Email marketing still has some of the highest returns of any type of digital marketing today. If you’re trying to sell a course online, email can be a powerful tool to help!
Although selling courses is similar to selling other digital products or services, there are some strategies that work better than others. Here are 4 strategies you can use to help you sell your courses effectively through email marketing.
1. Create an Educational Email Series
Not all emails need to sell something. In fact, you might be more successful if you send out a series of educational emails with marketing emails staggered between them. Educational emails can include a soft CTA to learn more, continue reading, etc., but generally won’t include a sales-focused CTA in every email. As long as you have a solid CTA in every email, it doesn’t always need to be selling something.
Instead, you can stagger marketing emails into the informational email series. Use these marketing emails to say: “if you’re enjoying this series, check out our full course!”
Another option is to use educational emails to introduce topics you’ll cover in-depth in your course. Use the email series as a 101 course to judge how interested someone will be in your actual course. Those who read most of the emails and follow up on the series may be more interested in taking part in a course you offer.
The goal is to look at email marketing as a process rather than focusing on the success or failure of individual emails. If you look at it holistically, you can arrange your emails so that you’re still selling over time without being too pushy or obnoxious. Slow and steady can truly win the race with emails.
Educational emails are a great way to link out to courses for sale. Because the emails themselves are both free and valuable to the reader, they have no incentive to unsubscribe. Over time, you build up an audience that associates you with quality information. Even if someone takes a while to actually purchase a course, regular email series may eventually bring them in, especially if you work in the tips from this next idea…
2. Present a Low-Risk Offer First
Courses can be high-priced purchases. Some people will be nervous about the cost and may resist it outright. But, studies have shown that people who make a purchase from a business are more likely to purchase something else from that same business. In other words, it’s easier to sell to repeat customers than it is to sell to new customers.
Expediting the First Purchase
If someone has a good experience buying from you, they’re likely to trust you again with future purchases. This applies even if the things they’re purchasing vary widely in price and product type.
Because of this, you can take advantage of the psychology of it and present them with low-cost products or services as a first offer when they join your email list. Offer them something relevant to your business that’s low enough in cost to be an impulse buy. Think $15-$20 maximum, but probably less. Or, offer a limited-time heavy discount for a popular course or product.
The goal is to make it ridiculously easy for them to become a first-time customer by removing the most common excuse (money). If they want to make a purchase, they’ll probably do it right away.
Once someone has bought from you the first time, you’ve already gotten around one of the other most common obstacles to a sale: trust. Provide them with a good product and a painless buying experience and they’re more likely to trust you with future purchases, including the course you’ll be offering them later in other emails, even if it’s far more expensive than their first purchase.
3. Put Your CTAs Front and Center
If you already have a good email marketing campaign, you can choose to keep that going and include CTAs to sign up for your online course within the email body. CTAs can pull your existing email list audience into participating in your course, increasing your conversions without creating a lot of extra work for you.
CTA Placement
Just adding a CTA is a good first step, but if you want to really boost your ROI you need to spend some time on CTA placement.
Although it’s common to put your main CTA at the end of the email, it’s actually better to put them higher up. The reason is that mobile users are far more likely to click on CTAs that are above the fold (meaning they won’t have to scroll down to see the CTA). Since mobile opens account for around half of all email opens, this placement can have a huge impact.
Learn more about why you should optimize your emails for mobile devices here.
Prominent CTA placement is unlikely to have a negative impact on your conversions, so you have nothing to lose by giving it a try!
Secondary CTAs
If you have a longer email, make sure you include secondary CTAs in strategic places around the body of the email as well. Secondary CTAs should link to something else that’s complementary to the main CTA, not directly competing with it. These CTAs can be placed at the end of email sections, in headers, or around images for prime visibility.
4. Address a Specific Problem
Use email marketing as a way to make highly specific content for your audience. These people have put their contact details on your list for a reason. What did they sign up for? Stick to what you said you’d send and keep it hyper-relevant to your audience.
Your email list gives you direct access to people’s inboxes. If you send something they don’t care about, they won’t even open your emails and you could eventually get relegated to the spam folder. But, if you make sure your emails are targeting subjects your list actually cares about, the ROI can be incredible.
Defining Your Audience’s Problems
Pain points are where you can make sales. If you can show your audience that you understand their issues, you earn a little more trust when you present a solution to that issue.
When you’re talking about a problem, make sure you’re putting it in its proper place. Don’t make mountains out of molehills or downplay something that greatly impacts many people in your audience. To avoid these issues, you can focus more on informative or descriptive language, storytelling, and case studies to bring the problem into focus.
Don’t spend too much time talking about the problem. Acknowledge it and how it affects your audience and prevents them from reaching their goal, then move on to what your audience can do about it.
Marketing Your Course as a Solution
It’s no good to talk about a problem if you’re just going to leave it there. Once you’ve covered the issue, transition into how your course helps them solve that problem and take a step forward.
Focus on the benefit to the reader. Your CTA link should go to a landing page for your course, so don’t overstuff the email itself with too much information about the course itself. Try to be concise and light on information, focusing on what your reader will gain from the course.
You’re not necessarily going to earn the sale straight from the email. Instead, you’re trying to get them to click over to a page where you can sell to them more completely. The goal is to get them further into the funnel where you have existing sales material set up to draw them in. If you want, you can also build a dedicated landing page for your email subscribers so that you know you’re linking to something that’s fully relevant to what you put in the email.
Keep your email short and to the point. It’s an introduction to your product, informing the reader that you’re offering something that can help them.
If you want to unlock the true power of email marketing, you have to use the right strategies for what you’re selling. These 4 ideas can help you get your course in front of the right people at the right time to boost your sales and turn your course into a real money-maker.
Try them out and see the impacts for yourself!
