Email courses for people who sell online courses

The trailer, and why it does not work

The default version is five emails describing the paid course: what is in module one, what students say, and a discount on Friday. It converts poorly for a reason visible once stated. Five emails of description is five emails in which the reader learned nothing, from a teacher whose whole proposition is that they teach well.

The reader has also seen it before. Anybody who has bought one online course has been through three of these sequences, and they recognise the shape by the second email. From that point the remaining emails are read as sales material, which means they are skimmed, which means the good arguments in email four are not read at all.

The alternative costs you something real and it is worth it: give away one thing completely. Pick the piece of your paid course you would least mind losing, teach it properly across five days, and let the reader arrive at Friday having actually done something. You have then demonstrated the only thing your sales page cannot assert.

What the five days should teach

One complete small module, with an outcome the reader can see on Friday. Complete is the operative word. A five-day course that teaches the first third of something leaves the reader worse off than before, holding an unfinished thing and a suspicion that the rest is behind the paywall, which it visibly is.

Choose the module by asking which part of your paid course a student could skip and still get most of the value. That is the part to give away, and the instinct to protect it is the instinct to give away nothing. The part you would most mind losing is usually the part that only makes sense after four other modules, so it would have failed as a free course anyway.

Teach it the way you teach, including the unusual parts of your method. A sample cooked differently from the thing on sale is a bad sample. If your paid course is heavy on exercises and light on theory, the free one is too. The reader is deciding whether they like being taught by you, which is a question about texture, not curriculum.

Day five ends with the outcome achieved and named: here is the thing you made, here is what you can now do. Then the ask sits on day six, outside the teaching. Putting the sell inside the last lesson spoils the one moment the whole sequence was built to produce.

The objection your readers arrive with

Not "is this worth the money". The objection is "I have bought four of these and finished none of them", and it is usually said with some embarrassment, which is why it rarely reaches you as feedback. It is an objection about the reader rather than about your product, and no testimonial answers it, because every testimonial is from somebody who finished.

A free course that the reader actually finishes is the only direct answer available. It is a small completed thing with your name on it, and it changes the question from "will I finish a course" to "will I finish another one of yours", which is a question they now have evidence about.

The related objection is the pre-recorded video library that could have been a document. Readers have paid for eight hours of screen recordings and discovered the useful part was twenty minutes. If your paid course is not that, the free one should demonstrate it by being tight: short emails, one idea each, nothing padded. Length is what the reader is afraid of, not price.

What your sign-up page has to say

Name the paid course and its price on the free course sign-up page. This is the recommendation people argue with and the one that matters most: the reader finds out on day six regardless, and finding out then reframes the previous five days as a setup. Told in advance, the same five days read as generosity.

Then state exactly what the free course is: a complete module, not an excerpt, with a named outcome. The word "complete" does specific work here, because the reader is scanning for the trap.

Say that the module starts once the confirmation link is clicked, and count your list after that click rather than at the form. A funnel measured at the form describes a fifth more people than ever received day one, and a paid course whose price and launch plan were worked out from that number was worked out from a figure nobody on your list corresponds to.

The lines that page has to carry:

• The outcome of the free five days, stated as something finished on Friday.
• That it is a complete piece of teaching, not a preview of the paid course.
• Five emails, one a day, ending with the module finished.
• That a confirmation email comes first, and that day one follows the click rather than the form.
• The name of the paid course and its price, in the same breath rather than on day six.
• How long the paid course takes, because time is the objection, not money.
• What else you will send afterwards, and how often.

What the day-six email asks for

The sale, once, with the price, the total time commitment and what happens after purchase. Everything vague on a sales page is a reason to close the tab, and the two things readers most want and least often get are how many hours this will take and what support exists when they get stuck in week three.

Open by naming what they just finished. "On Monday you had not made one of these; here is the one you made" is the strongest sentence available to you, and it is true, which is why it works. The offer follows from it: the paid course is more of this, for longer, on the harder parts.

Use a deadline only if the deadline is real. A cart that closes on Friday and reopens on Monday under a different name is a lie the reader eventually notices, usually by seeing the same countdown twice. A cohort start date is real. So is a price that is genuinely going up. Invented urgency on a course that has been on sale for two years undoes five days of honest teaching.