Yesterday I introduced you to "email delivered courses" and talked about why they’re the easiest, fastest and best way to start building a course that you can sell starting immediately.
If you’ve been wanting to build a new course or start your own solopreneur business – "email delivered courses" are exactly how I’d do it (and how I did do it when I started CopyHour back when I was working with clients full-time).
"Email delivered courses" take almost all the typical pressure off how normal courses are designed and sold because you don’t build anything until you know there’s demand. And really, best of all, customers love these email delivered courses because they get actual results versus just sitting on people’s digital shelves (which generates buzz & word-of-mouth sales).
Now, let’s get extremely clear on exactly what "email delivered courses" are and what they look like so you can see how easy they are to build and sell.
An "email delivered course" is a regular digital course, but drip-fed daily over email.
Typically these courses last for 30-90 days (I recommend closer to 30 days for most).
If that sounds like a lot of work, it’s actually the opposite.
It’s the EASIEST way to make a course because you’re only creating each little piece on-demand, and you can get feedback from your customers in real-time to see if things are making sense to them and if you might need to expand on certain subjects.
Then after 30 to 90 days you’re done with all the course content, and now you have an evergreen course that anyone can signup for at any time – your work is all done.
You’ll notice: A big pain point for anyone trying to create a course is actually sitting down to write the content and finish it. Us humans will take basically any excuse available to NOT write content-related materials. If you drip out an email course, you go in small chunks, hit publish each day, and ensure that you finish all the course content in weeks, not months or years.
Trust me, it’ll feel almost magical and like you have a superpower when you create course content this quickly and efficiently.
Here’s an overview of what it looks like:
- At the beginning of a week you choose, you tell people about your course idea. People then buy it. (If you already have an email list or social media following you can send people directly to a checkout page.)
- Customers are told beforehand that the course will not start until the next Monday AFTER they purchase.
- If you get enough sales during the week, you decide to start building the full course outline.
- Then, you queue the first course introductory email for that next Monday morning (you could even do this step just a few hours before the course is scheduled to be released).
- In each email during the first time you run the course, you ask for replies for feedback (or you setup and link a simple Google survey form).
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Then you build the next piece of content for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and so on.
Again, customers LOVE these email delivered courses because they’re different than anything they’ve seen before, and they produce results (especially if you build them how I’ll show you).
How many courses have you purchased that you never really even started? With my email delivered courses, I’ll see email open rates into 70-80% in the final weeks of a 90 day course. Meaning, 70% of people finish my entire course. With regular courses those numbers are closer 15-20% or less.
Ultimately, this means MORE HAPPY customers, which means greater word-of-mouth, and more "free" marketing for your course.
You can also charge more for these courses because of the extra accountability and value of daily delivery and because the course will work so dang well.
Now that you understand what an email delivered course is, I’m going to show you how to build your first, step-by-step from topic to setup and launch.
You’ll see how much easier (and immediately profitable) it is to get started and build a course when you deliver it via email.
We’ll dive in deeper tomorrow!
– Derek