In this episode, host Julie Hood shares secrets to email marketing and the 7 types of emails that all course creators should send (and talks about why email marketing doesn’t work)!
In this episode, host Julie Hood shares secrets to email marketing and the 7 types of emails that all course creators should send (and talks about why and when email marketing doesn’t work)!
LINKS MENTIONED
100 Done-For-You Rockstar Email Templates – just download and edit.
Perfect Welcome Series Guide from Kim Weitkamp - get this free guide to help with your welcome series.
Email Welcome Series Workshop with Kim Weitkamp – offered periodically through the year.
Get on Julie’s email newsletter to see how she sends emails when you sign up for this free training. Is My Course Idea Any Good? Get the free training here.
(Some of these are affiliate links and I earn a commission when you sign up. I only recommend partners I have vetted and tools I personally use.)
KEY TAKEAWAYS
For every $1 spent on email marketing, you can get $42 back according to research by Litmus.
The 7 types of emails you should be sending:
#1 - Welcome Emails for Your New Subscribers
#2 - Promotional Emails
#3 - Nurturing Emails
#4 - New Student Emails
#5 - Affiliate Emails
#6 - Special Offer and Flash Sales Emails
#7 - Specialized Emails
COME VISIT!
Clubhouse
Connect with me on Clubhouse for FREE masterclasses at @JulieHood.
CourseCreatorsHQ.club – to join the waitlist for my upcoming Clubhouse course
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So, what if I told you that you could spend a dollar and get $42 back, you would think I had lost my mind. Right? Well, actually, that's the return on investment for email marketing. And today I want to share some secrets with you. So let's jump in and get my 20 years of email. Welcome to the course creators
HQ podcast, helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses. And now here's your host Julie Hood. So today I want to talk about one of my very favorite ways to market your online course and connect with your students and it's email marketing and before you tell me that you've tried it and it didn't work, you need to know that most of the course creators I come across are really doing it wrong.
It's one of those skills that takes a while to learn the right techniques and the right sequence and the way to email market to your audience. And actually email marketing is a little bit of a confusing term because I really don't want you to spend all of your time on email with your subscribers of marketing to them. I want you to be connecting with them.
I want you to be helping them. And then we will come back to every now and then sharing some promos so that they are so connected with you and they trust you so that they will jump on what it is you're offering. So most email marketers, and most course creators, they just don't provide real value to their subscribers. They're just constantly pitching offers to them without really giving them anything in return.
So let's not do it that way today. I want to talk about a different way to do it. And some of the secrets I have for how you should be doing emails correctly, we're going to talk about the different types of emails that you should be sending. And if you don't feel like writing them, don't worry. I've got you covered. If you go to course creatorshq.com/38 that's coursecreatorshq.com/38 in the show notes, there's a link to 100 different done for you templates that are already written for you. You can just edit them and use them. And that makes it so much easier than sitting down to start with a blank screen and thinking, what am I going to write to my audience this week? So first I want to talk about how I am using email marketing,
and I'd really love for you to sign up and follow and see what I'm doing because it's not typical, but it does work really, really well. So I send out three different types of emails. The first one is what I call an educational email. And these are where I'm sharing knowledge, sharing expertise, educating my readers on some topic and giving them some knowledge that they probably didn't have before they read the email.
And then beneath that educational article, there might be a promo for something that's going on right now. And then I also include a link to the current week's podcast. So if anybody that gets to the bottom, they can click there and go listen. So it's very much an informational type email. That's the first kind that I sent and I try to make sure I get one of those out every single week.
The second type of email that I send are what I call promo emails. And these are strictly have one purpose. And that is to provide some kind of offer or possibly a free offer to sign up for and, or a promotion to pay for. And they have one purpose, either click on this link and go sign up or not. So those are promo emails.
I try to do one of those a week. Those don't always get sent, but that can be a really good way to help with the revenue for the week. And then during my launch periods for my courses, I send more than one a week. And then the third type of email that I send is a Sunday night planning email. So this is supposed to be helpful for my audience because it helps them think about the week ahead when they're going to work on their courses,
what they're going to be doing in the week. I will include some links to some things that are going on. So if I'm doing a course or if I'm doing a clubhouse event, or if I've got partners that I'm working with, who also have events going on, include those in this email. And it gives me another way to not only help with the planning questions,
but it also gives me a way to share some more things without having to send constantly email address emails out every single day. Now I will tell you my high-end clients that do really, really well. They send daily emails, they send a lot of promotions and it works for them and for their audience, they've trained their audience. That that's how they send out emails.
I am not to that point yet. I don't send daily emails. And I think you have to be careful because when someone signs up with you, they get a certain expectation of how often you will be emailing them. And you can't suddenly go from sending one email a week to sending daily emails without annoying your subscribers, because they don't expect that if you're planning to do daily emails,
you have to do some transition with your current list and tell the people who are signing up that that's, what's going to be happening. Okay? So as course creators, we really have to focus our emails so that they can impact our students and our, especially our prospective students. We want to help them solve all the problems that they have. And they're giving us the room in their inbox to do that.
So here are seven different types of emails that course creators should be sending. And you can use this checklist to see, Hey, am I sending all these out or not? So number one is the welcome email for your new subscribers and get response, did a research in 2017 and they found that the average open rate for welcome emails is 82%. So absolutely 100%.
You should have a welcome email. That's going out and it'll be one of your most popular emails. So make sure you take some time to provide some solutions to your new subscriber. You want to give them whatever it was that they signed up for. So it's their freebie, and then tell them what to expect from you. The second piece of welcome emails is a welcome email sequence.
And one of my good friends, Kimberley Whitecamp helps people write their custom welcome email sequence. And I'll include the link in the show notes coursecreatorshq.com/38, depending on the timing of when you're listening to this, she may or may not have a new workshop coming up. But what I love about that is she's, it's actually a work shop.
She works through your email sequence with you and gives you feedback. So that can be another way if you're, if you're struggling with this and you want to make sure that you get it set up correctly, join her for her workshop, and then you can work on your welcome email sequence. So that's number one, which is the welcome email or the welcome email sequence that you're providing.
Number two are those promotional emails. So most course creators, you know, we gotta be honest, we're in business. We need to make money to stay in business and we want to serve our audiences. Absolutely. We want to help them as much as we possibly can, but we need to have revenue in order to keep, keep doing that. Unless you're set up as a hobby,
you want to make sure that you get good at sending out promotional emails for revenue. And you can honestly, you can do it in a non sleazy, non salesy way, especially if you're also providing value and education in your other emails. So I like to send out, like I said, that one educational email every week, and then I'll provide these promo- promotional emails to balance it out and help the people who are interested in what I'm talking about this week.
So if there's a time sensitive offer, sometimes I'll send an extra reminder email or two, but most of the time, it's one promo email for one educational email. And then if you're still really nervous about sending out promos, a nearly a 49% of consumers have said that they'd like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands every week. So I'm giving you permission.
And then the flip side of this house, I want to tell you is don't just send, promote emails. I'm on lists with a lot of gurus who get started and people who are trying to build their audience. And that's all they send. They're constantly sending out emails with, go sign up for this, go sign up for that. And they're not providing any help or any value to their audience.
They're not giving them any kind of education. So what happens is you're just draining your bank account with the subscribers and they're more likely to unsubscribe, okay. Type number three, these are nurturing emails. So if you think about it, most of the time when people stumble across you, only about 3% of them are really ready to buy at that exact moment.
So what are you doing to the other 97% of people? So we're offering them a free lead as part of our free lead magnet, the freebie that we're giving them to help solve maybe a smaller intermediate kind of problem. And then you use the nurturing emails to help them get to know you and build their confidence that you're the person who can help them.
So even those educational emails that I was talking about and how to emails, those are fantastic for nurturing. It gives people a chance to get to know you. So number four are new student emails, and these are really important because when someone signs up for your course, there is a, a somewhat chance that their response will be, oh, I'm not sure if that was a really good idea.
So you want to make sure that your new student emails and the series of emails that introduce them to your course, really reinforce that they made a good choice. So you need to send them a receipt email so they can save that for their taxes. You want to send them a login email so that they can log in and get to their course. And then depending on how your course is set up,
you might send them regular emails as you release new new lessons. And then it's also really helpful to do some kind of motivational emails to help keep them engaged. And you're checking in to see how things are going. And then finally, any kind of reminder, if you're doing live training or Q and A live sessions with them, that's all part of their email sequence as a subs,
as a new student. So number five are affiliate emails, and I am working on these right now for all of the folks who are wanting to promote 24 hour course creator. I'm pulling together emails that my affiliate partners can use to help promote what we're doing. We're going to do a five day challenge in June. And then after that folks can jump into the program.
So I'm working on all of these emails, I want to have them together in May, so that everything's ready for the affiliates. And as part of these emails, a lot of times the, the really big launches, they will contact their affiliates every day during the launch and let them know how things are going. They're providing new content, new swipe content to share and encouraging them to promote.
Now, if you participate in any kind of launches like this, make sure you do some tweaking to the swipe content that the, the that's provided to you because people are getting the same message over and over again from all of the affiliates. So make sure yours is a little bit unique. You can use most of what they share with you, but add your own little tweaks,
add your own subject lines, make it unique so that the people who are reading don't get the same message from you as they get from 10 other people. So that was type number five, affiliate emails. Type number six are special offer and flash sale emails. So these can add a big boost to your bottom line because you're adding some kind of urgency or scarcity.
When you have an offer, that's either limited in how many people you'll work with, or maybe it's only an offer that's good for today or tomorrow. And I don't want you to use these constantly, but strategically placing the, these kinds of promotions throughout your email sequence during a year, you can definitely reach some new students that way. I am a big buyer of sales when I can get a deal.
I'm more, much more likely to jump in. So I'm one of those buyers and potential students who loves to get some kind of special offer. And then number seven is specialized emails. And if you're brand new, don't worry about these right now. These are the kind that my clients who've been doing emails for a long time, have really honed the skill and gotten into these specialized emails.
So they're, they target very specific situations. And here's a few examples. They may have a cart abandoned email. So if someone starts to buy and they've started filling out your cart, but then they don't finish ordering. You can have an email that goes out or emails that segment your list into different kinds of interests. So this is a really good way.
Let's say, you know, that your audience is interested in a specific topic. Maybe for me, like if I find out people are really interesting and I have some podcasting resources that I want to send out just to those folks who are most interested in that, then I can send out those emails just to them. Another type would be re-engagement emails. So if you've got subscribers,
who've quit opening. That's another really good way to help make sure that you're connecting with them. So there you have it seven different types of emails that you can be sending to reach your potential students and convert them into buyers. But if this sounds like a lot, don't worry, get those 100 done for you, templates that are already written and just edit them.
At coursecreatorshq.com/38. And I really, really like these because there are a bunch of, of different kinds of emails that you can use. So there's, there's five emails around your welcome sequence. There's tapping into the emotional triggers of the people who are listening. There's some lists segmentation emails. So if you're trying to break out your list,
you can do that. There's affiliate emails. If you're working on that special offer emails and promotional emails. So I think this will give you a lot of ideas of what you can be sending for your emails over the next few weeks. So please let me know, at coursecreatorshq.com and on Facebook messages. Also a really good way. Let me know how it's going for you.
Are you using these emails? Are you seeing a difference with your subscribers that they're opening and they're clicking, and they're much more interested in what you're doing because you're sharing not only the educational kind of emails, but some promo ones here and there. So let me know how it's going. And I'd love to hear how you're doing. Thank you so much for listening.
I hope this was helpful this week. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing and thank you for reviewing. I appreciate you have a fantastic week and I will talk to you again next time.