Despite the huge growth of messaging apps, chatbots, and social media platforms, email remains an effective way for reaching people out there. Data from Statista predict that in 2025 there will be 4.6 Billion global email users. About 600 million more than today.

Moreover, statistics collected by Optinmonster states that email is here to stay: 99% of people check their inboxes every day. And despite the rise of messaging apps, 91% of teenagers and young adults (15-24 years old) are still using email. According to the research, email is still the first thing we check every day after we wake up: 58% email vs. 14% for social media.

If you are a podcaster, there is something else you might want to consider: email is way more personal than other communication channels, and it's perfect to create a community around your podcast. Several podcasts have a monthly or a weekly newsletter, which is a great way to connect with listeners and build excitement around your content. Plus, sharing episodes via email is a great way to keep the audience engaged and up to date with your latest podcast releases.

MailChimp is the most popular service to build and deliver messages to a mailing list. It provides tools that allow you to design, create, and send emails to your subscribers. Mailchimp also allows for integrations and assets that will make it easy for people to subscribe to your newsletter.

Spreaker users can easily connect their podcast hosted on Spreaker to Mailchimp and automatically inform email subscribers as soon as a new episode goes live. 😉

Here's how to set this up. 👇

Access your MailChimp account and proceed with creating a new campaign. Click on the "Campaign" option from the menu.

Next step: click the "Create Campaign" button, at the upper right.

Now, choose the "Email" option.

Let's start setting up your email. Make sure you select the "Automated" email option.

It's time to choose which type of automated email is more suitable for your podcast releases. Go with "Share blog updates."

You'll be asked to name the Campaign. Choose a recognizable name, so you can easily find it in your MailChimp Dashboard in the future. You can select the audience or define this later during the creation process.

Now it's time to connect your podcast to your MailChimp campaign. First, go to your Spreaker's CMS and select your podcast. On the left side click on RSS Settings

Your RSS feed will be displayed and you can copy it from this screen:

Go back to MailChimp and paste the RSS Link to the dedicated field (image below).

You can choose the days and time when MailChimp should check for new episodes and automatically send the email. You can define the time and the day you think it's the most appropriate for your audience to hear from you.

Choose the MailChimp audience that contains the email addresses of your subscribers. If you are on the free MailChimp plan, you will have one single audience.

Fill out the fields with the necessary information about the campaign, such as Campaign name (internal use only), Email subject, Preview text and more (see image below).

Select the Template you prefer, so you can choose the email layout you think it's the most appropriate for your podcast.

You can use one of the many templates offered by MailChimp, or you can create one on your own by starting from scratch.

Now it's time to be creative! Customize the email look and feel, and make it in line with your podcast style.

You can also input the tags MailChimp retrieves from your podcast RSS Feed to populate your email content. This way, every time MailChimp sends an email, the fields will be updated with the information you edit on Spreaker (more about tags at the end of this article).

Make sure everything looks ok, there are no typos, and the tags you used are correctly set up. To check this out, you can easily select the preview mode.

Click "Preview and Test" at the upper menu.

If you click "Enter preview mode" you'll be able to see the preview in your browser.

If you want to get the exact same experience your audience will have when getting the email, you can also try out the "Send a test email" option so that you can get the email straight to your inbox.

When everything looks ready, move on to the next and final step for a final check, and set the campaign to go live!

These are the tags that MailChimp can retrieve from the Spreaker's RSS Feed and that you can use to populate your campaign information and content.