Announcements

New updates and improvements to podinbox

  1. Feature Your Sponsors on Your Fan Page!

    New Feature
    Announcement

    Do you work with sponsors?

    If so, you can now feature your sponsors on your fan page!

    Here’s how our new “Sponsors Widget” looks on your fan page…

     

    Website - Fan Page Mockup (8)

     

    Bundle This With Your Sponsors Package

    One common tactic podcasters use to sell more sponsorships is to “bundle” their various audience channels.

    For example, don’t just sell your podcast audience…bundle in your newsletter, social media, and PodInbox fan page to entice your dream sponsor. Sponsors want to get in front of your audience...everywhere your fans engage with you.

     

    A Versatile Sponsor Widget

    Our Sponsors Widget can also support audio. Just drop an ad-read into your Sponsor Widget, and quickly create an audio-rich ad unit.

    Website Images

    Have multiple sponsors. No problem. Add as many Sponsors as you need, and simply toggle them on or off when you want to feature them.

    We also let you choose whether to display multiple sponsors inside a carousel...or displayed as a stacked list right on your fan page.

     

    Useful for Fans

    Make it easy for fans to find the brands you promote by featuring them on your fan page.

    As your fans engage with you on your fan page, use it as the perfect opportunity to highlight your sponsors. Also, be sure to include your referral links to get credit for any click-throughs.

     

    We hope you enjoy this new little feature!

    It’s yet another way we’re making our fan pages a bit more useful for our community of podcast creators.

  2. Now…You Can Receive Typed Messages on Your Fan Page

    New Feature
    Announcement

    Most of you are already using PodInbox to receive Audio Messages from fans. Now, it’s just as easy to also receive typed messages!

    We realize, not all your fans are comfortable recording audio messages…so we wanted to help engage them as well!

     

    Website - Fan Page Mockup (7)

     

    How to Use

    To accept typed messages in your inbox, just login to your dashboard, and in your inbox settings, simply toggle on “Allow text messages”. That’s it! Now, fans visiting your fan page will also have the option to submit a text message.

     

    Why Use This

    Many of the top podcasters know the power of fan engagement. When you ask them to take an action...like, asking questions for an AMA episode, or sharing their story...you're building a deeper bond with your audience and creating superfans.

    This new feature simply lets you engage with more of your fans! And when they engage, we help you build your audience email list.

     

    Spam Protection Included

    You might be thinking, will this potentially introduce spam?

    We agree. Since text messages are a lot easier to create than audio messages, we also built a couple of features to prevent spam.

    Now, we set a limit of 2 messages per day a fan can post on a fan page. In the future, we may allow you, the fan page owner, to customize the daily message limit. But for now, we think this limit will protect you against potential spam, while giving fans ample opportunity to engage with you and your show!

     

    PS…next up, we’re building a feature that will appeal to podcasters working with sponsors. Stay tuned!

  3. New Fan Page Design...Now With Tabs!

    New Feature
    Announcement

    It’s here…our newly redesigned fan pages!

    TLDR, your fan page is now organized into tabs.

    Also with this new update, we’ve enhanced our tips feature.

     

    Inbox Tab

    This is where your fans can leave audio messages.

    Fan Page - Inbox

     

    The one NEW element on this tab is the Welcome Message. Login to your dashboard to customize your fan page welcome message.

    Currently, we only support audio input from fans. But due to overwhelming feedback…we’ll soon let you receive text based messages too. Stay tuned!

     

    Tips Tab

    This is where fans can give you monetary tips.

    Fan Page - Tips

     

    Under “Recent Tips”, you’ll see all your fan tips. This is a great way to provide some “social proof” and encourage other fans to give generously.

    Now…fans can also leave a message with their tip, and you can simply reply to tips inline!

    Additionally, you’ll be able to see your “Top Supporters” here. With this simple leaderboard, your fans will donate and compete to become your top super fan!

     

    Perks Tab

    This is where fans can view and purchase all your active perks.

    Fan Page - Perks

     

    Be creative! Give you fans an opportunity to buy perks…like episode shoutouts, online workshops, Zoom calls, etc. The possibilities are endless.

    With this redesign, you’ll have an entire page to showcase all your fan perks! Stay tuned as we enhance perks even more later this year.

     

    Fan Page Settings

    With this redesign, we now offer more ways to customize your fan page.

    Dashboard - Settings

     

    Simply navigate to the new menu option, “Page Settings”, in your dashboard.

    And don’t worry, whatever features you had before, we preserved your existing setting. For those of you who not yet using our monetization features…you’ll have all the monetization options toggled off by default.

     

    We hope you enjoy our new redesign with our much-improved tip features!

    It’s our first step in making our fan pages much more powerful, intuitive, and engaging!

     

  4. New Custom Theme Color for your Fan Page

    New Feature
    Announcement

    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!

    Website - Fan Page Mockup

     

    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!

  5. Faster Page Loads!

    Improvement
    Announcement

    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!

  6. Two New Customization Options for Our Floating Widget

    New Feature
    Announcement

    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!

    Blog Post (5)

    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.

    podinbox_-_2_0_-_widgets__Dashboard_-_Widget_-_Video

    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!

     

     

  7. Free Message Transcriptions!

    New Feature
    Announcement

    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…

    podinbox_-_0_0_-_new_features_graffle__Message_Component

    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.

     

  8. Sorry if you just received a bunch of "New Audio Message" emails!

    Announcement

    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!

  9. New Options for Message Tips and General Tips

    Improvement

    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...

    PodInbox___Dashboard

     

    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!

     

     

     

  10. New Core Feature...Paid Perks!

    New Feature
    Announcement

    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.

    Blog Post (3)

    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.