Blog Business & Work

How and why I created a free email course

20.10.2016 · 4 min read

The members of my email list have been teased about an upcoming email course for a while now. Today, I'm launching the course. Here's hoping everything goes well.
So how and why I created this free email course?

I've had a couple of different incentives for joining my email list. I hope people stick around for the content of my emails, but I know sometimes you have to give a little extra to initially spark the interest. It's an extra gift. Besides sharing my knowledge and experience for free each week, plus now also giving out monthly gifts, I also give an extra thing right away. The subscribers give me their email address, I give them stuff in return. My last incentive was Indie Online Marketing Workbook, which is no longer available as of today. At first I decided to create a new workbook. However, after a while, I realised these workbooks and ebooks and other downloadables are everywhere. Every email list gives you one or some. I have a folder full of them on my Mac. Never opened, never read, never touched. Downloaded and forgot. I needed to do something else. Something that would tell the same story and give the same information and work as an incentive, but in a slightly other format.

That sent me to think about email courses. I googled around for information about the subject, and subscribed for a couple to see how they work. Of those I tested, some were better than others. I noticed that many of the email courses I tried were pretty hard on selling. They were sales emails, for another course or something. I get it, the wish to monetise the list like this. But they were taking the selling a bit too far. Others worked better. They were informative and nice packages. I decided to create something like that.

Of course, I needed to make the course about something I know. This is why I kept the things online, this time with presences. The workbook I had started to work on was about online presences. Thus I took the main point and started to restructure it for the course. On the way the emphasis changed, from the general advice you can read anywhere else, towards more specific building blocks of an online presence. The original workbook content faded to the background, and I themed the emails around superheroes. The idea is you don't have to be into superheroes but they work as a general concept of the course.

Finding a theme helped a lot. I ended up creating completely new lessons (emails) due to it. The theme made it easier to organise and construct the course. It could scare some people away, I saw one person unsubscribing from my list after hearing about it. But that's the thing: I cannot please everyone.

Finally I had to come up with a name for the course. At first I was writing about Indie Superheroes, but it felt too clinical and boring. I wanted something with more edge, and more... Fabulous. That's where and when SuperFabulous was born. In order to keep things consistent, I decided to rebrand my whole email list around that name. The course itself is called SuperFabulous Online Presence, simple as that. The name has to do with the superhero theme of the course, but also it's super and fabulous. Something I'm thriving for with the list.

The pace of the course was something I had to put for a test. I did some searches. Some suggested spreading the emails over the span of several weeks, one email per week. The most advice was to go with something more intensive. Five days appeared to be the most popular choice, but I didn't want to cut my course short. It ended to be seven days long. Of course the pace depends on the course content. SuperFabulous Online Presence doesn't require doing tasks in between the emails, though the emails give actionable tips on how to proceed on crafting each building block. The first email is sent within an hour (or sooner) after the sign up, the rest of the emails the next 6 days after that.

I have been using Mad Mimi for three years now. I switched to it from MailChimp after things with it got hairy, and haven't looked back. For paid accounts, Mad Mimi offers possibility to create drip campaigns. Drip campaigns are emails that are sent to subscribers after they sign up to your list. I had previously used a one-email-long drip campaign. It was sent to the new subscribers right after they sign up, to give some information about the list, and to share the download link to the workbook. To send out this course, I created a new drip campaign. I also created a new group, for my current subscribers can get the course if they wish to. In today's email, I offered them a chance to opt-in for the course. This, of course, means I will send my weekly emails and monthly gifts to two different groups. Let's call it segmenting.

I decided to keep the emails considerably short. They won't take too long to read, which is good since the emails are sent in several following days. It's an intensive course, a starting point for building a more fabulous and cohesive online presence.

Mervi Eskelinen

Hello, I'm Mervi!

An artist, nerd and business sorcerer, dedicated to make world more beautiful and strange with art, illustrations and logos + to help you figure your sustainable business out.

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