How to create a great email course

Strategies and ideas

For those who don’t know, an email course is simply a series of emails sent out to your audience or users over a certain period of time. Each email contains one lesson and all those lessons together create your email course. 

So why should you create an email course? Well, there are several benefits. But I think Paul Jarvis summarized one big advantage in a very good way:

"When I realized I had written what seemed to be a course (i.e. not my usual article or book), I was left with a sense of panic. There are so many options for running an online course, and all of them seem slightly confusing or time-intensive to set up."

Easier to set up

If you have something to teach, an email course is way easier than setting up an online course with high-quality videos, creating the lesson plan etc. 

Completely automated 

Thanks to great tools, like Mailchimp or Convertkit, you can fully automate your email course.

Low risks and low costs 

Email courses are minimal, viable products, which means you don’t need a big budget or a lot of time to build them. 

Perfect for growing your email list

You can easily duplicate the course for different services, users or products.

Email courses are 100% self-paced

Email courses allow you to drip each lesson out over a period of time. Paul Jarvis, for example, let his audience click a link at the bottom of the email when they completed a mission. After that they were sent the next email. 

You can finish your content gradually 

You don’t have to write the whole course in advance - your email course is released gradually, which means you don‘t need to  finish all of your emails before the start of your course.

So, as you see, there are several advantages to start with an email course instead of jumping into building an online course. But at the end, like with any content you create on the internet, it needs to be great content, helping people to solve a specific problem.

How to write great content?

If you already have great content from your blog it is a lot easier than starting an email course from scratch. Nevertheless, Convertkit provides some really useful questions you should ask yourself before writing your content and putting together your course:

• How does my course benefit my reader?
• How does my course benefit my business?
• How many lessons does my topic break into?
• What are the key points of each lesson?
• What type of action does my audience like to take after a lesson?
• How long is my audience’s attention span?

How to find a topic?

• Which advice is often needed in your profession or niche?
• Any problem in your profession or niche you see popping up in social media, communities or forums?
• What advice would you give your younger self? 
• What are you an expert in? 

Write down a list of topics you have in mind. An example of a paid email course might be a 30-day writing course or a “Go Paleo in 1 Month” course. 

Check the ideas to see if they cover the following aspects: 

• Teachable in an email course
• Would my audience or users spend money for it
• What skills would someone have after taking the course
• Places you can promote the course

Examples

If you need some inspiration you can also take a look at Highbrow, a knowledge app sending out email courses with lessons in different categories.

Tools you can use to create an email course

Mailchimp

Convertkit

Substack

Teachable

Aweber

Final Thoughts

I don’t know if it is only me but I think that email courses are really underestimated and a great way to promote your content, grow your email list and, at the end, also to sell your products or services.  

• Email marketing is up to 40 times more effective than social media
• People need great educational content 
• Overflow of content on the web - people need curated learning content

Sources

How to Create Your First Email Course in a Single Weekend

https://buffer.com/courses

The Guide To Creating Email Courses

How To Create A Self-Paced Email Course

How to Create an Email Course That Converts Like Crazy

8,991 emails later: everything I learnt creating my first email course in Mailchimp