How to Create an Explosive Email Course

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0:16so first of all thanks for voting for my talk I was gonna call it explosive fire hydrant fire thing but fortunately I called it something else I'm really excited to be teaching here today because I came here last year and I just really blew my mind and it was so it's really great to actually be able to to contribute a little bit to what's going on I'm David Kennedy I wrote a book it's called design for hackers I teach developer types about the visual design and the principles of visual design but today I want to talk about about creating an explosive email course creating an email course that actually

0:55doubles 3x is 4 X is 5 X is 6 X's your email list and I think the the first point that I want to drive home is that your email list is not an email list and I apologize to the French Colstrip culture ministry for using the word email only a few people understand that one or it's just not that funny all right but your email list is not it's not just a bunch of emails just like it was a Stolley we're saying that they're people and the technology that you use to send those emails is just a technology that you use to create some sort of an experience

1:38right it is don't think of it as an email list and as all these separate email is you want to actually create an experience using this piece of technology and there's this perfect quote from Steve Jobs that you've got to start with the customer experience and work back towards the technology and that's what Apple does with everything they do and obviously that works very well with them so you need to think about your your email whatever it is that you used to send emails in that way and you probably a lot of you already have an autoresponder some of you might even have an email course and it

2:14probably brings you incremental growth in incremental sales and you know the little graph goes up and to the right but if you do a couple weird tricks then you can have actually absolutely explosive growth and sales you can really double it triple it for exit and I actually 6x my email list I went from five thousand subscribers to thirty thousand subscribers in a matter of two weeks with with one promotion so I want to share the formula with you for that now I did get some people asking me on the message board like about the quality of the email addresses that I gotten is true that if you have an email course

2:57that that goes this viral that you are going to have a little bit of riffraff in there somewhere and that but I can tell you that I did so lots of books if you are a traditionally published author you know that you don't get very much data on the books that you sell but I can tell you that this is Christmas right here and then this taller spike is my email course promotion spanning a few few weeks and then I got the largest royalty check of my career so far nine short months later so what makes the difference between just a regular email course and one that's that's really

3:42explosive I think there's two main things that just to keep in mind as you as you work on your email of course and I do hope that some of you will take some of this advice first of all remember that your course is valuable information you are creating something of tremendous value and you need to respect that and you need to make sure your prospects respect that and you can give it away on your own terms you are creating something valuable the next is that your course is a collective event now just because you have the technology to as soon as somebody signs up for your

4:18email course go ahead and put them on that email course and start sending them right away doesn't necessarily mean that you should be doing that there are some some good psychological phenomenon that you can take advantage of to actually make that course go more viral so the first point there making it valuable how do we make it seem like a like a really valuable thing because there is already something psychologically going on with you know it's 12 emails or something but now it's a part of this cohesive experience that suddenly makes it seem more valuable but there's a few little templatized sort of ideas that you could use to create an

4:57email course that's going to give a sense of tremendous value so one it could be a sample of a product or it can be you can promise a transformation of some some kind or you can introduce your unique philosophy so you need a budget Jessie talked earlier today he's got a great email course it's all about the kind of philosophy of money management behind the software that he sells Noah Kagan of sumo me and appSumo has a free 30-day course on how to double your email list yet you know 1k comet it promises it's gonna double your email list the course that I have it was

5:35called summer of design when I first launched it it's available still a design for hackers comet it's probably I'm probably going to change it out to a different one but it was basically a sample of my book each chapter was a sample or each email was the sample of a chapter of the book pretty much just talking basically free samples of the book and it certainly didn't prevent people from buying the book the next thing is actually making it an event making it this collective event so one way to do that is that once you're in once they're in your course you get them excited you remind them about this great

6:11thing that you've created for them this great thing that you're giving to them for free and remind them there's a deadline coming again just because you have the technology to send them emails whenever they want doesn't necessarily mean they should go that way so there should be a deadline there should be a start date to your course there should be a deadline to sign up for that course and that way you also make it a collective event and there's gonna be some things that that make that more effective and then you ask them to share the opportunity with others it's just like I probably butchering his name

6:44steli was talking about talking about sharing getting referrals it's because if you have something valuable and and you want you you naturally want to share it with with other people who are going to about to value it so now let's get to some specifics here the actual anatomy of the course that I use to 6x my email list so here's the announcement tweet and you can use whatever your strongest social channel is hopefully your prospects hang out in some social channel somewhere and I did have the advantage that I have a fairly good Twitter following I think at the time I had around 10,000 or something like that and but it's just

7:27the fact and this becomes the centerpiece of your marketing efforts this is what helps make it viral the next is the announcement email you already have an existing list hopefully if you don't you to start one immediately and this basically just says hey I'm starting this great course it's gonna start on such and such date you're already enrolled in it please get the word out with a retweet and I say I say one social network because you know you don't want to dilute your call-to-action people will naturally share on other networks but you just pick the one and you get them content to concentrate on that one getting to share on that

8:04network next up is the announcement post this is again same sort of formula you build with excitement you announce the deadline you're asked for shares and on the landing page you can see it says well you probably can't read that actually says a roll enrollment close I used to be a timer there and that was just there I wasn't trying to get shares or anything just telling people about the course my one goal here is to get them to sign up that's all that I want next up is the welcome email this is when they sign up now that you've signed them up now your goal is to get them to

8:40share it so this is paraphrase paraphrased here and the brackets get really excited about this get them pumped up about this great thing that they're getting for free and then be kind and share remind them there's a deadline remember share it with the friends and then as the deadline approaches then you start to remind people with with some emails so for example this one I just say you know look at how pumped up everybody is I asked people on Twitter you know why are you signing up for my course and they shared why they were signing up for it this makes helps make it a collective

9:16event it helps make it something that people are excited to be a part of and remind them the deadline is coming I sent one of these one week before I sent one on either the last I think the last day and you know don't be a bad friend like you're getting this free thing there's going to be a deadline share it be a good friends so then this is how all this is actually constructed call this the viral loop and this contains everything that is in that was in my whole anatomy of the email course and you can see the there's the launch tweet there and as that is on like when you

10:02sign up and you have to confirm or when they sign up they confirm on the email success page you've already got them signed up you say all right you're signed up and then you try to get into launch to retweet the launch tweet doing that welcome to email the blog post you can see some of the psychological principles that are going on there just commitment and reciprocity commitment your your you've made this into an event that they are now a part of they are committed to it in some way there's a deadline and then you know the welcome email we in the week before email that a

10:32week before a tweet and last day tweet and that's where you start to get the scarcity working and so then all these things work together to help actually just make that an explosive thing so that it's not it's not just an email course that they sign up for whenever now case studies can this actually work for you there you may have heard of summer of marketing I don't know if it sounds familiar it's because Noah stole it from me which is fine he asked me he asked me permission he was kind enough to put a link at the bottom and he had a Steve list of about 20k and he grew

11:09about ten thousand subscribers with that and he keeps the timer going every week it's a new course starts there's a new deadline there's a new collective thing and I believe there's a community for that on Facebook as well which helps make it more of a collective event and then become a morning person malece I think name is Melissa she followed my lesson that I wrote for email 1k with this exact same formula and she had a seed list of 7,000 she started a new list her first lesson had 26,000 students in it so it definitely worked for her and I was actually just talking to Brandon done and he he's

11:50copied a similar model and he has a deadline every week and he says that it converts 10% for his I believe probably the double your freelancing rate product or something like that ten by people 10% people who sign up for his course 4 for the free email course buy his product and it's not a cheap product so action items you want to make this happen I would like for at least three of you to to make an email course and hopefully at least double your email list first thing brainstorm an outline for your course second just barfs draft the first email I wrote my course as the week's

12:33went on I mean I had direct barf draft in a few of them which by the way is just a crappy draft is give yourself permission to suck if you do those two things I think that you should be sufficiently inspired to then move on with actually following through with with doing a course of your own again I'm David caddy I can be reached on twitter @academyofone ette I unfortunately have to leave immediately at 5 p.m. so I'm gonna try to like hang out outside the door unfortunately you might have to miss a talk or something but if you do have any questions you want to talk to me please do thank you

13:08very much you [Applause]