I make a distinction, mostly to myself and mostly unasked for, between marketing with a small m and Marketing with a capital M. Small-m marketing is promotion, the getting-the-word-out business of telling people a thing exists and hoping enough of them care. Capital-M Marketing is the theory of the firm, which is to say understanding the wants, needs, and desires of a customer and delighting them profitably, still the best definition of the discipline I know, and one I learned in business school over 20 years ago.

Nearly every conversation I have about podcast newsletters happens in the small one. The newsletter as bullhorn, as a way to stay visible between episodes, as a conduit for offers, or simply as evidence to an audience that a show hasn’t quietly died. Those are all perfectly good reasons to write one, and I’m not here to sneer at any of them, particularly since I am at this moment sending you a newsletter about newsletters. Please read it and subscribe to it and share it with your friends. The Podcast Atlas measures the newsletter on exactly those terms, and by those terms it does well. The more valuable thing a newsletter does for a creator isn’t in the study at all, and I’ll get to it in a bit. Strap in, kids.

Most of the Audience Isn’t There Yet

39% of podcast listeners currently subscribe to at least one podcast newsletter, with 24% of them subscribing to more than one. The report presents the remaining 61% as the growth opportunity, which is true as far as it goes. However, that 61% is really two audiences with two entirely different problems: 42% have never subscribed to a podcast newsletter at all, and 19% subscribed to one and left.

Those two segments require different approaches. The 42% were either never asked, or were asked in a way that made the newsletter sound like more of the show they were already getting, which makes it a problem of offer and awareness. The 19% raised a hand, received the thing, and decided the thing wasn’t worth the room it took up in an inbox, which is a problem with the thing itself. So for every two podcast listeners who never subscribed, one has tried and quit, and I’d hold onto that ratio, because it turns out to be the most interesting number on the page. And, by the way, that ratio of 2:1 between people who do a thing and people who stopped doing a thing is almost like the Golden Ratio of churn research.

What It Does for the People Who Have It

87% of subscribers say newsletters lead them to listen to an episode at least sometimes, and I want to handle that figure with the same care I gave the clip conversion numbers two weeks ago, because 45 of those 87 points are “sometimes,” and sometimes has never been a media plan. The number that we really care about is the 42% who say often or always.

The cool stat is in the small numbers, as it often is, at the other end of the same scale, where 3% say never. Practically nobody who subscribes to a podcast newsletter reports that it has no bearing on what they end up listening to, and set against the clips data, where roughly a third of viewers reliably went on to an episode, newsletters convert more dependably on a much smaller and considerably more committed base.

For an advertiser, that makes this about as clean a direct-response environment as the map offers, since it’s known people with high intent are arriving through a path that doesn’t route through anybody’s ranking system, which is why you buy it for retention and episode promotion rather than for discovery. Newsletters serve audiences a creator already has, and I’d rather state that plainly as a job description than concede it as a limitation.

The 87% is telling you something more useful than the fact that people click through to episodes, though. It’s telling you the line is open.

I Don’t Have Access to Them

I’ve had the same conversation with hundreds of podcasters over the years, and it goes the same way every time. Someone wants to know more about their audience: who they are, what they want, whether the thing they tried last month actually landed. I tell them to go and ask, whether that means a formal piece of research or simply spending time in a Discord where the audience is already talking to each other. And almost every time, the answer that comes back is that they don’t have access to them.

Somebody in the chain knows who’s listening, and the question of who that somebody is and what they might do with it is a fight I’m not picking today. But here’s the thing: a creator doesn’t need any of that. What a creator needs is permission, which is a different asset entirely, and one that nobody upstream can withhold, because it can only ever be given directly. That relationship is a romance, or at least a courtship, and you don’t get all the way to fourth base on the first date. A newsletter is how a creator earns the gift of an email address, and if you’re going to ask someone for that gift, you owe it to them to honor it.

This recasts both charts above. That 19% lapse rate has nothing to do with deliverability or send frequency or any of the other things we usually blame. Those are people who handed a creator the most valuable thing they had to give and received a bullhorn in return (or, at least, a low-quality intruder into their inbox), and a newsletter run purely as small-m promotion will go on earning exactly that response.

The Loop

Once you have permission, the newsletter becomes the best feedback instrument most creators are ever going to have, and the delightful part is that it looks nothing like “research,” as in a 20-question survey you ask people to fill out all at once. A newsletter relationship lets you float a question or two a week, every week, from someone the reader already hears from and has already decided they like. Over enough weeks, that yields something no dashboard will ever give you: a running read on what’s landing, what’s gone stale, what deserves more room, and what could stand a rest.

That’s the capital-M definition doing actual work in Marketing, because understanding what an audience wants stops being a positioning exercise and starts being a standing input into next week’s episode. It’s also why this has to be the channel you own. Every other territory on the podcast creator map is intermediated by somebody else. While a platform will happily tell you how many people watched, not one of them will hand you a way to ask those people why.

It’s a loop that feeds itself, too. A newsletter worth reading earns the address, the address earns feedback, feedback makes the show better, and a better show makes the newsletter easier to keep giving away for free. The thing holding the whole loop open is that the reader gets something of value every single time, which is precisely why “just promote the episode” breaks it at the very first link. Continuous improvement on the line of your own podcast, if you like, and I’ve never seen that as a nice-to-have. For a creator with no other continuous line to their audience, it may well be the only one on offer.

About That 87%

The 87% who say a newsletter at least sometimes led them to listen to an episode is measured on subscribers, who are by definition among a show’s most engaged listeners, so some unknowable share of that figure is the enthusiasm that produced the subscription in the first place rather than anything the newsletter subsequently did. The study shows an association, and nothing in it separates the two. Which means you have to work as hard on the newsletter as you do on the show. Sorry about that.

The larger problem is those who stopped subscribing to your newsletter. A feedback loop running through a newsletter list is a loop with the happiest slice of an audience, which is exactly the group least likely to tell you a show has gone stale, since the people who already think so mostly stopped opening some time ago. Read uncharitably, that 19% lapsed figure is the most useful feedback in this entire study walking out of the building unrecorded, and I don’t have a clean fix for it beyond asking the people still in the room better questions than most of us bother to ask, and asking them more often, like before you have a problem.

Over the last five weeks, we have explored the surfaces of five territories in the Podcast Atlas, so let me put the map back together. Clips recruit, audio persuades, video demonstrates, social carries the reach, and the newsletter keeps the relationship warm in between all of it. The creator sits in the middle holding the whole thing together, which is why 73% of listeners say they’d follow a host from audio into video and 71% would follow one from a full show into clips, and why 46% of people on these platforms have already bought something because a creator recommended it, a figure that is the commercial case for the entire map in a single number.

Every other territory here is a way to talk to an audience. The newsletter is the only one where they can talk back (PLEASE don’t use a no-reply on these, unless you are Joe Rogan or something. You can handle it, I promise), which is the whole of capital-M Marketing sitting there available to anyone willing to earn it, and I’d build it long before I thought I needed it.

For more, please download The Podcast Atlas here, where you can also watch the webinar where I walk you through all of the “territories” of the podcast map.

Thank you as always to our wonderful research sponsors, SiriusXM Podcast Network, ESPN Podcasts, BetterHelp, NPR, and American Public Media, as well as our research partners at Signal Hill Insights.