While traveling abroad, Susan L. Schwartz was waiting to meet friends at a hotel bar. A friendly couple seated nearby chatted her up. They, too, were traveling and were also interested in craft cocktails. The couple asked Ms. Schwartz what she does for a living. “And I said, Well, I host a podcast and write about drinks. And they said, what is it called? I said Lush Life. And they said, we’re on your email newsletter. We know you. You’re Susan. We know you. Isn’t that crazy?” 

Susan’s story shows how good email marketing solidifies your relationship with your audience. An email newsletter can be something your audience looks forward to opening, builds trust, and elevates your podcast niche. However, email platforms have changed dramatically over the past few years. Whether you’re podcasting to sell objects or swap ideas, let’s look at these platforms and discuss the changes so you can decide which is right for you. 

Why Email Newsletters Are Useful for Podcasters: Clarity, Consent, & Progress

Good email marketing for podcasters helps you keep in touch. Clarity, consent, and progress can build a relationship.

Email marketing provides clarity. Social media algorithms and ads don’t crowd out your lines of communication.

Consent means your audience is there by choice, so feel free to wax rhapsodic about which Lower Decks character is your favorite, if that’s your niche. 

Progress means your email newsletter can incite discussion and build on your podcast episode content. Whether that means photos, ancient scrolls, or inviting your followers to live meetups is up to you. 

But, just like there are different kinds of podcasts, there are different kinds of audiences and engagement. Some email platforms are great for sales, others for discussion. Let’s look at these email marketing platforms to see how they can cultivate your audience. 

What Are the Best Email Marketing Platforms for Podcasters?

Maybe your podcast’s goal is to sell products and services. Some email marketing platforms integrate with text message marketing and/or shopping platforms. Your podcast’s audience may have their hands full during your promo read, particularly if they’re driving. But, that SMS prompt can reach them when they are in a position to make a purchase. 

Conversely, if your goal with your podcast is to share your unique voice, sending a newsletter puts your ideas front and center. You can elaborate on those ideas with photos, audio, video, and more. Plus, you can discuss these in the comments. On top of that, you can also cross-promote with other newsletters in your niche.

First, we’ll look at some email marketing platforms that focus on a sales funnel. Then, we’ll examine some platforms modeled on blogging. In all cases, we’ll consider essential features of the application, pricing schemes, and what makes that platform stand out.

This email marketing platform roundup contains the odd affiliate link, which helps support all of our free content. Rest assured that affiliates never cloud our judgment or prevent us from giving our honest opinions on products, tools, or services!

Mailchimp

Mailchimp’s brand image has walked hand in hand with podcasting since they sponsored Serial in 2014. This email marketing platform earned a solid reputation as an excellent tool for solo producers and small businesses who didn’t need to send thousands of emails at once. Mailchimp is built to scale with the podcast or company as it grows. 

Mailchimp’s Features

If you’re not sending more than 6,000 emails per month, Mailchimp’s features are pretty standard. Mailchimp offers a  suite of email marketing tools, including: 

A/B Testing

Campaign Manager

Landing Pages and Websites

Automation for email with the Customer Journey Builder

Templates in their Email Builder

Sign-up forms 

Mailchimp has over 300 integrations with software you may already use, such as Canva, LinkedIn, or Wix. At higher-priced tiers, Mailchimp can analyze customer behavior and automate future email messages for sales conversion.

Pricing for Mailchimp

How many contacts you have and how many email “sends” you use per month determine what price tier you fall into. If your email list grows beyond the amount permitted in your price tier, you’ll get a message that reads: “Sending will be paused if contact or email send limit is exceeded.” Mailchimp recommends you take their quiz to determine what features you need, and what price tier. Below are the prices for an account with 500 addresses on their email list. 

Free. This price tier permits:

1,000 email “sends” a month, 

one login and one list of contacts

customer support via email for the first 30 days, 

over 300 integrations, limited reporting, and analytics, 

full access to forms and landing pages, 

limited access to email templates and their Creative Assistant (Mailchimp’s AI). 

Essentials. Starting at $13 a month, you get everything in the Free tier, plus:

SMS (text message) marketing, 

5,000 monthly email sends, 

Three logins and three contact lists,

24/7 customer support by chat or email, 

full access to email templates, 

A/B testing, 

email scheduling, 

access to their Customer Journey Builder with up to four journey points, 

the ability to remove Mailchimp branding from assets. 

Standard. Starting at $20 monthly, you get everything from the Essentials tier, and:

6,000 monthly email sends

Five logins and five contact lists

Full access to reporting and analytics

Automated Customer Journeys with up to 200 journey points

Scheduling optimization

One session of personalized onboarding, 

A long list of features to help you optimize your email, test, and analyze your audience response. 

Premium. Starting at $350/month, you can use all the features from the previous tiers, and:

150,000 email sends per month

An unlimited number of logins and contact lists

Customer service by phone

Four personalized onboarding sessions

Premium migration services. Presumably, if you need all these features, you must already have active email lists on another platform. 

Is this a ton of information? Yes, it is. Are all of these features necessary for the average independent customer? Funny how that brings us to the next topic.

Why Are So Many Podcasters Searching for Mailchimp Alternatives?

In 2021, Intuit bought Mailchimp, making it part of a suite of customer growth products, along with QuickBooks and Turbo Tax. Intuit focuses on “powering prosperity” for small businesses. But, by changing direction, they shifted from an inexpensive messaging platform for producers with smaller email lists to a growth-focused sales platform. 

Mailchimp also sunsetted Tiny Letter, a cottage industry email newsletter platform with a loyal fanbase, as part of the change.

Recently, Mailchimp developed an anti-union reputation. They canceled all their contracts with Audacy because one company, Pineapple Street Studios, insisted on working with union employees. This soured their appeal among pro-worker podcasters. 

Fortunately, many email marketing platforms besides Mailchimp help podcasters sell products or services. Some offer more flexibility at an affordable price. 

Some great Mailchimp alternatives are MailerLite, Convertkit, Substack, and Beehiv.

MailerLite

MailerLite’s philosophy is more straightforward. They use the term “Lite” because their philosophy “removes complexity while still offering advanced features.” But it’s no less robust. Mailerlite offers: 

Email marketing with automation options and personalization

Newsletter editors with drag-and-drop functions and an AI-powered editor

A website builder and blog

Email verification to clean and optimize your email lists

Landing pages and signup forms

E-Commerce and the ability to sell digital products 

Paid newsletter subscriptions

These options can grow with you, whether you’re starting an online business for the first time or a veteran podcaster. 

MailerLite’s Pricing

Compared to other email marketing software, Mailerlite has surprisingly modest prices for the feature sets. 

Free. This tier allows:

One login

Up to 1000 subscribers

12,000 monthly emails

Email automation

Ten landing pages

Websites with drag-and-drop design, embedded forms, and pop-ups. 

Growing Business. For $13.50 per month, if you have up to 1,000 subscribers, users get everything from the Free tier and:

Three logins

Unlimited monthly emails

Targeting and personalization within email messages

The ability to sell digital products

A/B testing.

Advanced. For $27 a month, with 1,000 subscribers,  users get everything in the aforementioned tiers and:

Unlimited logins

The ability to integrate with Facebook

Promotion pop-ups

Smart sending (for example, sending email based on the recipient’s time zone) 

Enterprise. The price is “Let’s talk.” At this rate, you get everything mentioned, plus personal services like:

A dedicated IP address

Onboarding consultation and training

 A dedicated success manager

Account audit and performance improvements. 

MailerLite allows you to start selling paid newsletters for free for 30 days. After that, it can cost as little as $9 a month when you pay annually.

Kathi Kamleitner of Wild for Scotland says, “Mailerlite is good for me because I have multiple newsletters that go out to different parts of my audience. It’s very good value for money, straightforward, easy to use, and a good visual editor of emails. I’ve tried a few different systems, and that’s the one I’ve been with the longest now. I’ve really enjoyed it.” 

Convertkit

Since 2013, Convertkit has focused on what online creators need to succeed. They’ve grown through affiliate marketing, helping their customers make money while growing their email marketing platform’s customer base by people who use and benefit from the features. In 2017, Convertkit redesigned its entire platform from scratch. Now, Convertkit’s Creator Network helps its users recommend each other’s content, to help each other grow. 

Convertkit’s Features

Convertkit helps you grow your audience with landing pages and forms, recommendations, and their Creator Network. Their email designer makes beautiful emails, and their commitment to deliverability ensures your message reaches actual humans. Their automation builder’s visual interface makes a clear and straightforward user experience.

Convertkit has hundreds of integrations that match your podcast’s goals with email marketing. Plus, Convertkit helps you monetize with e-commerce, a sponsor network, and the opportunity to be paid for newsletter recommendations. You can even offer paid newsletter subscriptions, even in the Free tier. Convertkit only charges card processing fees to these users.

Convertkit’s Pricing

Free. For up to 1,000 subscribers, this tier allows:

Unlimited landing pages, forms, and broadcasts 

Audience tagging and segmentation

Options to sell digital products and subscriptions

Community support

Creator. For $25/month, with up to 1,000 subscribers, this tier offers everything from Launch, plus:

Live chat and email support

Free and paid recommendations

Automated email sequences

Visual automation builders

Third-party integrations

One additional team member login

Creator Pro. For $50/month, with up to 1,000 subscribers, this tier offers everything from Free and Creator, plus a newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, and advanced reporting.

Pricing varies by the number of subscribers. For example, if you need the features from the Creator tier but only have 300 subscribers, you would pay $9 a month.

Here at The Podcast Host, we use Convertkit for our newsletters. I use it to edit and send The Fiction Podcast Weekly newsletter. I often say, “It can’t be that simple,” and preview my work half a dozen times. Making a newsletter with Convertkit is straightforward, with an uncluttered, sensible interface.

Our Head of Marketing, Jacob Anderson, said, “Convertkit manages to keep quite a big set of tools very simple and pleasant to use. Anybody can use it, and it’s affordable. Things that are simple in ConvertKit took too long or cost an arm and a leg as an add-on in the other platforms. The differentiator for ConvertKit is built-in discoverability, thanks to their creator network. I’ve seen people have a lot of success with this!”

I couldn’t agree more. After trying many different email marketing tools for podcasters, coming back to Convertkit felt like meeting an old friend who’d just returned from a spa day.

Substack

Among the blogging and newsletter editor set, Substack is The Soup of The Day, The It Girl, The Flavor of The Month. The little orange tag logo is unavoidable if you spend time perusing digital content-creation circles.

Substack started as a blogging (although they use the term newsletter) platform. In 2019, when Substack added the ability to embed podcasts in a newsletter, it garnered more attention. Once Twitter began to implode in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover, journalists leapt en masse to Substack. With them came readers in search of an experience that’s like reading the paper but with threaded comments and the possibility of up-to-the-minute reporting. Creative people can also share a newsletter that combines text, images, audio, and video. With the option to sell subscriptions, you can see why Substack says they’re “building a new economic engine for culture.”

Discovery depends on recommendations by readers and other newsletter creators. The lack of algorithms makes the experience feel mindful.

Substack’s Pricing

Substack offers a flat pricing model for all creators, regardless of how many followers they have or how many messages they send. Aren’t you glad you weren’t going to have to endure another price tier matrix?

That being said, Substack’s platform fee is a whopping 10% of your subscription contributions. Creators also pay Stripe’s 2.9% + $0.30 credit card fee plus a 0.5% recurring subscription fee. Now you see why folks offer a discount for paying an annual fee all at once rather than a monthly charge.

Ten per cent is more than any crowdfunding platform charges. And, despite the fact that most readers prize the ad-free interface, Substack plans to help creators sell ads in the future.

The Substack Controversy

Debate is unavoidable with anything new, especially when it gathers as much attention as Substack. In some circles, it’s an uproar.

Substack has a content moderation problem, to put it lightly. However, any platform with millions of subscribers has a hard time moderating content with any kind of subtlety or nuance.

In Substack’s case, this issue is more prickly because their discovery model relies on “if you like this, you’ll love that.” Theoretically, each newsletter is responsible for its message and brand. In practice, this means newsletters rub off on each other by association.

Let’s say you subscribe to a newsletter that sends you apple pie recipes. Two days later, the platform notifies you about a newsletter that seems similar. Before you know it, you’ve subscribed to the “Great American Home Cooking” newsletter, but landed deep in white supremacist hate speech territory.

If this is a concern, or you don’t want to be overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of content, Substack isn’t the only paid newsletter option in town. As we’ve shown with MailerLite and Convertkit, paid email marketing newsletters are an option for many platforms. Here are some more where you can get features and simplicity that’s similar to Substack.

WordPress Newsletter

Remember your old pal WordPress? I sure do. Did you know that your blog posts in WordPress can function as a newsletter, just like Substack? It’s true.

You can embed videos, podcasts, and images and write text in any WordPress post. The Subscribe block is as easy to use as any other block in WordPress. Anyone can sign up to receive your blog posts via email.

But what about monetization?

When Substack took the blogging world by storm, WordPress created a similar email marketing tool. WordPress Newsletter looks a lot like Substack, and WordPress Reader helps you find similar topics and creators to follow. They even charge the same fee: ten percent of your subscribers’ contributions, plus credit card processing fees.

Aren’t you glad I was able to keep one of these explanations short?

Beehiv

Gavin Gaddis of Sounds Profitable recommended Beehiv for its simplicity and clarity. Arielle Nissenblatt of Earbuds Podcast Collective values Beehiv’s ease with cross-promotion. I fell in love with its straightforward interface and friendly approach when I tried it out.

Beehiv’s Features

Beehiv helps you create a simple website without coding. Then, when you create content, Beehiv sends a newsletter to your list and updates your site. Referral and cross-promotion tools help you grow your audience. Instead of making more tasks, Beehiv wraps up your total content stream like a toasty, tasty burrito. Then, you can monetize your content with:

Ads

Boosts, or recommending other newsletters

Selling monthly or annual subscriptions. 

Not only can you make money, but you can help other Beehiv users grow their audiences, too. 

Stephen O’Grady of Podcast Delivery added, “They’ve developed a complete ecosystem you can grow your newsletter with. Their newsletter-building user interface is intuitive, and their 3D analytics actually let you learn something about your audience’s habits and what content performs well. It’s not just superficial sends, opens, or clicks.”

Stephen went on to explain Beehiv’s 3D analytics:

“If you set up promo campaigns or newsletter swaps (for example), you set tracking parameters (done effortlessly with their Magic Link feature) and segment your audience to no end. It’s a great way to measure which acquisition channels yield the highest quality and then re-focus your efforts. They also automatically divvy things up by web-based metrics vs. email-based metric,s so you can see whenever your web version of what you published gets picked up somewhere.” Nice!

Beehiv’s Pricing

Beehiv’s Launch package may be all the email marketing podcasters need to keep their audiences informed. But, the Grow and Scale features are available to all users for the first 30 days, so you can test how they might help you engage with your audience. And, if they’re not floating your boat, use the free tier. Beehiv charges a flat subscription rate, not a percentage of what you earn or credit card fees. 

Launch. This free tier allows:

Up to 2,500 subscribers 

an unlimited number of sends, 

web hosting, 

Custom newsletters with campaign analytics

Recommendation network

Optimized deliverability

Grow. For $49/month, this tier offers everything from Launch, plus:

Up to 10,000 subscribers

Custom domains

Premium (paid) subscriptions

Audience polls and survey forms

Multiple team members 

Beehiv’s exclusive newsletter community

Scale. For $99/month, users get everything from the Launch and Grow tiers, and:

Up to 100,000 subscribers

Access to Beehiv’s Ad Network and Boosts

More detailed analytics and testing 

Priority customer support

Their Enterprise level is priced as “Contact us” and includes all the aforementioned and dedicated IP addresses, advanced security, a newsletter course, and more. 

Ultimately, Beehiv helps you share your ideas with your audience and helps your audience share your ideas for you. 

Effective Email Marketing for Podcasts: Case Studies

Here are a few tips to cultivate your podcast’s email marketing.

Gabe of Board Game Design Lab told us that he started building his email list early and incentivized it with a prize giveaway. “Before the show started, I started posting in different Facebook groups and forums, saying, hey, this is coming soon. I did a big giveaway where I bought games from the five designers who were the first five interviews. I bought a game from each of them and then made that a giveaway.”

Write good email. Remember, a person on the other end of the message opted in for your voice and ideas. Susan L. Schwartz of Lush Life said, “Speaking in your voice is really important. Also, I think it’s important you’re not always asking your email list to do stuff, like buy stuff. ” Remember, Susan is the one who met strangers at a bar and ended up having cocktails with them as friends.

Make sure your newsletter provides details your audience can act on. For example, you can complement your guest’s name with links to their website and any books they’ve written or work that makes them unique. This provides a template your guests can use to share your episode. Vicki of the Bring Your Product Idea to Life podcast said, “I can tell from the downloads whether a guest has done much sharing or not because the ones who put it out to their email list… you can see a real difference in the numbers.” That’s the kind of clarity that helps your podcast grow.

Landing pages and opt-in forms shouldn’t be an afterthought. Consent means you ask them to opt in with an invitation to your content. When the email marketing you send is based on a mutual understanding of what you’re going to share, whether photos of golden brown apple pie or saucy illuminated medieval manuscripts, you can promise and deliver.

Make The Email You Would Enjoy Receiving

Let’s go back to our friend Susan from Lush Life and her serendipitous podcast meetup. Her audience – and yours – is out there. You don’t need to travel to find them, however. You just need to cut through the noise and connect with them, free of distractions competing for their attention.

Once you identify your podcast’s core goal and niche, choose a platform that provides the most direct route of communication. Then, you can use your ideas and unique voice in your email marketing to build relationships. Whether you and your audience are sipping cocktails, designing board games, scuba diving, or anything else, your podcast’s email marketing can help you build trust.

Of course, email marketing for podcasts is just one great way to reach people, build engagement, and grow your content. We have an entire course dedicated to podcast promotion called Growth Essentials. Whether you’d like to build an entire marketing strategy around your show or just pick up a few extra quick tips, you’ll find everything you need to know right there.

Originally posted on March 12, 2024 @ 1:25 am