Now, you can define a custom theme color for your fan page! This lets you control the color of your fan page buttons, link colors, header banner background color…just to name a few things!

To customize your fan page theme color, simply login to your PodInbox dashboard, click “fan page” on the main menu, and under the details tab…just select your custom color and click “save”. That’s it!

Along with this change, we’ve also made some design tweaks to the main header area of the fan page, to streamline things a bit.

We’ll be releasing more design changes to the fan page this month! Specifically, we’ll be splitting some of our core fan page features out into separate tabs…giving you more control of which features you want to enable on your fan page!

We’re taking time now to make these design changes because we’ve added a LOT of features to our fan pages, compared to when we first began.

Also, we have plans, coming soon this year, to release even more exciting features to engage your fans in interesting ways.

So stay tuned and happy podcasting!

Happy new year podcasters!

Just a quick update. Over the past 2 months, we've been busy improving the overall speed and reliability of our entire platform. Most noticeably, you'll find your public-facing fan page is a LOT snappier and your dashboard inbox now loads a lot faster.

Those of you with more fan messages will really notice these improvements!

We decided to invest in performance improvements to really get our platform in a great place for 2023! We've got a ton of features and updates planned for this year...to help podcasters and creators connect with fans better, and monetize their work.

We're building exciting things to support your journey as creators.

Stay tuned!

Our PodInbox widget just got a lot more personality. We can now feature you, right in the widget!

Now, in our floating widget, you can display your avatar or a custom video…to give more life and character to your PodInbox widget. Here’s a glimpse of what this new widget option looks like!

Pretty cool right? It’s our way to make this important call-to-action on your website stand out a lot more. When you feature your profile pic, or a video of yourself talking, visitors on your site will be 5 times more likely to click this widget, vs the normal “leave a message” icon.

This will help you grab the attention of your fans and site visitors, and get more activity and messages on your audio capture widget.

To display your PodInbox avatar in your widget, simply scroll down to the “select icon” section of the floating widget settings, select your avatar, and save settings.

To display your video icon option, simply upload a new Widget Video in the Floating Widget settings area, select the video icon option, preview your new widget design, and save settings.

We highly recommend using this new video widget option, as it’s the most effective option to convert passive website visitors…to active site participants. When your website visitors see a video of you on your website, they’ll be more compelled to view that video…and follow whatever you’re requesting in your video.

Please note, these 2 new widget options are only available on the PodInbox Pro plan. Upgrade now, to take advantage of this new option, along with a multitude of other premium features on our affordable Pro plan.

We hope you enjoy this new feature!

Now, when fans record an audio message on your podcast fan page, you’ll get that message transcribed automatically…for free! 

You heard that right, we’re now providing free voice transcriptions!

This works a bit like visual voicemail, and here’s what it looks like…

There's nothing you need to do to turn this on...as this new feature is toggled on by default.

Also, if you’re using our embeddable widget on your podcast website, you’ll also gain the benefit of voice transcriptions. Any audio messages recorded with your widget, will be transcribed in your PodInbox dashboard and in your notification email. 

If for some reason you’d like to hide your transcriptions on your fan page…just login to your dashboard, edit your inbox, and toggle off “Show transcriptions”. But, we recommend just leaving it on!

We’re still labeling this new feature as “beta”, since we’re continually working on the accuracy and speed of these transcriptions.

On some rare occasions, new messages might not get auto-transcribed when submitted. Don’t worry. You can always manually trigger the transcription with the “transcribe” link inside every untranscribed voice message.

We now also include the transcription in your notification email, whenever you receive a new audio message. It’s just a convenient way for you to read the audio message, before listening to it on PodInbox. 

We hope you enjoy this new feature! It's just another way we're making fan engagement a bit easier and more sustainable.

Oops...sorry if you just received a batch of "New Audio Message" emails from PodInbox.

On Sunday, Nov 20, at around 1:15p PST...we just launched a new audio transcription feature (read more about this new feature here).

And as part of this new feature release, we backfilled the transcriptions of all existing audio messages on our platform.

As part of the backfilling, we sent you, the fan page owner, an email notification of all your past audio messages that we successfully batch-transcribed. Fortunately, we stopped it part way through, but many of you still might've received a bunch of "New Audio Message" email notifications.

So, if you just received a batch of these emails today...sorry for the confusion! We hope this explains what happened. We're working hard (yes, even on Sunday) to bring you this great new transcription feature, and we went a bit too fast.

Sorry again for any confusion, but we do hope you enjoy this new transcription feature!

Many of you asked for more granular options for message tips and general tips. So with our newest update, we now have separate options for these 2 features. To access these new settings on your dashboard, just click monetization from the main menu, and there are 2 new tabs for general tips and message tips...

The first new option you'll see is the ability to toggle each one on or off. We recommend you keep both on, to give your fans more ways to engage and support your show. But, this option gives you the flexibility to activate them individually on your fan page.

Now, you can also define your suggested amounts for each. Prior to this, the suggested amounts were a global setting for your fan page. Now, you can have a different set of suggested amounts for your message tips and general tips.

Finally, you can now customize a different thank you message for both general tips and message tips. This gives you the flexibility to thank your fans differently, depending on which action they take. We also include this custom thank you message in the email confirmation we send to your fan.

Over time, we'll be adding even more granular settings to really help you customize your fan page!

Today, we’re excited to announce our newest core feature, Perks.

In a nutshell, Perks is a simple way for you to create things that fans can buy…right on your PodInbox Fan Page.

Fans want to support you and engage deeper with you. With Perks, you can do just that! By creating Perks that your fans might want, you're giving fans a tangible way to support your show...and get something out of it. Perks are a great way to activate your audience, and it can be a good revenue stream for you.

Perks can be just about anything, and it’s totally up to your imagination. Here are some creative things you can sell with Perks…

• Episode Shoutouts
• Books
• Workshops
• Courses
• Digital Downloads
• Discord or Slack Community
• Group Zoom Calls
• Private Zoom Calls
• Private RSS Feed

When creating Perks, take into account what works for you and your fans. With this new feature, we’re including a library of Perk Templates that can help you customize your own Perks.

To use Perks, just log in to your PodInbox dashboard. There on the main menu, you’ll find a new option called “Perks”. Here you’ll be able to add, edit, and manage all your Perks.

To learn more about our new Perks feature, you can read more here…

https://www.podinbox.com/features/perks/

This feature is available on all plan tiers, and you can create unlimited Perks.

We hope you like the new feature, and we can’t wait to see all the perks you'll offer!

Since Perks is now one of our core features, it’s our priority to improve this feature even more.

With this announcement, we have some good news and bad news. Let's start with the good news.

New Perks Feature!

On October 15, 2022, we’ll be releasing a brand new feature called "Perks", where you can create custom Perks that fans can buy on your PodInbox Fan Page. We’ll release a dedicated announcement with more detail when this becomes available!

Deprecating Our Rewards Feature

And for the bad news, we’re deprecating our “Rewards” feature. When we released Rewards several months ago, we thought it solved a very unique need. Our goal was to create a way to gamify fan donations, letting fans “unlock” the podcaster’s Rewards, based on a fan’s total tips and donations.

We shared this idea with a bunch of podcasters, and people really liked the concept. Unfortunately, it did not work as well as we hoped.

Here’s why this Rewards feature did not work.

Not Great For Fans

The main problem is it’s not intuitive for fans. This is actually one of our CORE principles here at PodInbox: to create fan pages that are both fun AND simple. We can admit, we failed this principle with our Rewards feature.

Fans want the Rewards podcasters are offering, but it’s not straightforward how to earn those rewards. Turns out, fans just want to buy specific rewards in a straightforward way…with a buy button. Our mistake…we tried to get too clever.

So, with our new Perks feature, we’re changing it so each Perk has a price and a buy button. It’s just the simple pattern everyone knows and loves.

With the new Perks feature, fans don’t need to unlock your Perks in sequence. They just simply buy whichever one they want.

Not Easy for Podcasters

We also realized that creating Rewards is too confusing. Podcasters often got stuck on designing their Reward Levels and knowing what dollar amount to set for each level.

Creating Rewards took too much mental gymnastics, and podcasters had to think like game designers. This was also neither simple nor fun.

With the new Perks feature, creating rewards is a lot easier. You basically just decide what you want to sell, set a price for it, and publish it. No game mechanics are involved. We’re even providing a collection of Perk Templates to give you a ton of starter ideas on things to sell on your fan page.

Building on Perks

We’re VERY excited about the new Perks feature and excited to see the creative ways podcasters and fans will engage with it. This Perks feature will replace our Rewards feature, and we’ll post another update dedicated to Perks in several days, once it’s released.

You can now enable a text-based chat room on your fan page to help build your community!

For a while now, y'all have asked for a feature to let fans interact with each other. So, we created chat rooms. Chat rooms are a simple and effective way for podcasters to build community and encourage audience engagement. Fans want to chat with each other and connect around a common interest…your podcast. PodInbox chat rooms provide a turnkey solution for this.

And being an integrated feature in our fan page platform, podcasters can optionally monetize their chat rooms with a flat-fee or a monthly subscription, by making it a private chat room.

How It’s Different

Unlike other more complex community platforms and dedicated chat apps, PodInbox chat rooms are simple. It’s a real-time, text-based chat, that conveniently lives right on your PodInbox fan page.

We see it as an entry point to activate passive listeners. Chat should be a low-barrier fan action. When fans participate in a chat room on your fan page, they’re taking the first step into being a member of your community.

It's not designed to be something overly complex or burdensome, like Slack or Discord. Rather, it's meant to be lightweight and welcoming, like a YouTube live chat.

Also, we want to help podcasters know their listeners. So when a fan participates in your chat room, we organically capture them right in your PodInbox contacts list.

If you already run a membership group, like a community, course, or cohort...we still a chat room is a good "first step" into your other paid offerings.

How It Works

PodInbox chat rooms are available on all PodInbox account tiers. You can enable or disable your chat room with a simple toggle.

You can easily set your chat room’s cost for access…with options being free, one-time payment, and monthly subscription. The exact pricing is totally customizable. Creating a private chat room is a great way to monetize and reward your engaged fans.

You can learn more about our new Chat Rooms here. Enjoy!

https://www.podinbox.com/features/chat-rooms/

Just wanted to announce several new improvements and fixes we just added!

NEW - Leaderboard Toggle On/Off

You can now toggle the Leaderboard on or off on your Fan Page!

This new setting is pretty easy. Simply login to your dashboard, click "monetization" from the main menu, and on the Leaderboard tab, there's a new toggle option to "Show Leaderboard on Fan Page". If you toggle it off, the leaderboard will no longer be displayed on your Fan Page.

NEW - Customize The "Leave a Tip" Label

Some users wanted to customize the area on the Fan Page where it says "Leave a Tip". We loved that idea! So, now you can easily customize that to say whatever you want! (well...within 20 characters max). Some ideas might be "Support My Podcast", "Buy Me Dinner", or "Donate Now". It's up to you...so be creative!

NEW - Reward Level 1 Can Now Be Toggled Off

We really encourage you to create some reward levels...both to reward your fans for their support, and to earn more money!

But, we recognize some of you might not be ready to launch your reward levels yet. So, now you can turn your default reward level to draft until you're ready to publish your rewards. When ALL your rewards are toggled off, the entire rewards section just disappears from your Fan Page.

Your default 1st reward level is still set at $1. If you're not into a $1 reward level, no worries. Just keep this reward level off and create more reward levels at whatever price you want!

NEW - Contacts Now Has "Added" Date

We thought it'd be nice to know when a new fan was first added to your contacts list, so we added the date a fan was first added to your Contacts List. Just a reminder, Contacts List is viewable for Paid accounts only, so just head over to Contacts List to see the new "Added" column.

FIX - Video Avatar Now Works in Safari and iOS

There were some issues with our Video Avatars (for the welcome video and inbox video). Now, it's working across all browsers!