Social Media Marketing Podcast · Michael Stelzner, Social Media Examiner

Building Email Communities: How to Grow a Raving Audience

·43 min·3 clips

Paul Gowder says your email list is one of the only two things you truly own in the digital world.

1. Social Media Marketing Podcast host Michael Stelzner interviews Paul Gowder on using email sequences to build community around a niche brand. 2. Paul Gowder is founder of powwows.com, the leading online community for Native American arts and culture, and host of the Side Hustle Suitcase podcast, with over 20 years of email and forum community experience. 3. The episode argues that email sequences — serialised multi-day email series — are a more effective community-building tool than social media posts because they deliver value over time and encourage individual replies. 4. Paul traces his origin to the mid-1990s when he built static web pages about powwows in college, found them indexed before SEO existed, and realised early that sending bulk email to a forum list was unusually powerful. 5. He defines community broadly as anyone who feels a connection to the topic, brand, or host — not just Facebook group members — and writes every email as though speaking to a single person at a powwow. 6. Paul cites Lou Mangiello's principle that there are only two digital assets an operator truly owns: the podcast feed and the email list, and backs it with his own loss of an 85,000-member Facebook group that Facebook deleted overnight. 7. He contrasts email's 50-60% open rate with Facebook's 1% organic reach on a 1.6-million-follower page, making the reach advantage of email concrete. 8. Sequences — pre-written series delivered once a day, once a week, or on a custom schedule — allow new subscribers to receive structured onboarding before they encounter the weekly broadcast aimed at long-term readers. 9. Paul's flagship sequence, 'What to Expect at Your First Powwow,' grew from 7 emails to 13-14 over time, answering questions like what a grand entry is, what to wear, and what to bring, with questions embedded to prompt replies. 10. He argues that serialised sequences produce higher retention and engagement than PDF lead magnets because subscribers read daily and reply, whereas most downloaded PDFs are opened once and never revisited. 11. Throwback Thursday is a 52-email automated sequence written in January each year that resurfaces one piece of the 20-plus-year powwows.com archive each Thursday, with subscribers experiencing it as a personal weekly newsletter. 12. For podcasters, Paul recommends building a similar sequence from the top 10-20 back-catalogue episodes to ensure new subscribers encounter the best content regardless of when they join. 13. Sequences of all sizes are useful: Paul has two-email sequences for narrow questions, 13-14 email onboarding series, and a 60-email Native American Heritage Month series delivered over two months. 14. Subscribers enter sequences through several paths: a Mediavine Grow plugin that displays topical opt-in forms mid-article, standalone landing pages with a single call to action, and link triggers inside weekly broadcasts. 15. Facebook lead ads — where subscribers supply an email without leaving the platform — cost Paul 12 to 20 cents per subscriber, with a back-end automation routing them to Kit. 16. At the end of every sequence, Paul adds a menu of two or three other sequences the subscriber can enter by clicking a link, creating a self-perpetuating system where each completion feeds the next onboarding journey. 17. Paul emphasises writing in a personal, first-person voice — addressed to 'you' with the subscriber's first name — rather than as a brand, drawing on his early lesson that posting as 'Webmaster' made people think they were reading automated system messages. 18. He recommends keeping sequence emails short, scannable, and text-based rather than image-heavy to improve deliverability and match natural reading habits on mobile. 19. Newsletter operators, podcasters, bloggers, and community managers who want to move new subscribers from strangers to engaged readers through structured email onboarding. 20. Businesses that do not yet have a content archive or a recurring topic to serialise will find the Throwback Thursday and archive-replay tactics less immediately applicable.

As heard by us

A practical look at turning existing content into short email sequences that build reader habit and support site traffic.

Michael Stelzner's episode keeps email community building close to the operator's desk: take content you already own, turn it into a short welcome sequence, and let each message do one job. The useful bit is the workflow, not a grand theory.

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Why you'd press play

Turn one idea into a week of shorter emails.

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