The best top-of-funnel asset for creators? Email-based courses.

Build an email-based course.

I did a community session this morning for the On Deck Course Creator fellowship on building, launching, and scaling an email-based course (been at it with Big Later for about two years now -- lots of learnings, lots still to learn, but plenty of material for an actionable 30-minute session). The feedback was so good (yay look at me) that it got me thinking, "I might have to make an email-based course on this topic!"

Too meta? Perhaps.

Anyway, thought I'd share my learnings because that's what LinkedIn is all about.

This is a two-minute read. And this is the road I'm gonna take you down:

1) Why build an EBC?

2) Email design best practices

3) The tech stack (guess what: it's cheap)

4) Challenges (email sucks occasionally)

Let's start at the start: what is an email-based course? 

Lay-up question! It's a multi-step email marketing campaign that triggers upon the completion of a form (or checkout, if you're going the paid route).

That sounds cool and fun, right? No? Not really?

Here's a better definition: an EBC is a simple, automated, low-cost approach to teaching that builds your email list, provides a risk-free opp to tease a more involved (i.e. expensive) offering, and is great copywriting practice! That last one's a bonus. 

Email course design in 6 steps (according to my screw-ups)

1) Limit yourself to 3-4 core concepts -- these will be your chapters (with the first chapter being all about your “why”).

2) Make use of chapter overviews and learning objectives early in the chapter, and recaps, quizzes, and action items later in the chapter. Oh ya, and a little thing on learning experience design: quizzes shouldn't be designed to test knowledge, they should be designed to reinforce it.

3) Each email should present the time requirement and key takeaways up-front.

4) Start your body copy with a hook -- remind the reader why they’re here.

5) Utilize the Q&A format to achieve a more conversational flow (anticipate questions!) and keep the length less than 700 words.

6) Wrap up with a preview of the next email’s content, recommend “further learning”, and a reminder of where they are in the journey (progress trackers help).

What does this look like in practice? Take a peek here. (It's in Notion, but you'll get the idea).

The tech stack is simple and cheap.

You'll need...

1) A landing page. We use Shopify. 

2) An email service provider. We use MailerLite. 

3) A low-code integration tool. We use Zapier. Duh.

4) Surveys. We use Typeform. 

It's not all rainbows and gumdrops and rainbow-shaped gumdrops. Email sucks sometimes. You'll run into deliverability issues (I don't want to talk about the Promotions tab), size limits (102kb in Gmail), and a sort-of-but-not-really-steep learning curve.

I probably have 2 hours' worth of content on this subject

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https://www.subscribepage.com/ebc

Bye!