How to Create an Email Course 2021 — Step-by-Step Guide
You must have signed up for an email course at least once in your life. But now that you’ve started your online business or a blog you must be looking for how to create an email course of your own.
Offering free courses is one of the best ways to collect an email address and increase your subscriber list.
However, creating courses is time taking and requires a lot of effort. But Hey!
How about creating an email mini-course? Well, I’ve seen people doing this manually. They enroll students batch-wise and send emails every day.
That is so wrong! In many ways. Manually, you can’t scale and you’ll be busy most of the time.
So in this article, we will learn how to create an email course and automate it. So that whenever a new subscriber joins in, everything will be taken care of. Without any manual effort.
Note: I use ConvertKit as my email service provider. You can start your 14 days free trial here. Even if you are using any other email service provider, you can easily move to ConvertKit.
Before we start, let’s understand some of the basic things about creating an email course. If you want to skip it, jump to the steps here.
What is an Email Course?
Ideally, email courses are a series of multiple emails that are sent in a specific sequence talking about a certain topic.
The whole set of this email sequence can be called a course and each email consist of a lesson.
While creating an email course, you don’t need to create an awesome video or graphics of any sort. Most of the email courses just contain a written course.
Also, free email courses are commonly used as an opt-in incentive (to collect someone’s visitor’s email address). And later, in the last email or in the future, students are pitched with the paid course or a product.
Here’s one such example:
This is a great practice because, during this mini-email course, you nurture your lead and build that trust. Let’s talk about it in the next section.
Why to create an Email Course?
Did you know the average conversion rate of almost anything online is 2–3%? That is out of 100 visitors, only 2 or 3 visitors would buy from you. (Given that you have a good website)
And that’s okay because most of the visitors are new to your website and they don’t trust you yet.
But you could beat this average conversion rate if you put in a little extra effort. By using email marketing techniques.
Visitors easily sign up to free courses because they are “Free”. They’ve got nothing to lose. Let’s look at some more reasons:
1. Email Course Builds Trust
As mentioned above, new visitors don’t trust you. But if they sign up for your email course. You get some time to interact with them, show your expertise, and sell your product at the end.
Also, it builds your authority in the reader's mind. They start assuming you’re an expert in your field. They keep coming back to learn more things from you.
2. Email Courses are the Best Lead Magnets
It becomes really easy for visitors to give their email address when they see a new learning opportunity for free.
Once they sign up for your course, they also become a part of the general subscriber’s list where you can promote various products or services with time.
Or you can promote your paid courses too for which you probably have spent hours.
As a creator, business, or blogger, your subscribers are your biggest asset. If you have got a large list of subscribers, there are higher chances of conversions.
You can see how well emails convert:
3. Creation Takes Lesser Time
Creating video lessons can take a lot of my time. You have to record, edit, and do plenty of things before you can upload.
While creating my classes on Skillshare, it takes me a whole day to create one video lesson. Even if it’s just a screen recording video.
But that’s not the case while creating email courses. Of course, you may have to spend a whole day writing those series of emails. And I know it could be overwhelming
But consider it as a one-time investment and the rest of the thing would be automated.
How to Create an Email Course
Now that we have understood why email courses are important, let’s dive into the steps of creating an email course.
Step 1 — Create an Opt-In Form or a Landing Page
You can’t mix up your course students with your general newsletter subscribers. Hence, it is really important to have multiple forms placed at multiple places on your website.
For example, if I place a website building course in this article, it wouldn’t make sense at all. But if I add an email marketing course, there would be higher chances of visitors (even you) subscribing to it.
With ConvertKit, you can create unlimited forms and landing pages.
Select the type of form you would like to add to your website. Edit it and embed it. It is really easy to create a form.
Step 2 — Create an Email Sequence
Now it’s time to write your email content and create your course, as mentioned above, email sequences are a series of email.
You don’t have any limitation on the number of emails. But Ideally, an email course can be 7–10 emails longer.
You don’t want your students to be overwhelmed where they start ignoring your emails.
Creating email sequences is easy. Just head over to Sequences Tab on the top and create a new sequence.
Once you have created your sequence, make sure you have the status as published and have set “When to Send” properly.
Ideally, when to send would be after 1 day of the previous email.
You have completed 90% of the task by creating a sequence. Now let’s automate it.
Step 3 — Setup Automation
Now it’s time to connect the form that you created in the first step and your email sequence. Your course is already complete but now we will automate it completely.
So that you don’t have to add every student manually.
Whenever they come and sign-up for your email-course, everything will be taken care of automatically.
Click on Automations from the tabs and Click on Create Automation.
Select your automation trigger. Here, we select when the automation is supposed to be triggered. So, it would be when someone joins a form. Choose your opt-in form and click on Add Event.
Now click on the “+” Button bellow and select Email Sequence from the Actions tab. Once your automation is ready. Make sure you make it Active from the Paused state.
ConvertKit comes with a lot of email automation options. Once you start experimenting you’ll learn them yourself.
How to Write Email Course Content?
Well, the creation of an email marketing course may seem easy. But if you want to make the best out of your email marketing courses, you should consider these points:
- Write attractive subject lines.
- Don’t write long emails.
- Create a hook at the end of each email (something your students would wait for).
- Keep your course content.
- Don’t oversell. No need to add product links in each email.
- Keep it easy for skim reading.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How do I create a free email course?
Creating a free email course is really easy. Just to recap, here are the steps:
1. Create an Opt-In Form
2. Embed Opt-in form to your website
3. Create Email Sequence
4. Setup Email Automation
How long is an email mini-course?
You can have the freedom of creating email courses as long as you want. But ideally, you should keep your emails limited to 10 days. Otherwise, your subscribers would get overwhelmed and stop reading your email.
How do I create a paid email course?
You can integrate your email service provider with payment gateways or teaching platforms.
What’s Next?
Go ahead and show-off your skills by creating your own email course. It’s a great way of learning more about email marketing automation and collecting more email subscribers.
Just try to keep it simple. Interested in growing your subscriber base? Check out this course.
It may seem like plenty of work while creating an email course. But once you finish off, you’re not going to regret it.
Just keep yourself motivated to write at least one email every day.
So are you going to start your email course today?
There are external links on this to this post that are “affiliate links” which are are links that have a special tracking code.
This means that I may receive a small commission (at no extra cost to you) if you purchase something through these links. I test each product thoroughly and give high marks to only the very best.
Originally published at https://www.networgs.com on June 13, 2020.