8 Tips On How To Develop An Email Course

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach
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An email course is usually delivered in “drip” mode. This means that whether it’s daily, weekly or monthly, part of the course is delivered to those who signed up for it via their email, through an autoresponder service. An autoresponder service like Aweber.com, Mailchimp.com, or another one can get the job done delivering an email course. 

1.    Determine What the Purpose of the Course Is:  Is this a free or paid course? Is the purpose of the course to encourage your audience to buy something from you when the course ends? If it’s a free course, what will the offer be at the end of the course? If it’s a paid course, how can you deliver exceptional value to your audience and make them feel as if they got their money’s worth?

2.    Decide What to Teach:  Teach your audience about or how to do something that is unclear, frustrating or hard to do for your audience. If you’re not sure what this could be, look be ask your audience for the answers. You can ask them directly, or you can find groups where they ask questions. Any question is a likely a good choice for an email course.


3.    Organize the Subject:  Choose your topic or question to answer so that you can now organize the subject into subtopics. You’ll want to pick one focused subtopic for each part of the email course. You don’t want to overwhelm your audience with too much information at one time. Instead, think of it like teaching one point of a problem at a time in a logical order.

4.    Choose How Long You Want the Course to Be:  Usually an email course consists of five to seven emails for free courses, but sometimes a topic will require a lot more than that - especially if it’s a paid course. Decide how long, but more than six to eight weeks might be too long. It’s important to consider your audience so that you know how they’ll deal with shorter or longer courses. Making it too long might mean a lot of people don’t finish, but you do want to give enough information that they learn the material.

5.    Tell the Subscriber What to Expect: Before and after the subscriber signs up for the course, you should let them know what to expect. Be explicit about what is in the course so that they’ll know what’s coming and know what to look for. How many emails will be in the course? How often will they come? Will you send other emails and information to them? Let them know what to do if there is a problem. Probably the best place to do this is on the sales page, plus on the thank you page, plus in the first email. 

6.    Format Each Email Similarly:  You want each email to look like part of the same course by branding it the same. Use the same fonts, images, colors, intro and exit. Always tell them what you have already told them, and then after the body of the email tell them what to expect for the next part of the course. This will help hone their expectations in a way that keeps them interested and involved.

7.    Make Each Email Simple and To the Point:  Once you’ve created a template for your course, it will be simple to fill in the details for the course. Give them one strong lesson each email, and keep the emails on the short side - no more than 700 to 1500 words per email. Otherwise it will be too overwhelming.

8.    Craft Subject Lines They’ll Recognize and Open:  The subject line is important because it will be key to ensuring that your subscribers know to open the email. You probably want to put the name of the course and the lesson name inside so that they know.

Finally, give your audience a way to report problems and ask questions. You can do that via a special course email address or by making a private and closed Facebook group only for people who have signed up for the course. 

Did you like this post?  Was it helpful?  If you have a question or a comment please let me know.   You can put them in the feed with my blog post or email them directly to me at doreen@doreendilger.com.   You’re feedback would be greatly appreciated!