It’s [always] a great time to build an email course

You’ve probably never heard of Thomas Foster. But at one point, one in every 27 Americans had enrolled in one of his correspondence courses, receiving one lesson at a time in their mailbox. He charged over $100 for most of his courses–oh yeah, in the year 1900 by the way–and helped millions level up their careers. 

Foster had two things going for him: deep domain expertise in a high-demand field (recently mandated mine safety tests) and nigh-unlimited access to cheap transmission (recently lowered postal rates). And, in that way, not much has changed over the past 125 years. 

As long as you have sought-after knowledge, experience, and a newsletter platform (cheaper than stamps!), you too can create courses similar to Foster’s. Email has no ranking algorithm or adversarial agent in the middle to contend with. Just a direct connection between you and your subscribers. 

And while you could run a course manually, sending emails and reviewing responses at a pace on par with Foster’s, you can also automate the entire process to spectacularly increase your course’s footprint without sacrificing the subscriber experience.

An equally sweet deal for subscribers and senders

The correspondence course format is perennial because, when all parties involved act in good faith, everyone ends up better off than when they started. Subscribers have opportunities to improve themselves and instructors can earn money (for paid courses or free courses that end in an upsell) or reputational dividends (for free courses). 

What it all comes down to, in Patrick McKenzie’s opinion (better known as patio11 in the dev community), is the self-paced aspect of email courses. “The advantage is not ‘Score! We get to spam the heck out of you! We have copious data to prove that the statistical aggregate purchaser is overwhelmingly more likely to consume six emails in a month than they are to actually read a 20,000 word web page.” 

So if you, the sender, need to educate people before you sell to them or want subscribers to venture forth and brag about what they’ve learned and who they’ve learned it from, an email course is one of the easiest formats for getting them from Point A to Point B.

Beyond breaking lessons into digestible chunks, learners and instructors also benefit from content that slots into their existing accounts and habits. Everyone has email, accessible from laptops or phones. Everyone knows how to reply to an email. Everyone has their own way of organizing their inbox. The foundations were laid years before the learner signed up or the creator launched the course.

Sometimes, though, students don’t reach out or actively participate. They simply drop off or disappear. This too is where email has an advantage over other channels. Depending on the tracking and analytics you’ve enabled, you can see where in the sequence someone lost interest, reach out with a personalized check-in, and rework that section to prevent other learners from ghosting you. 

Perhaps most importantly of all, no reputable newsletter platform will bury a clause in the EULA that requires giving up ownership of your content. You can pack everything up and migrate your course to another platform whenever you want. 

Digital correspondence courses let participants progress at their own pace, they let creators share longer, more detailed content without overwhelming people, don’t require gatekeepers with problematic motivations, and if you’ve got the lessons finished usually take less than an hour to set up.

Build out your first lesson

The first thing you’ll need is a page where people can sign up for your course. The minimum viable page would have a title, a paragraph describing the necessary time and course prerequisites, and a signup form. Maybe a portrait of yourself, if you’re feeling fancy.

A more detailed landing page might look like the one Monica Lent uses for her free Blogging for Devs course. It has testimonials, an instructor bio, and evidence of student outcomes. Or, there’s Will Steiner’s paid Master the email-based course (fitting, I know!), which has a landing page complete with syllabus preview, Stripe checkout, and refund details.

To add a Stripe checkout to your email course’s landing page, first make sure that you’ve connected your newsletter platform to your Stripe account. In Buttondown, it’s Settings > Paid subscriptions. Once the two platforms are talking to each other, create a product in Stripe and add it to your account associated with the course. Lessons will only begin trickling out after someone has signed up and completed the checkout.

Whatever you decide to put on the page, remember that when most people arrive they’re already interested. They’re primed to start your course at that moment. So put a form at the top of the page (and bottom) and schedule the first email in the series to go out five minutes after a signup or Stripe checkout session is completed.

Technically, the first thing you’ll send learners will be a transactional message asking them to confirm their subscription by clicking a link. Even though an email course is usually a short timebound series, double opt-in keeps your deliverability high and ensures you’re compliant with anti-spam laws. Immediately after the confirmation message, though, send something meaty. 

In Buttondown or your newsletter platform of choice, create a welcome automation triggered when someone confirms a subscription to your email course. Then drop in the content for your first email. It might be a course syllabus, a self-assessment, a full-blown lesson, or anything else that drafts off the momentum that got them to fill out your form mere minutes ago. Just keep in mind that while they’re ready to learn, they may not be ready to trust you...yet.

The average internet user knows TANSTAAFL. Your first email might be the only chance they give you to prove you deserve a spot in their inbox. Specifically, patio11 recommends your first email “presents an idea which is either new or which one is vaguely aware of, presents concrete suggestions for implementation, has a case study which the target customer will find incredibly compelling, and teaches one thing they can literally execute on by the end of today.” By the time a subscriber gets as far down as the Unsubscribe link, there should be no doubt that future emails will teach them how to accomplish more than they can today.

Set up the rest of the course

Even when you do earn their trust with that first email, you’ll be fighting for visibility amidst dozens of other messages. Use a subject line format that remains consistent throughout the entire course, like an acronym based on your course’s name, followed by “...Lesson #1: [Lesson teaser]”. The first subject line should anchor your series in students’ minds, something they’ll unconsciously keep an eye out for in the coming days or weeks.  

Beyond a standout subject line format, subsequent emails in your course should arrive at predictable intervals. The most popular approach is sending either daily or weekly lessons. You’d set that up by creating another step in your automation with the same trigger (“When a subscriber confirms their subscription”). But this time, the timing of the action (sending the next lesson) would be delayed by a day or a week. So, someone signs up and receives your welcome email five minutes later, followed by the second email 24 hours or seven days later, followed by the third email at the same interval, and so forth.

Another option is to give learners even more control over the course’s pace.

The most flexible trigger is when a subscriber clicks on a link. With a Buttondown automation, for example, you’d create a unique survey for each lesson and place it near the bottom of the email. It would say something like “Are you ready for the next lesson?” and clicking “Yes” would fire off the next email in the course. The primary benefit here is giving subscribers agency, sure, but there’s another reason to go this route.

Paul Jarvis used the click-to-continue tactic to unearth a goldmine of optimization insights. “I asked Paul about how this is working out so far, and by far the most interesting takeaway from his setup is that he can see how long each mission takes to complete,” Brennan Dunn explains. “Are most people struggling with the outline? Is getting that first sale a major roadblock? Paul’s self-paced course is ripe with opportunities for Paul to proactively reach out (automatically, even) to people who are stuck.”

A lesson reminder automation similar to Jarvis’s is a piece of cake. First, create a tag and call it “Dropped Off.” Next, create an automation with the “When a tag is added to a subscriber” trigger with the Dropped Off tag selected, and the action is to Send an email. Once or twice a month, you would open and filter your list by Subscription date and Last opened date, and bulk add the tag to anyone who has ghosted you. The automation will take care of all the reminders.

Nudging people along to the end of the drip sequence could be the difference between clinching or losing your upsell, or a glowing review and an awful one. If subscribers are making it through the course but not purchasing anything or leaving reviews, add one final email to the series: the One Last Thing follow-up. 

Schedule the post-course check-in for two to three weeks after the final lesson and give subscribers a reason to take the action you want. You might offer a discount on a paid course, a one-on-one coaching session, or a mention in your newsletter or on your website. At the very least, try to get them to sign up for your ongoing or pop-up newsletter.

Finally, before turning on all the automations and sharing the link to your landing page, make sure the course’s email archives are only accessible to subscribers. Once that’s finished, the only thing left is to promote your work.

Hype it, refine it, repeat

There are lots of wonderful ways to promote a new email course or newsletter: swaps with other creators, lead magnets, and good ol’ fashioned referrals. You might be able to drum up more interest by offering live, real-time teaching to early cohorts. Or, if you’re charging for what you’ve created, give it away to the first 50 subscribers in exchange for testimonials you can add to the landing page. Eventually, you’ll have enough goodwill and social proof for people to start trickling in from places you never expected.

Then, go back and update your course based on analytics, participant feedback, and industry or cultural changes. One of the best things about email courses is there is no final draft. You can revise and revisit the lessons as often as you want, ensuring every signup has a better, more optimized experience than the person who preceded them. 

"Consistent competence equals eventual excellence, or c2 = e2” as BYU’s Coach Eyestone likes to say. That attitude, along with a little domain expertise and cheap information transmission, could turn you into a modern-day Thomas Foster.

Photo by Allen Taylor on Unsplash