, hey, you should book a time with me. And we're going to talk about my product or service and you might be a little nervous about that conversation because you've been on sales calls before where other people have pressured you to do something that you didn't feel like was in your best interest. Side note, that's not how I do things. And over the past month, I've had three people who I've told not to buy my thing reach out separately to thank me for that. So not only is there friction between where you're at right now and the moment you take the action I want you to take, but if I ask you to book a call, it is not something that is as immediately valuable to you as, hey, I have this free thing that you can access right now. Do you see the difference? So that's one reason why we want to get people onto our email. So that's a little bit, a little bit of a dead aggression, but going back to the client I was talking about, I'm like, hey, if you are getting people to book a call with you from your podcast, you are absolutely going to get people to join your email list from your podcast. And there's three reasons why you should do that. There's three reasons why you want to get your podcast listener to onto your email list. Reason number one is because you will make more money. People are more likely to buy something or book a call from an email CTA than a podcast CTA for reasons we've already described. When you are in your email inbox, you are click and stuff. You're doing stuff. You're taking action, right? You're either at your desk or you're on your phone. You're in the context of doing things when you're checking your email. When you're listening to a podcast, you're usually not. So that client, what we are going to see is that client is going to get more sales calls from his podcast because we're going to get more emails from his podcast. And the people who wouldn't have a book to sales call right from the podcast itself will get on the email list. And then later when he tells people on his email list a book of sales call, there will be people who do that. So that's number one. Number two is that your podcast downloads will actually go up from emailing your list. So this particular client that I'm now working with doesn't really ever email his email list. And so what we're going to see counterintuitively is once we start emailing his list every single week, just telling his list that, hey, there's a new podcast episode available and here's the value you're going to get from it. Once we start doing that, his downloads are going to go up because there are people who are on his email list who have listened to his podcast before who forgot about his podcast. So this is why we don't want to measure our success as podcasters by looking at how many downloads our last episode got because for every 1000 downloads that you get, there are 9,000 people who love your show who forgot about it. So what email does is it allows us to remind people that our podcast exists. It allows us to retarget them. This is crucial. And again, think about your behavior as a podcast listener. There are podcasts that you are a fan of that you have forgotten about. You might have even forgotten about this show at some point. And if you haven't yet, you're going to, I promise you, forget that grow the show exists at some point and stop listening, although you'll still be a fan and you'll still be like, oh, yeah, I love Kevin show. And someday in the future, I'm going to get you back in. That's just how this works. So when you email your list every single week, you create a system to remind your audience that your podcast is there and then it has value to provide them. And when you're doing that, your downloads go up because the people that you've already gotten into your audience resume listening to your podcast. The third reason why email is impactful for your podcast is that it makes you less reliant on social media for the above two because social media is a place where you can get people to buy stuff and book a call and it's also a place that's really good to remind people that you and your podcast exists. But the thing is social media algorithms change all the time. Anybody who had success on Twitter in 2020 or 2021, how they're feeling now about X and how it is virtually impossible to reach anybody on that platform now. And so there are people who devoted a solid chunk of their life to growing their audience on Twitter in 2020 and 2021 when it was actually really easy to grow an audience on Twitter. And then what do you know Elon Musk buys the platform, renames it to X completely changes it into something else and completely changes the algorithm such that you don't reach anybody anymore. So all of that work is kind of for nothing. And this week I spoke with a consultant who has over 100,000 followers on X and they're abandoning it and they're kind of starting from scratch because X has been totally changed. This doesn't happen with email. Email doesn't change that much. Emails kind of been the same as it was for the last 20 years. Sure, every once in a while Gmail changes something that makes it harder to reach people, but it's exceedingly rare and it's much easier to correct for. So those are the three reasons why you should be collecting emails from your podcast audience. Number one, you'll make more money. Number two, you'll get more downloads and number three, you won't be as reliant on social media. So the big question is, how do you get emails? Well, that's probably a topic for a different solo episode, suffice it to say, every single episode of your podcast should offer your audience something in exchange for their email address. In my case, those are lead magnets. I have an email course and I have a video masterclass. I say, hey, do you want this thing? If so, go to this link. When you go to that link, it asks you for your email in exchange for that free content. The other thing you can do, if you don't have a lead magnet, you can just quote unquote launch a newsletter. You can just say, hey, if you want more of this value in your inbox every single week, join the podcast name newsletter. And here's the thing. That newsletter can be your podcast content repurposed in text form. That's it. And so I'll leave you with one extra one extra thing that surprises most people. So if you've ever listened to Grow the Show, you've probably heard me say that a great and sometimes the best way to grow a podcast is by collaborating with other podcasts. And usually that comes in the form of you being a guest on other podcasts. Well, I get asked all the time, what should my call to action be when I am a guest on other shows? And I used to say, your call to action should be to tell the listeners of the podcast you're guessing on to go listen to your podcast. It actually changed my mind about this because what I've learned is that what's more impactful is getting those people onto your email list. So when I'm a guest on other podcasts, I might mention the Grow the Show podcast along the way. Like I might drop hints to it. But my main call to action when people say, so Kevin, what can people do if they want more from you? I will say, you should take my email course. You should take my master class. You should consume my lead magnet. Why do I do that? Number one, when I get their email, I'm going to get multiple at bats to get them to listen to my podcast. So once they're on my email list, I can contact them again. But if I just say, you should go listen to my podcast or you should book a call with my team, then that moment when they hear me saying that on the podcast is my only at bat. If they don't listen to that episode again, and they don't take the action right then in there, it's never going to happen because they're not going to be reminded that they should take the action. In addition to that, when they join my email list, I will have multiple opportunities to send them specific episodes of my podcast, which hopefully then we'll get them to actually tune into the show. Okay, so hopefully this episode helped you see the power of email and helped you understand why. In my opinion, it'll make you more money from your podcast and it will make your downloads grow up. And so if you want my help with this, join us in the Grow the Show Academy or the Grow the Show Accelerator. And I'd be happy to help you make email start to work for you. That is going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. I have two things for you before I let you go. Number one, real quick. If you've ever gotten any value from the show, please if you haven't yet, leave us a five-star review. I get a notification every single time reviews come through and they almost always make my day. So please, please, I would love to hear from you. It really, really helps us. And then the second thing is if you are a podcaster who needs help with production, if you are struggling with all the time it takes to make these things and you haven't yet definitely set up a conversation with podcast boutique. They are the team that I've been working with for five, six years. They're my most trusted production agency. And recently they added an incredible service that you're going to want to hear about. They call it record and forget I've been using it for months. It is amazing. You just record your episode and send it to them. They do the content editing for you. They create titles, show notes. They can make it into an amazing YouTube video, clips, and of course, high value production. So the content editing piece is the thing that I know people have been asking for for a long time. It is unbelievably good. All I do is record. I send it off to them. They handle the rest. And by the way, they are also closely in lockstep with me. So anytime I discover something that is working to grow and monetize a podcast, I immediately share it with them. We work to implement it with my show and then they implement it with the other shows that they work on. So if you're spending time yourself doing any of the editing or post production or if your current post production team isn't cutting it, maybe they're an internal team that doesn't know what they're doing or they're an external team that's either too expensive or does not keep their promises, which is very common. Check out podcast boutique. You can go to podcast boutique.com. Let them know that I sent you one thing though. It is podcast boutique, not the podcast boutique. So if you google podcast boutique, watch out because it is not the podcast boutique. It is podcast boutique.com. All right. I'll see you in the next episode.