Email courses for coaches and consultants

What you are actually selling, and why that changes the course

There is a fixed number of hours in your week and no version of your business where that changes. That one fact makes your course different from almost every other use of the format. Somebody selling a recorded course wants ten thousand readers and is happy if two per cent buy. You want twelve clients a year, and ten thousand readers who cannot afford you have cost a month of writing and returned nothing.

So the first question is not how to get more sign-ups. It is which reader you want on the other end, and a course a hundred people finish and four of them book beats one a thousand people skim.

The second thing that changes is what people are buying. Very few buy a method. They buy relief from a situation they can feel and cannot describe, which is why a first conversation so often goes nowhere: the client spends it trying to explain and you spend it trying to understand.

What the five days should teach

Teach the diagnosis. By Friday the reader should be able to say, in one accurate sentence, what is actually wrong in their own situation. Not what you would do about it. What is wrong, named precisely enough that they would recognise it said back to them.

Day one is a measurement of their own circumstances that takes ten minutes and produces a number about them: a rate they have never worked out, or a count of last week's unpaid hours. The output is about the reader, so day two arrives at somebody holding a fact they did not have on Monday.

The middle days each take one thing that measurement can mean, and they are where the diagnosis is actually taught: the same number means three different things depending on what is underneath it, and separating those three is the skill. Day four is the mistake, because by then the reader can recognise themselves in it, and a named mistake is the most forwarded email a teacher writes.

Resist teaching your framework. A named framework makes you memorable and leaves the reader with the impression that the value is a diagram they now have. The clients worth having are not the ones who wanted the diagram. They are the ones who recognised their own situation in email three and want somebody who saw it that clearly to look at the whole thing.

The objection your readers arrive with

"My situation is different." This is the one, and it is not stupidity. It is often true, and it is always true enough to be a reason not to act on generic advice. Every piece of business writing your reader has ever met was addressed to a category they only partly belong to, and the correct response to advice addressed to a category is mild suspicion.

The answer is not to insist the advice is universal. It is to be visibly specific: three situations in detail rather than one in the abstract, a plain statement of which readers this does not fit, and one description close enough that the reader feels caught. Telling somebody something accurate about themselves they had not quite put into words is the only credential that works at this distance.

Underneath sits the quieter objection: this ends in a sales call and both of you know it. Say on the sign-up form what day six is, and every email after it is read as teaching rather than as a slow approach. The reader was going to assume there was an ask. The only question is whether you said so first.

What your sign-up page has to say

Name the situation, not the service. "Five days on why your best clients are the ones taking the longest to pay" is a page a specific person recognises. "Five days of business coaching insights" is a page nobody recognises, including the people who would have paid you.

Then turn people away. Saying who this is not for is the cheapest filtering available to anybody selling their own time, and it does the opposite of what it looks like: a page that rules out three kinds of reader is read as confident by the fourth.

Say on the page that a confirmation link arrives first and that nothing else is sent until it is clicked. Readers who have been added to lists they never joined are scanning for exactly that sentence, and for somebody selling hours it is also the cheapest filter in the whole funnel: a reader who will not click a link to start is not a reader who will hold an hour in their calendar.

The lines that page has to carry, in roughly this order:

• The situation, described closely enough that the right reader thinks you have been reading their email.
• What they will be able to say about their own circumstances by Friday.
• Five emails, one each morning, and then it stops.
• That the first message is a confirmation link, and that the five days begin the morning after it is clicked.
• Who it is not for, in one sentence, named plainly rather than hedged.
• What happens on day six, including that it is an invitation and that declining it is fine.
• What else you will send afterwards, if anything, and how often.

What the day-six email asks for

One call, described so precisely that the reader can picture it before agreeing to it. How long it is. What happens in it. What they should bring. What they will leave with whether or not they ever pay you anything. "Book a free strategy session" describes nothing, and a reader who cannot picture a meeting declines it by not replying.

Price it, or say clearly that the call is free and what it is for. The worst version is the unpriced call with an unnamed purpose, which a reader correctly reads as a sales meeting of unknown length. If your work starts at a number, put the number in the email.

Then say that not booking is a normal outcome, mean it, and stop. The reader who finished five emails and did not book is not a failed conversion. They now know what you do at a moment when they did not need it, and a meaningful share of an established coach's work arrives months later from exactly that person. A day-seven follow-up and an invented deadline convert a few of them now and cost you the rest.