People might tell you that you’re mad running an email list as well as your podcast. Why use two channels to deliver one message?
Well, email is where you build a community around your podcast. It’s where you develop the personal relationship with your listener that you established in your podcast. It’s where your listeners become your clients.
Email turns the hours you spend recording your podcast into money into your bank account.
But you can only do that if your podcast email list is working for you and if those emails generate opens and click-throughs. So getting your emails right is really important and that starts right from when a subscriber joins your list.
Think about it.
You wouldn’t walk right into one of your listener’s houses without knocking and then go and put the kettle on. You need to get to know each other first and your email welcome sequence is where you do that. Your email welcome sequence greets your new subscriber as they join your list. It catches them when they’re most interested in hearing from you (right after they join your list) and capitalises on that moment to build their trust in you.
If you don’t have a welcome sequence, your new subscriber might join your list and not hear from you for days or weeks until the next time you send out an email blast, by which time they don’t remember why they signed up to your email list in the first place.
All that said, it’s clear that the stakes are fairly high for your welcome sequence. It’s got an important job to do. But what should it actually say?
The good news is that your email welcome sequence can be very similar to your podcast content. Not identical, but similar.
Start by reminding yourself of what you know about your ideal listener and why they like your podcast. Identify a clear problem that they have and why your podcast solves it. Perhaps they’ve got a French bulldog and they subscribe to your Frenchie Pawdcast to learn how to be a better dog owner. Or they’re a stressed-out university student and your Away From Home Podcast helps them to balance the demands of studying, working, making new friends and moving away from home. So take your ideal listener, their problem and your solution. If they’ve got several problems, tease them apart and pick one that’s pressing but that you don’t cover every single episode.
Then, go through your podcast archives and identify all the content you have that touches on this topic. Ideally, you want to have more than 10 episodes that cover this subject in some way. This content is the basis of your brand-new email welcome sequence.
This is where it gets a little tricky because your welcome sequence needs to fulfill several functions. Ideally, it should:
- Solve your listener’s problem
- Deliver extra value that your listener doesn’t get from your podcast content
- Have a narrative structure
- Firmly place your listener in the world of your podcast
- Set your listener’s expectations for what they’ll get from being on your email list
That’s quite a few jobs. I recommend a welcome sequence of 5-7 emails so not every email has to fulfill every function. Instead, start by focusing first on the listener and their problem and by reinforcing the idea that they’ve come to the right place to solve it. Then gradually switch the focus over to you, all the while underlining why you’re well-placed to help out your listener.
In the body of your emails, include plenty of references to your podcast episodes and some reflections on your podcast and how you feel about it to give your subscriber some insider info.
AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude AI are a good way for you to brainstorm your welcome sequence and email copy. I’d also recommend reading my previous blog post on using AI to repurpose your podcast content and my post on how to pull highlight quotations from your podcast episodes, which are handy to keep the emails firmly grounded in your podcast. And if you want some more support, please reach out to me too.
It’ll be worth it when you have an email welcome sequence that’s up and running, that’s highly relevant, feels like you, that greets your listeners at the door of your email list and walks them all the way through to becoming your client. And the best news is that when your welcome sequence is that good, it functions as a lead magnet for your email list. No need to spend time and money creating a PDF that your subscribers will download and never read; simply tell them that everyone who signs up for your emails will get 5/7/however many emails from you that help them to solve their burning problem. This positions your email as highly relevant, valuable and desirable.
And when that’s how your podcast listeners become your email subscribers and then your clients.