Using an email course as a lead magnet

What changes when the magnet is a course

On the form, not much. A course is one line of copy and one field, exactly like a download: "five short emails, one a day, and by Friday you will be able to X". What changes is everything after the button.

A download ends the transaction at the moment it completes. The reader has the file and you have an address with no scheduled reason to use it, which is why so many lists grown on files open at a few per cent when their owner finally writes. A course begins the transaction at the button. It has five scheduled reasons to arrive, each of them wanted, and it ends with a reader who has opened your mail four times in a week.

The other change is what you learn. A download tells you how many people wanted a file. A course tells you how many people finished something you wrote, which is a far better predictor of whether anybody will buy anything. Completion is the number no download counter can produce.

What to promise on the form

Promise an outcome, a length and a cadence, in that order, and make all three checkable. "Set your day rate by Friday. Five emails, one each morning." The outcome is what persuades, the length is what makes the ask small enough to accept, and the cadence is what stops the first email being a surprise.

The promise also has to be small enough to keep in five short emails, and this is where most courses go wrong before a word is written. "Learn email marketing" cannot be delivered and cannot be checked. "Write the five emails of your own welcome sequence" can be both, and a reader who has done it knows on Friday whether you kept your word.

Say what happens after the course on the form, not on day six. If a weekly email follows, that sentence belongs beside the button, because it is the difference between a promise kept and a promise quietly extended. It costs a small number of sign-ups and removes the most common reason a finished course produces a complaint.

The shape that works as an opt-in offer

Five days, one email each morning, each email one idea with one small action, and the fifth email carrying a single ask. Ten is the ceiling worth considering, and past that completion falls off sharply, because a fortnight of daily mail is a different commitment from a week of it and the people who abandon are disproportionately the ones who were most enthusiastic at sign-up.

Day one delivers something usable rather than introducing the course. This is the single highest-leverage decision in the whole sequence: a reader who got something useful on the first morning has a reason to open the second, and a reader who got a welcome message has only politeness.

The last email is where the magnet earns its name, and it should contain exactly one ask, stated once, for something that follows from the four emails before it. A course that sells in every email is a funnel, and readers identify the shape long before they can name it. One ask at the end, to somebody who finished, converts better than four asks to somebody who did not.

Things a course-as-magnet has to do that a file does not:

• Survive being read on a phone in ninety seconds, five days running. Three hundred to six hundred words is the comfortable range.
• Work for a reader who missed a day, which means no email may depend on having clicked a link in an earlier one.
• Stay true for a year, because nobody is watching it go out. Anything written against a tool’s current interface will become wrong silently.
• Carry the legal furniture in every message: a working unsubscribe honoured immediately, a real postal address, and a sender name matching the form.

When a course is the wrong magnet

When the need is immediate and singular. Somebody who wants a discount code, a template they are about to use, or one number they can look up wants it now, and a five-day course is an obstacle placed in front of a thing they had already decided to accept. Give them the file, and put the course on the thank-you page.

When you will not write it properly. Five mediocre emails are worse than one good page, and not by a small margin: the unread download is simply forgotten, while the sequence actively teaches a reader to skip your name, on a schedule, five times. If you have one good page in you this month, publish the page.

When the subject genuinely has no steps. Some material is reference rather than sequence, and a reference cut into five arbitrary arrivals is less useful than the same reference in one place. The test is whether you can say what the reader will be able to do on Friday. If the honest answer is that they will know more, it is a guide, not a course.

Confirmation, and the one place this breaks

Confirmed opt-in matters more for a course than for a download, because a course sends repeatedly. An address that was typed by somebody other than its owner receives one unwanted file in the download case and five unwanted emails in this one, and the second of those is what produces complaints. Google asks bulk senders to keep the complaint rate in Postmaster Tools below 0.10 per cent and never to reach 0.30 per cent, and the fastest route to breaching that is sending a sequence to addresses that never asked.

The cost is real: requiring a confirmation click loses somewhere between a fifth and a third of would-be subscribers in the published benchmarks, mostly people who closed the tab or never saw the message. Spend your effort making the confirmation work rather than avoiding it. Say on the page that the email is coming and name its subject line, send it within seconds, keep it almost empty with one button at the top, and start day one immediately after the click while the reader is still in their inbox.

And then the thing that is worth knowing before you launch: the confirmation step is the only moment of real risk in the whole machine. Everything after it is automatic, so anything broken there is broken silently, for everybody, and looks like a poor conversion rate rather than a fault. Sign up to your own course, on a phone, in the mail client most of your readers use, before you send anybody to the page.