How to Turn Passive Podcast Listeners Into Engaged Fans

Listener engagement isn't always easy, but it's not as hard as you think. In this episode, Alban joins me to talk about turning a casual audience into engaged listeners. We cover Buzzsprout's Fan Mail feature, how listeners can engage through text and voicemail, and how replies change the way we connect with our audience.

• Using Fan Mail to Engage with Your Listeners
• Creative Ways To Use Voicemail In Your Podcast

If you have questions about using Fan Mail reach out to us on the Podcaster Success team by email support@buzzsprout.com. 

Keep podcasting!

Transcript

Welcome to Podcasting Q&A

Cara Pacetti 0:00

Welcome to Podcasting Q&A, brought to you by the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Cara Pacetti, and I'm bringing you the best tips and strategies to keep you podcasting with confidence. Every podcasting Q&A episode starts with a question from a podcaster just like you. If there's something you're stuck on and you find yourself heading to Google or Chat GPT for the answers, go ahead and send it my way. I'd love to answer it on a future episode. Today we're answering how do I make it easy for my listeners to engage with my podcast? Listener engagement is so important and can often feel super rewarding for you as the podcaster. To help me answer this question, I've asked Albin, our head of marketing here at BuzzSprout, to help. Alban, thank you for joining me on another episode of Podcasting Q&A.

Alban Brooke 0:49

Cara, thank you for having me. I love that you're having everybody ask a lot of questions. Um, now that people are texting the man, you need to turn on voicemail so people can also leave you voicemails so you could include their voice on the podcast.

Testing Listener Engagement Theories

Cara Pacetti 1:01

Whoa, Alban, you're leaking a little too much information. We're gonna get there. Great segue into this. So before we get there, I want to start with a little bit of history about how we even landed on fan mail in the first place. Uh during your many years of podcasting, you've done a lot of experimentation trying to turn passive listeners into engaged listeners. Can you share a little bit about the things that you tried in an effort to connect with your listeners and what you learned from it?

Alban Brooke 1:27

Oh, we tried all sorts of stuff. Probably the first thing we ever did was something like Speakpipe, where people could leave voicemails. And we just didn't get too many. Um, I think back then it was a little bit too much work for people, and so we didn't get a ton. We would invite people into like a Facebook group or to go chat on a forum. That didn't really get a lot. We did have a period where Twitter was really popular, and this would have been, I don't know, 2019 or so. And we would make a whole thread about the episode and people would go comment on it, and that did all right. Um but few as fewer people used Twitter, it stopped being as useful. We tried Boostigrams, which was a way for you to send messages along the Lightning Network, like sending Bitcoin to the podcast. And while that worked, it really only worked for the people who used all that stuff. So it was a very small, very technical piece of our audience. And we had a bit of a breakthrough at one point, and I think beginning of I don't know, two years ago or one year ago, Kevin said, we have got to figure this out. And then I went to a conference, and at every conference we set up uh something called slick text, where you have a phone number and you can text everybody who's going to the conference and they can reply. And I thought about how much I enjoyed uh texting because text is the one inbox that I keep clean all the time. Anyone who texts me, I check it, I reply to everybody, I let it go. And I thought, you know, let's try text. And it just felt right, though I don't think at the time I could have told you why. And we put it into the show notes, and it was like instantly we started getting tons of replies. And by the very next episode, Kevin was saying, All right, let's not talk too much about this because I think we've got to build this into Buzzsprout. It's going so well.

Cara Pacetti 3:24

I love that story and I love that you guys didn't give up. And now we have a fun new feature. So out of all of that came fan mail, which has been an amazing tool for our podcasters and has definitely made it easier for listeners to engage with their favorite Buzzsprout podcasters. And we actually have a previous episode of podcasting Q&A where I explain all about fan mail, how it works. And so if you want to check that out, I will go ahead and link to it in the show notes. But to answer today's question, I want to focus on strategies you can use to make it really easy for your listeners to engage with your podcast. And there are actually two new facets of fan mail, which Alban leaked a little bit. But I think that they're really gonna help with this. So, as mentioned before, listeners actually now have the option to leave a voicemail with fan mail. So super exciting. You spoke about SpeakPipe, and the voicemails actually reminded me of old Podcasting Q&A episodes because the listener questions would actually be played inside of the episodes because they were leaving them through SpeakPipe. And so now that voicemail is incorporated into fan mail and easy to use, we might need to bring that back for Podcasting Q&A.

Alban Brooke 4:32

I I love the idea.

Cara Pacetti 4:34

So, Alban, tell us a little bit more about how voicemail works and how this update is going to make it easier for listeners to engage with your podcast.

Alban Brooke 4:41

Sure. Um, if you don't mind, could I talk about why texting works and then why voicemail is a great add-on?

Cara Pacetti 4:48

Yeah, absolutely.

Alban Brooke 4:49

So the reason the text works is we have a lot of good rules and etiquette around text. We know that text is very informal. So it's not like an email where I need to write out, you know, dear Kara, I was thinking about you today. I hope it, you know, and send out a whole email. With a text, you just fire off a text. And so what you do is people listen on their phone, they click that button, it opens it up a message inside their texting app and they send a text real quick, real casual, and they fire it off. And you really don't have to think about it too much. The downside is texting often feels impersonal. So while we're getting way more messages because we have texting, you don't always get all the nuance from somebody's voice. You don't get the connection. We talk about the power of connection of the human voice in podcasting. And so it felt natural to try to add voicemail. Now, voicemail, you won't get as many as you're getting texts because it's much more work for your listener to go and record themselves. You know, may feel a little bit self-conscious when they're recording, but what you get is a really nice clip of audio that you can include in your podcast. And so that was why we thought it'd be really nice to have this as well. In the past, we'd used SpeakPipe, we'd used other services. The downside there was we're paying for something month after month. And if we only got one every two months, it felt like this is a lot to pay to keep another service going. This is something we could add into fan mail that feels natural and ended up working out really well. So we launched this on Buzzcast. And I think we had five fan mail voicemail messages when we came back the next week.

Responding to Listeners

Cara Pacetti 6:30

So almost as big of a hit as the initial text release as well. Super exciting. And actually, there is a BuzzCast episode that you did with Kevin, and I think you guys really dive deep into ways of using voicemails on your podcast. So I'll also link to that episode in the show notes. So, in addition to voicemails, there was another itch that we needed to scratch here with our podcasters, which was the ability to respond. So now we've added the ability to respond to fan mail uh using text. And so it's kind of funny because fan mail was created because podcasters could communicate to listeners and we wanted to give listeners a way to respond. Now we are giving podcasters a way to respond to listeners who are engaging via text. So, Alban, can you tell us a little bit about why we wanted to incorporate replies with fan mail?

Alban Brooke 7:19

Uh so initially we were pretty against adding replies. We were thinking, you know, people will send off a text and then you include, you know, you read that off in your podcast, and that's how you respond. You know, we don't want to get into this whole weird thing where now they see your phone number, you see theirs, that doesn't seem right. And so we said it's just a one-way streak. But as we used fan mail more and more, we got a lot of messages. They'd say, I love the show. Thank you so much. And I think we just wanted to reply, thank you. And we got others that uh shared something kind of personal. And we went, I want to read this on the podcast, but I'm not 100% sure they'd be okay with us reading that. And so we wanted a way to say, is it okay if I read this on the podcast? And every once in a while, somebody would reach out with a question, like, I tried to sign up for your Buzzsprout subscription, but then I canceled it. Is it okay if I still listen to the episodes? You know, they'd have some technical question, and we had no way of replying. So there were lots of things that were coming in that were kind of private that wouldn't have made sense to read on the podcast. And so what we did is all these are going through a Buzzprout phone number. And the benefit there is we really wanted to make sure that this was a way for your listeners to reach out to you without giving everybody on the internet your phone number. And the idea is we're not trying to rebuild a whole messaging app with custom backgrounds and emojis and, you know, reply reactions. It's just if people message you, you can reply with a short message. And each time they come in, you can reply. But I've gone back and I've replied to a bunch of old messages just to thank people for the kind things that they've written us.

Cara Pacetti 8:50

I love that. We actually had a podcaster that we reached out to in 2024 via fan mail and they just replied last night in support. So that was pretty fun. It was a message from 2024, and they're must be doing the same thing, going through and and responding. So I love that. I love that there's that ability now. Okay, Alban. So before we sign off, I have a lightning round question that I think our Podcasting Q&A listeners who are maybe just enabling fan mail for the first time could benefit from. So I want to hear your top three creative ways of incorporating fan mail into a call to action.

Alban Brooke 9:24

So, what we do on Buzzcast is we ask a specific question and we ask the question that will relate the next episode. So, if for Podcasting Q&A, you knew we're going to talk about artwork next week, you would craft a question about artwork and ask them, text the show, leave a voicemail, tell me about your artwork. And then you could incorporate those into a future episode. Uh the specificity is really important. Ask people to tell you exactly the answer to a specific question. Don't just say anything goes, or else people won't really know what to say. But if you ask a specific question, especially one that people have different opinions on, then you're going to get lots of answers. So the first is ask specific questions. Second, I like to ask people to tell stories. So tell me about the time where you almost gave up podcasting. Tell me a story about it. Uh, stories work really well, especially over voicemail. And I think last is you kind of can put out a call, you know. I want to just get some feedback on the last few episodes. Uh, but you can just say, you know, I'd like your honest feedback. How could I improve as a podcaster? Is it more time put into the subject matter, or would it be cleaning up audio, or would it be something totally different? I'd love to hear your opinion and people can reach out and tell you.

Cara Pacetti 10:42

I love that. And that's such a benefit if somebody is hearing something in your audio that maybe you're kind of, what did Kevin say the other day? Ear deafness?

Alban Brooke 10:51

Ear blindness.

Cara Pacetti 10:52

Ear blindness, that's right. Ear blindness. You're not hearing it. Uh, your listener can let you know. Hey, I just want to let you know, whenever you play that outro music, it's it's really loud or or whatever that may be. And so that's great to ask for some constructive criticism, especially if you're just getting started. So what a great use. So if you have questions about using fan mail, please reach out to me, leave a voicemail, or send a text, whichever you'd like. I'd love to hear from you. And uh, and I'd love to answer any questions you have about your podcast or about fan mail. Be sure to join us every Monday to kickstart your week. Thank you so much, Alban, for being here and for helping me answer this question. And thank you for listening. As always, keep podcasting.