Today, we’re continuing our deep dive into the 6 components of the Podcast Growth Engine Model.

As a reminder, the model is designed to help you engineer the most efficient, effective marketing & sales system around your podcast possible.

The result: More sales with less effort.

So far, we’ve covered the first two components of the model:

1. ​A (Cash Cow) Offer​ — That covers your costs with as few sales as possible, and subsidizes your low-ticket and free offers.
2. ​An “Infinity Loop” Podcast​ — That subtly but automatically communicates your key sales messages and primes your listeners to buy on autopilot.

Oh, and if you’re interested in going deeper on the model as a whole, you can watch the recording of last week’s ​Podcast Growth Engine Masterclass here​.

Today, we’re digging into the next two components: Your AAAA Lead Magnet and your Minimum Viable Email Strategy.

Email & Podcast, Yin & Yang

Before we get into the specifics of the email side of the Podcast Growth Engine model, some context about why email is so important for both audience growth and sales generation.

While podcasting is perhaps the single best audience nurture and Conversion Acceleration platform, it struggles mightily on two key fronts:

1. Audience discovery & acquisition
2. Driving action (ie. booking a sales call, going to a sales page, leaving a rating or review, etc)

And yet, these are two key functions your marketing and sales system must perform in order to work.

So, rather than relying on your podcast to perform these functions poorly—thus reducing the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire system—we want to install a different component that excels at both of them.

Ie. Email.

Unlike podcasting, signing up to a lead magnet or newsletter is an incredibly low-friction experience.

Rather than:

1. Scanning through a show listing to try to decipher whether this show is worth prioritizing over all the shows already in their listen queue…
2. Finding the time to actually listen and then…
3. Assessing if the show is good enough to make permanent space in their regular stable of (likely 3-5) shows…

When it comes to email, all your audience needs to do is:

1. Take 5 seconds to enter their email address, and then…
2. Go back to doing whatever they were doing, knowing that your emails will now regularly show up in their inbox where they can assess and decide later whether or not your list is worth staying subscribed to (which, if you set it up right, it will be).

Easy peasy.

And then there’s the sales side of things.

I don’t know about you, but I have never once listened to a podcast, and then immediately navigated to a sales page to buy a product or sign up to work with someone.

That’s not to say I haven’t spent money with the creators of shows I listen to.

I have. Tens of thousands of dollars, in fact.

But in every instance, what got me to the sales page or the discovery call was a prompt or a link delivered via email.

The reason email is such a powerful complement to a podcast is twofold:

1. The Platform Constraints baked into each of the platforms — People are generally doing other things while listening to podcasts. With email their focus is singular. What’s more, navigating through the show notes to find a link that was mentioned is clunky and full of friction. With email, it’s effortless.
2. The Platform Psychology we all have with each of these platforms — None of us have any expectation of buying anything (or being sold to) when we queue up a podcast. Email, on the other hand, is a platform we all regularly buy from. In fact, in many cases, we sign up to email lists with the explicit intention of being marketed to and reminded of things we may want to buy in the future. In short, email as a platform carries an expectation of (potentially) purchasing. Podcasting does not.

So, with this in mind, how do you best set up our ​Email Engines​ to accelerate audience growth and unlock the value that’s accruing in your podcast… all without taking over your life as yet another type of content to create consistently.

There are three essential components.

The AAAA Lead Magnet

You can think of your lead magnet as the front door to your internal, more intimate audience experience.

Regardless of where they discover you, your lead magnet will be the most logical next step for your cold audience members to enter and go deeper into your world.

There are dozens of types of lead magnets that can work, but regardless of what type of deliverable you’re offering, your lead magnet should meet four core criteria:

1. Attractive — With a strong, immediately compelling hook that appeals instantly to your ideal customers and a promise or deliverable they can’t easily get for free elsewhere online.
2. Aligned — With the promise of your big expensive Cash Cow Offer. By aligning these two components you’re creating a filter that ensures everyone who signs up for your lead magnet has pre-screened themselves for interest in your paid offer.
3. Actionable — Delivering a practical, positive outcome or benefit in as little time as possible. Tools, assessments, and short, tactical micro-trainings on specific obstacles they’re facing can all be effective.
4. Accessible — Or, said differently, easily consumable. Not a 45-page ebook they’ll never find the time to read, in other words. You want to put as little friction (ie. required time and/or effort) between them and experiencing the benefit of the lead magnet as possible.

Again, there are dozens of types of lead magnets that can work. Over time, you’ll likely end up with multiple of them that meet the AAAA criteria.

Regardless of what you land on, however, your goal is to create one or more that are highly and obviously valuable—perhaps to the point that it pains you to give them away for free…

And then make them as discoverable as possible via your:

• Website (menu bar, pop ups, inline forms, etc)
• Social profiles (Bio, banner/cover photo, posts, etc)
• Podcast (ads, show notes, recurring episode segments built around the lead magnet, etc)

In short, your goal is to have all roads—from every corner of your content kingdom—lead back to your lead magnet.

The Ignition Sequence

When someone signs up to one of your lead magnets, it’s an expression of interest in your work, philosophy, and (potentially) offers.

But that interest and attention won’t last long.

Which means your goal is to strike while the iron is hot and use this narrow window of attention and interest to:

1. Embed yourself deeper in this new subscriber’s mind as someone who can help them solve the problem they signed up to your lead magnet to solve
2. Communicate the core messages about you, your work, your approach, etc. Specifically, communicate why your approach is the best, most effective one for them… thus winning them over to your worldview around your topic
3. Introduce them to all the ways they can go deeper—from paid offers to your podcast to your other content

The goal of your welcome sequence—or as I refer to it, your Ignition Sequence—then, is to achieve all of this as efficiently as possible…

Entirely on autopilot.

What we want is for every person who joins your email list to emerge with a crystal clear understanding of what you do, who you help, what your offers are, and what differentiates your approach from your competitors.

Achieve this, and you’ll have automated much of the heavy lifting for your sales process… and probably be generating a few sales while you’re at it.

Then there’s the podcast growth side of things.

Beyond communicating your key messages, one of the core functions of your Ignition Sequence is to move new subscribers to your podcast by including one or more emails highlighting your best, most compelling, most relevant episodes.

The hardest part of getting a new podcast listener is getting them to click play once.

With a captive audience and a highly targeted CTA, your Ignition Sequence can reduce this friction significantly.

The Minimum Viable Value Newsletter

Email marketing is one of those activities every Founder and Creator knows they should be doing more of… and yet almost universally struggle to be consistent with.

The reason?

They’re approaching email with the wrong mindset, which makes it almost impossible to be consistent.

See, especially if you already have a podcast, the goal of your email marketing strategy is not to provide in-depth, highly valuable content to nurture your audience in a deep and meaningful way.

Your podcast is already doing that.

Instead, in the context of the Podcast Growth Engine, the goal of your email marketing strategy is simple:

1. Get your people to open your emails regularly
2. Deliver regular sales CTAs

We’ll talk more about the sales CTAs tomorrow, but when it comes to getting people to open your emails regularly, the bar is significantly lower than we often make it out to be.

In short, what you’re aiming for is Minimum Viable Value.

Here’s how it works:

Imagine a newsletter satisfaction scale from 0–100, where:

0 = Extremely Disappointed

50 = Neutral

100 = Extremely Satisfied

In most cases, if a newsletter is consistently hitting a 51 on the satisfaction scale, they’ll stay subscribed.

Because even if the level of satisfaction is minuscule, it’s still above neutral, which means their day—and perhaps their life—is a little, teeny tiny bit better.

And as long as you can consistently deliver that satisfaction, your readers will stay subscribed.

This type of Minimum Viable Value can be delivered in near-infinite formats, most of which do not require you to spend hours writing thousand-word essays on your topic.

In fact, if your podcast is where you share your deep thoughts, insights, and teachings on your topic, your newsletter should almost certainly not try to do the same thing.

Instead, it should complement the podcast, offering something different, but equally relevant (note I didn’t say equally valuable) to your audience.

Perhaps it’s a short 3-sentence behind-the-scenes idea-in-progress you’ve been mulling.

Perhaps a sketch or photo that demonstrates or fleshes out some concept.

Perhaps it’s a meme.

Perhaps a link roundup.

Or any number of other low-lift, Minimum Viable Value formats.

Remember, the point is not for your newsletter to be some great creative opus.

It’s a vehicle to deliver regular CTAs to your offers and other requests in the medium that is most conducive to people taking action.

Don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be.

Find a format that allows you to create and send your newsletter in one hour a week and automate as much of it as possible.