Navigating Email Marketing Best Practices for Podcast Growth with Favour Obasi-ike
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This episode focuses on navigating email best practices for podcast growth. Favour Obasi-ike, a creative entrepreneur and business owner with a background in SEO, Pinterest, and podcasting, shares insights and strategies to help podcasters grow and scale their business through effective email marketing.
Key recommendations include the importance of having a dedicated website for a podcast, vocally mentioning the website on the show for transcription purposes, and strategically using keywords in episode titles and descriptions for organic search visibility.
Favour Obasi-ike also emphasizes the critical role of email deliverability and managing customer relationships using a reliable email service provider and CRM system, offering specific advice on elements like font size, image resolution, and avoiding underscores in usernames to ensure accessibility and strong organic reach.
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Core Principle: The Podcast-Website Symbiosis
The foundational element for podcast growth is establishing a dedicated online presence. Favour Obasi-ike argues that every podcast, regardless of its stage, requires a website.
• The "Front Door" Analogy: A website is described as the "front door" for the podcast. When a listener hears a URL mentioned in an episode and types it into a new browser tab, they are metaphorically "opening a door" to the podcast's home. The homepage is the initial entry point from which they can explore other content.
• Central Hub for Engagement: The website serves as a central location for listeners to connect more deeply with the show. It is the ideal place to host freebies, newsfeeds, blog posts, and, most importantly, an email sign-up form.
• Capturing the Audience: By verbally directing listeners to a specific URL on the podcast (e.g., "go to playinc.online/newsfeed"), podcasters create a direct path for listeners to subscribe to an email list. This is demonstrated in real-time by Favour Obasi-ike asking listeners to provide their first name and best email via a link.
Strategic Email Marketing for Audience Engagement
Once a system for capturing emails is in place, the focus shifts to strategic content and delivery to build and maintain a relationship with the audience.
Content and Subject Line Strategy
• Intrigue Over Information: Generic subject lines like "Episode One Introduction" are less effective. A more powerful approach is to use curiosity-piquing subject lines, such as, "Want to know the best way to make a sandwich?"
• The "Sandwich" Analogy: This example illustrates that a subject line can use a relatable concept to draw in an audience, even if the episode's core topic is different (e.g., using the layers of a sandwich as an analogy for content marketing). This method attracts both those interested in the literal subject and the curious.
• Valuable First Content: A podcaster's first episode, or the first email a new subscriber receives, can be strategically repurposed. For a business, this could be a "Frequently Asked Questions" episode, providing immediate value and educating a potential client about their services.
Cadence and Consistency
Building Relationships: The goal of email marketing is customer relationship management (CRM). Consistent communication builds familiarity and trust.
Email Frequency: Favour Obasi-ike personally sends a minimum of two emails per month, rarely exceeding four to eight unless for a segmented campaign. The goal is to maintain a presence without overwhelming the audience.
The Annual Cycle: Favour Obasi-ike views email as an "orbit," aiming to send 365 emails over time to represent a full cycle. After a year, the strategy should evolve, introducing a "new form" or "new formality" to keep the content fresh.
Technical Foundations for Email Deliverability
Effective email marketing is impossible if the emails do not reach the intended inbox. Favour Obasi-ike highlights several critical technical aspects that directly impact deliverability and audience reception.
Platform and Server Integrity
The Importance of the ESP: The choice of Email Service Provider (ESP) is crucial. A key objective should be to use a platform with a high-quality server to achieve deliverability rates of at least 99.9%.
Recommended Platform: Favour Obasi-ike is a partner with and recommends Flodesk, citing its simplicity, authenticity, credibility, and speed. Flodesk's partnership with Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is noted as a significant benefit.
DNS Authentication: Low email open rates can often be attributed to an incomplete Domain Name Server (DNS) authentication setup. Podcasters must ensure their DNS records are correctly configured to authenticate their sending domain, which helps prevent emails from being flagged as spam.
Email Design, Formatting, and Compliance
Readability and Audience Awareness: Email formatting must be tailored to the target audience. For an audience aged 45 and up, a font size of at least 16 pixels is recommended to ensure legibility without requiring readers to "squint."
Email Weight: Font size and image size contribute to the overall "weight" of an email. Large files can negatively impact deliverability. An image of 3000x3000 pixels is preferable to one that is 300x300 pixels for email content.
Spam Score and Testing: Podcasters should proactively test their emails for potential issues. Favour Obasi-ike recommends using a free tool like Mail-tester.com to check for spam scores and compliance issues before sending a campaign. Registering with platforms like Postmaster Google is also advised.
SEO and Multi-Platform Discoverability
Organic growth is driven by discoverability. Favour Obasi-ike outlines a comprehensive SEO strategy that extends beyond the podcast itself to all associated digital assets.
Keywords and Semantic Search
The Power of Repetition: Consistently repeating a target key phrase (e.g., "email best practices") across all content formats significantly boosts search visibility. This includes the podcast audio (which becomes a transcript), episode titles, blog posts, video descriptions, image alt text, and the URL itself.
Verbal SEO: Vocally stating and phonetically spelling out URLs (e.g., "p l a y i n c . o n l i n e") on the podcast is a critical practice. Modern transcription services can recognize these as links, making them clickable directly from the text version of the episode.
Descriptive Titling: Podcast titles should be contextual and keyword-rich. A title like "The Sun Nutrition" is far more discoverable than a generic title like "The Sun Podcast" because it tells potential listeners exactly what the show is about.
Social Media and Platform Integration
Username Optimization: Avoid using underscores in social media usernames (e.g., on Instagram). Favour Obasi-ike argues that underscores are not search-friendly, add unnecessary complexity for users typing the name, and conceptually place the user "under the line." A mashed-up name or a hyphen is preferable.
LinkedIn RSS Feed Integration: A powerful and underutilized tactic is to connect a podcast's RSS feed directly to a LinkedIn company profile. This can be done in the company settings section and allows for the automatic distribution of new episodes onto the LinkedIn server, expanding reach.
Advanced Growth Strategies and Data Analysis
Beyond the fundamentals, Favour Obasi-ike offers advanced tips for optimization and scaling based on data intelligence.
Technical Standards and Validation
Podcast Artwork: The industry standard for podcast cover art and episode covers is a minimum of 3,000 by 3,000 pixels. Anything smaller may cause issues.
Feed Validation: Podcasters can use free tools like Castfeedvalidator.com to perform an audit of their RSS feed and ensure it meets technical standards.
Data-Driven Decisions
Browser-Based Listening: It is a critical insight that a significant portion of the audience listens to podcasts on a web browser. With Google Chrome accounting for 72% of web browsers, this highlights the importance of a web-friendly presence and SEO within the Google ecosystem (Search, YouTube, Gmail).
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