If you want to build a course – your first course or your next – I recommend you create an Email Delivered Course.
Especially if you’re a relatively busy person who doesn’t want to spend months making a course you’re not sure people even want… Email Delivered Courses are a game changer.
I’ve been selling & making them for more than a decade now and to this day they alone pay my mortgage, provide food for my kids, and give me a lifestyle I love.
Read back on my emails from this week if you missed any and need to be sold on the idea further.
Now, here’s a really great question I got from a reader:
*“My concern would be: does this work for all offers & niches?
Isn’t a good offer dependent on how fast the problem is solved?
If I have to wait 30 days for the solution to my problem, it wouldn’t be as appealing.
Am I seeing this correctly?
Makes sense for CopyHour— 90 days and you got a deadly skill that pays you forever— that’s a hell of a bargain.
But a problem like quitting p*rn addiction, the pain is so great that the client wants a solution now.”*—
Okay, there’s a bit to unpack here.
Hopefully the answer I’m about to give will give you insight on how to make a course that sells like crazy – whether it’s an Email Delivered Course or not.
First, yes the best offers solve a problem fast.
If you can sell a pill that instantly and safely cures your customer’s problems, that’s the perfect scenario.
That’s what most customers would love. Instant relief. And it’s less work for you too.
But… that doesn’t generally exist.
- If it’s instant, it’s not usually safe.
- Or it cures part of their problem – but not their whole problem.
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Or it cures it temporarily – but not permanently (2 months later the problem is back and worse than ever)
Now here’s why this is important:
The majority of people who buy your products have already bought similar products to try to solve their problems – including the supposed “instant relief” products.
It’s extremely rare that someone just buys one solution to a problem and that’s it.
Generally they spend weeks, months, or years struggling with tons of solutions until they find something that actually works.
(This is also why it’s actually relatively easy to sell high-ticket products – you’re not selling to newbies, but rather to the people who have failed again & again & again and now understand that the “cheaper” solutions are just going to waste their time. They actively WANT higher-ticket products, because to them higher prices = better solution. And, honestly, that’s typically true.)
The point is, your best customers already understand that “instant relief” doesn’t actually exist for their problem. They’ve been ripped off by that dream too many times to count.
Addiction, like in the reader question above, is a perfect example.
There is no such thing yet as guaranteed instant relief for addiction of any kind. Even if you have a miracle cure (for example a number of federal studies have shown some psychedelics, used in the right context with the correct protocol, can be close to this miracle cure for some people with some types of addiction) there is always lots of follow-up and integration to make sure the change stays. It’s not overnight.
Your best customers inherently understand this because of their own struggles. They know it takes time and repetition and integration to make any change permanent. They don’t trust “overnight” solutions.
And that’s why, outside of how much an Email Delivered Course makes it easier on you (the course creator) to vet & create a winning course, it is also often a game changer for your customers.
But let’s say you really do genuinely have a true safe overnight solution – and delivering that solution over 30 days is completely unnecessary.
Maybe it even fits in just a single 10 page PDF.
Integrating an Email Delivered Course with that solution is still an amazing idea that could transform your business.
First, here are a few ideas to demonstrate what I mean:
- Give 95% of the solution right away (bundled as a PDF or all at once in a members area or even just attached to your first email), then follow up over email for 30 days to walk them through applying it. I worked with a workout program years ago that did exactly this – the program was in a members area, and when customers were ready to start, they’d enter their email address and be walked through the workout (aka the content in the members area) day-by-day for 90 days (which was the duration of the program). This also dropped customer support tickets to almost zero, since each email covered the typical problems people ran into day-by-day.
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Offer a complementary bonus that’s delivered as an Email Delivered Course. Another fitness program I worked with taught a simple technique that was bundled in a short PDF – and when customers bought it, they were also offered a 21 day advanced diet & recovery walkthrough over email (that genuinely was very advanced – and content they’d normally pay for).
Note how in these cases, the “Email Delivered Course” was an add-on to an existing product.
Now why would you do this?
First, it provides massive value to your customers. It helps them get better results.
But what I didn’t mention is that the two businesses I mentioned above also consistently had over 60% email open rates.
That’s unheard of.
Most businesses are ecstatic with 15%-25% open rates.
But every time these businesses sent an email out (even after the course was complete), their open rates were astronomical.
This is the holy grail of digital businesses: a list of paying customers who are trained to open and value every email you send.
Lists like this are how you make a fortune with tiny subscriber counts.
And all it took was spending 30-60 minutes per day (sometimes less) every day for a month to do it. Once it’s done, well, it’s done. You now have an evergreen asset that your customers love – and that simultaneously builds you a hyper-responsive list.
I hope this is starting to click for you.
There are a number of ways you can implement this idea, but the end result is always the same: the “holy grail” of an ultra-simple, ultra-profitable mailing list & digital business.
I’ve got so much more I want to say about Email Delivered Courses so I’ll be back on Monday to continue the discussion.
Have a great weekend!
– Derek
P.S. If you have other questions about Email Delivered Courses, keep sending them my way. Just hit reply and tell me what’s on your mind.