How to get featured on podcasts [38% reply rate email template]
A few days ago, we started sending our Podcast 2.0 Outreach Campaign in an effort to put Guillaume behind the mic this summer.
Today I’m gonna show you how we did it and the email template we’ve used. But first, the results from the first sprint.
In this article, I’ll share our game plan… in great detail and gonna break down the important stuff for you.
To give you a quick overview:
- Why you should consider podcasts as part of your growth strategy
- Gonna share my process, from start to finish
- Will show you how to automate boring tasks to focus on what matters most
- You’ll see the email template we’ve used + the follow-up
- You’ll discover a simple way to extract the info you need (e.g. emails)
If you’re too lazy to read, feel free to check out this video instead.
For those of you who prefer the written word, let’s crack on.
Podcasts as part of your growth strategy
Although I’m a big fan of “Video Killed The Radio Star” song ever since the GTA Vice City days, I was never convinced that radio really died.
I continued to listen to local radio stations on the internet and today my Spotify is filled with various podcasts.
Gary Vee Audio Experience, The SaaS Podcast, Mixergy SaaStr Podcast… you name it.
To me, podcasts are like Radio 2.0.
Why podcasts?
First of all, podcasts are an excellent attention channel for B2B entrepreneurs. You’re able to reach more people, show off the great work you’ve been doing and deliver extra value to your audience.
For many businesses out there, consuming audio content is the way we learn EFFICIENTLY.
We don’t need to read an in-depth podcast. No reason to watch something while listening. We can just continue to do whatever is that we’re doing and still consume content.
For instance, I’m into cycling these days. In 4 out of 5 training sessions, I’m listening to a podcast.
Secondly, you can prove your expertise by jumping into one. You’ve done something cool? Have an authentic story to share?
Whatever your answer may be, doing a few episodes on different podcasts is a great way to build credibility and grow your personal brand.
Thirdly, they’ll bring you more organic traffic, some good backlinks and far greater exposure.
Finally, you get audio material for your content marketing. You don’t have to do your own podcast. No need to record and polish audio files. You just take the episodes where you joined as a guest that are already perfect, transform it into micro content for different platforms and then distribute.
Podcasts just make sense.
The process
Here’s a quick breakdown of the process.
🧠 Research → creating your email list and finding the details needed
🧠 Prep room → defining key targets and custom variables for personalization
🧠 Pitch → writing the copy and launching the campaign
🧠 Automation → putting boring tasks on autopilot
Before we dig deeper into all of then, a quick word on automation.
At lemlist, we love robots. Whatever task we gotta do twice and that’s incredibly boring, we will look to put it on autopilot.
That being said, never try to automate the human part. Robots don’t have EQ, they can’t build relationships for you.
Automate boring tasks so that you can have more time for the important stuff.
Phase 1: Research
If there’s one task I absolutely load to do is to find someone’s email address. Don’t even get me started.
But, since we’re a tight team right now, you stop making excuses and put in the work… and so I did exactly that.
Thanks to the KING of SEO, Ryan Stewart, and his $0.02 on podcast outreach, I’ve found out about this website called Listen Notes.
To say it quick, it’s a fantastic website that contains all the information you want about one’s podcast, including their verified email in 95% of the cases.
The thing that’s left to do now is to turn on your favorite playlist (throwing in my hip-hop one in here if you’re like me) and get grinding.
Once completed, just put it into a spreadsheet. I prefer Google Sheets.
For this particular outreach, we’ve organized prospects in a few different categories for which we think have the attention of our key audiences such as: Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing, SaaS etc.
P.S. Apologies for blurring emails, but you gotta do the work for this kind of info. 😎
Phase 2: Prep room
This is the most important phase of them all… hence its name.
Just to be sure you understand why, here is where I make sure the following things are completed:
- Eliminated podcasts that are not the right fit
- Overall understanding of what every target podcast is about
- Listened to their work
- Have custom variables set (first names, podcast names, website links etc)
- Special personalization variable for the pitch set
Let’s start from the top.
You don’t wanna email podcasts that are not doing interviews nor those that don’t attract the right people and which are not the right fit. How much list cleaning you gotta do will depend on whether or not you’ve outsourced this task to someone externally or internally and his/her work ethic.
But please make sure to have your list looking sharp.
As stated above, I wanted to have a personalized piece of the pitch that’s going to be unique for each prospect.
Let me show you how this looks like.
This is a column in my Google Sheet database btw.
What I did is… I went and listened to one segment of an episode (or in some cases the entire episode or a few bits from multiple episodes).
For. Every. Single. Podcast!
Of course you’re not gonna listen to whole 50+ episodes, that’s not the point.
The goal is to understand what an episode is about and to hear a part of the conversation to make the process scalable.
By doing so, you’ll be able to leverage it to make your emails unique.
In my case, I mentioned what episode I’ve checked out. Then we added our $0.02 to the conversation or gave a genuine compliment.
Remember, it takes time to build REAL relationships.
To sum it up:
😇 DEFINED AND VERIFIED LIST + 💯 CUSTOM VARIABLES + 😍 SPECIAL LAYER OF PERSONALIZATION = ✅ MY OUTREACH
The whole point of the “Prep Room” stage is to get those kind of nuggets ready before you start writing your copy.
Phase 3 — Pitch
Before I give you my entire pitch, wanna say two things.
First, don’t just bluntly copy this pitch. For starters, you’re gonna look like an ass because a lot of podcasts have already received this pitch.
Instead, use it as inspiration. There are more than one way to do this. For example, you can go and personalize images instead of my “sentence” thing. Don’t be lazy and put in some effort into this.
I promise you’ll be happy you did it, because this stuff needs to be authentic to you and your brand.
In this particular pitch for instance, I borrowed the Subject Line from Ryan Stewart and edited it only slightly. Simply added the {{firstName}} tag and an emoji.
What I’m saying is I also got inspired by someone, but still did me.
That’s perfectly fine.
Here’s the pitch.
If you break the pitch down, you’ll notice a few key pieces:
1) Basic custom variables — the name of the host (plus a fallback option) and the podcast name
2) Extra layer of personalization — unique {{Sentence}} variable we talked about a earlier
3) Metrics — proof that we’re practitioners, not fancy entrepreneurs
4) Topics — a few suggestions on our end to do their work for them, but also leave it open since it’s their podcast
5) Extra credibility — adding an example of a podcast Guillaume did + his insanely active LinkedIn to spice it up
One more thing.
The follow-up.
Always put it in there. Here’s mine…
From the total replies we got, 4 or 5 were from the follow-up. Both 4 and 5 are bigger than the number before.
Phase 4 — Automation
Once first emails were rolling out, I started thinking about automating a few things in the backend to save time.
Again, since we’re doing everything internally, I know that every prospect that goes into the Google Sheet is both legit and that their email is verified.
With that in mind, it was a no brainer to launch a quick Zapier integration between Google Sheet and lemlist.
Why?
To automate one boring task. In other words, whenever a new podcast has been added to the list, the email gets fired off automatically.
Not gonna go into details right now. If you decide to set this up, here’s a useful video.
Results
Here’s the outcome of the first June sprint.
Overall, I’m really happy with these results.
Of course, keep in mind that not all replies are gonna be an immediate YES. With some people you’ll have to negotiate certain things, while with others you just have to fine tune two busy schedules.
At the end of the day, it will depend on two factors:
1) Do they think you’re the right guest for their show
2) Size and popularity of the podcast
In our case, for most we either arranged an agreement or I’m fairly confident one will be made once we agree on dates.
Final advice I can give you is to keep yourself organized and keep all the dates, links and whatnot in that same Google Sheet… or wherever makes most sense for your workflow.
Oh… Hope you’ll watch and enjoy those podcasts that are coming soon.
Your turn now!
P.S. Lemme know your thoughts on this case study.
