Email courses for ecommerce brands

What the welcome discount actually buys

A popup offering ten per cent collects addresses efficiently and is the most measurable thing on the site, which is why it is on every site. What it also does is teach the person on the other side that ordering at full price is a mistake, and that lesson is learned in one transaction and unlearned in none.

The second cost is the list itself. Addresses gathered by a coupon open the messages containing coupons and ignore everything else, so engagement falls, and a large list with falling engagement is the condition under which a sending domain slides into the promotions tab and then into spam. The list grows while the mail arrives less.

A course is a different trade: the reader hands over an address in exchange for knowing something, and what they know is about the category rather than about your brand. It collects more slowly and it produces a list that opens mail with no offer in it, which is the only kind worth having in a year with a lot of sending in it.

What the five days should teach

Teach what your category is genuinely hard at, from the customer's side. How to measure for fit. What the material does after twenty washes. Which of four variants suits which use. How to keep the thing alive for five years. Every category carries a body of knowledge its customers lack and the product page cannot hold.

Aim it at returns. In most categories the most expensive customer behaviour is the wrong-size order that comes back, and it is caused by somebody guessing. Five days ending with a reader who knows their own measurement removes the guess, which makes this one of the few marketing decisions with a number attached on the operations side.

Keep your own products out of days one to four. A course about how to choose in a category, which happens to be written by somebody who makes one of the things in it, gets read and forwarded. A course about your range is a catalogue on a timer, and readers identify it by the second email.

Day four is the mistake the category makes, and in most it is a compensation: sizing up to get width, over-washing, buying the cheap version twice. Name it and the reader believes the next thing you say, including the part where you tell them which of your own products is wrong for them.

The objection your readers arrive with

They expect discount spam, because a brand sign-up has always meant discount spam. The worry is not that the emails will be bad. It is the volume, and the certainty that all of it will be selling, because every previous brand they gave an address to sends four a week in November.

The answer is a stated cadence and a stated end, on the form, in numbers. Five emails over five days, then a named frequency. Be honest that promotions are part of what follows, because they are: a reader told in advance that there will be a sale email in the autumn does not read the autumn sale email as a betrayal.

There is a version of this objection you can turn round. If you do not discount, say so on the sign-up page and say why. A brand that states plainly that the price is the price all year makes the reader's waiting strategy pointless, which is a better outcome than competing against your own next sale.

What your sign-up page has to say

Sell the knowledge rather than the ten per cent. Five days on how to measure your own foot and what the numbers mean is a proposition somebody wants who is not currently shopping, and those are precisely the addresses a discount popup never collects.

Say how many emails, how often afterwards, and whether offers are among them. A popup gets away with saying nothing because it is trading on a coupon. A course is asking for attention, and attention is granted against a stated cost.

Say a confirmation email comes first and treat that click as the moment the address joins the list. A large consumer list is where wrongly typed and third-party addresses accumulate fastest, and they are what drags a whole sending domain down, which costs you the order confirmations as well as the marketing.

The lines a brand sign-up page has to carry:

• What the reader will know by Friday, phrased as a skill in the category rather than as an offer.
• That the five days are not about the range and contain no discount code.
• Five emails over five days, then a named frequency afterwards.
• Whether sale and promotional mail is part of what follows, answered honestly.
• That a confirmation click joins the list, and that order and delivery mail is separate from it.
• How long each email takes to read, and whether anything has to be measured or fetched.
• What day six is, and that it is one order rather than a code with a countdown on it.

What the day-six email asks for

Ask for one order, in the variant the reader worked out during the week. That is the whole advantage of this sequence over a coupon: they are not being asked to buy something, they are being asked to buy the specific thing five days of measuring says is theirs, which is an easier decision and a far less likely return.

Put the returns terms in the email rather than behind a link. The size anxiety that stops a first order is answered by the exchange process, not by the photography, and a reader who has just measured themselves is thinking about exactly that. Say how long they have, who pays for the postage, and how an exchange actually works.

Offer a discount here only if you were going to discount anyway. If you do, make it the one you named on the sign-up page rather than a surprise, and keep it small. A course that ends in a thirty per cent code has spent five days teaching and one email re-teaching the lesson that waiting pays.