Why Your Email Prospects Are Dryer than the Sahara—And Why an Educational Email Course is the Solution

Hailey Thompson
Apr 18
6 min read

You’ve done it. Your website is up.

The user experience is flawless, your photos look beautiful, and your store is functioning beautifully.

Everything is fully operational.

There’s one thing that isn’t performing, though—and I’m not talking about your SEO.

It’s your email subscription.

It’s not that prospects can’t subscribe.

The problem is…no one is actually hitting that subscribe button.

What’s Going Wrong With Your Email Subscription?

You may have tried to troubleshoot this already:

Updating UX design
Adding the subscription as a pop-up box
Changing the color scheme to make your subscription stand out
Offering a discount for subscribing

The issue isn’t that you’re doing the wrong things. These are all valid solutions that may improve your subscription rates.

The problem is that no one wants to subscribe to another email list.

And your conversions will likely remain abysmal is something doesn’t change.

Why Your Email Strategy Needs a Refresh

You aren’t necessarily failing here. You’re just not using the right email strategy yet.

Think about it from your customer’s perspective: they’ve just landed on your website. Right off the bat, they’re bombarded with a pop-up box that asks them for their email with a 10% or 15% discount offer.

At this point, one of the following things happens:

They simply click out of the pop-up box and continue with their shopping.
They get frustrated and click off your website.
They put in their email, but it gets drowned in the hundreds of other emails they receive on a daily basis.

In the first situation, you may get a sale, but it’s unlikely.

In the second situation, you’ve lost a prospect before you had a chance to gain one.

In the third situation, your email subscription may as well be non-existent.

All these situations leave you with the same problem: poor subscription numbers and even worse conversion rates.

So, how do you fix it?

The Solution: An Educational Email Course

The simple solution is to create an educational email course.

If you’re not sure what that is, it’s simply a series of email that drops in your prospect’s inbox for a set number of days, meant to educate them on your products and processes.

This may not sound very different from the emails or newsletters you already send out, but there’s one big difference that makes these emails work:

Positioning.

See, when you send out regular email copy or newsletters, you start sounding like everyone else jumbled up in your prospect’s inbox. It makes it difficult for your prospects to differentiate your from the rest of the noise:

Your headlines blend with the rest.
Your brand doesn’t stand out.
You sound like another sales ad out to get their money.

With an educational email course, rather than shouting from the rooftops,“SPEND YOUR MONEY!!” you’re telling your prospects, “This is who we are, why we’re different, and how this product will change your life.”

The difference is in positioning yourself as an authority rather than a run-of-the-mill salesperson.

When you GIVE first—and continue to give more and more—your prospects are a lot more likely to become customers.

Give First, and the Sales Make Themselves

Why does this work?

Why bother giving to your customer at all?

While giving first seems counterintuitive, it actually incentivizes your prospects to buy from you.

Giving first:

Increases trust in your business
Positions you as an authority
Provides unique insight into your products
Increases the number of pre-sale interactions, and
Differentiates you from other brands

Plus, when giving out an educational email course, you’re providing FREE resources for your prospects at minimal cost to your company. It’s not going to lose you nearly as much money as a giving out free samples or trial products.

Your educational email course is as simple as having your copywriter draft up five days’ worth of emails and sending them to your clients when they sign up for your subscription.

That’s it. That’s all it takes to increase conversions.

The Magic Behind the Educational Email Course

Of course, you can’t send out AI slop and hope it makes you sales. You still have to strategize.

When creating your educational email course, you’ll first want to decide how you’re going to change your opt-in box. The best option is to offer a discount AND a free course to your prospects.

How you design your opt-in box, the exact copy you’ll use, and the positioning of your subscription opt-in are all up to you, but it’s best to have a pop-up first thing when your prospects land on your website. Additionally, you’ll want to consult with your UX and copywriting experts to optimize the design of your opt-in.

There’s several strategies you can choose when designing your educational email course. Here’s a few of the most successful strategies:

Introducing a product per day
Introducing your company, its mission, and its products in successive days
Introducing one department per day
Using a case study series
Highlighting one signature service per day

The list goes on, of course, and you can mix and match strategies for what works best for your company.

Bottom line, you have to bring your brand to the forefront of your prospect’s mind (and their inbox).

This is your chance to show off what makes you unique.

Make your headlines stand out with your brand voice.

Show off your clients’ success stories.

Demonstrate the transformation your services provide for your customers.

Talk about your startup days.

Highlight key employees and their journeys.

Whatever you do, make it you—and then loop right back into how that benefits your prospects.

The whole point of the educational email course is to increase trust and differentiate your brand. Even if your prospects don’t make a purchase right away, you want to be top of mind when they’re ready to buy, and your educational email course will make all the difference.

The more your customers understand why YOUR specific brand is the solution for THEIR specific problem, the more likely they are to choose you over the competition.

(Bonus points if you’ve nailed down their pain points and speak to their emotional state.)

Implementing Your Educational Email Course

You know the benefits. You know the why.

Now, let’s address the how of your educational email course.

If you’ve got a copywriter or digital marketer, you’re golden. All you have to do is work with them to strategize your email course, nail down brand voice, and outline your emails. It’s an even easier step if you already have someone regularly sending out emails for your business.

If you don’t have a copywriter, it’s time to hire one.

And no, AI is not a viable replacement. Sorry about that.

By bringing in a copywriter, you’ll:

Save tons of time
Save loads of money
Prevent stress headaches
Develop a relationship with a seasoned professional
Possibly make a friend
Never worry about your copy again

Unfortunately, AI isn’t creative enough to align with your brand voice, understand your customer avatars, and speak to your prospects in a way that sounds human. It’s a great starting point to develop your ideas, but you can’t count on it to write your emails for you.

A copywriter is going to come in, ask the right questions, and write you several masterpieces that are worth their weight in gold. They’ll understand how to speak to your prospects in a way that combines creativity, brand voice, emotion, and logic.

As an expert in writing copy that hits prospects’ pain points and motivates sales, your copywriter is going to do all the things stress-free that would keep you up at night.

There’s no need to second-guess your writing abilities or tear your hair out over whether you’re using the right vocabulary for your brand; your copywriter has it all covered.

Plus, they’ll do it at a speed that astounds and with a mastery of the written word that excites.

As a bonus, you can keep your copywriter on for other projects as needed since they’ll already be integrated into your brand.

So, what are you waiting for? Get started on that educational email course!

If you need a copywriter, I’m here to help. I love helping brands nail down their voice, redefine their email strategy, and create conversions like never before.

Click here to get started with your educational email course.

Oh, and just in case there was any confusion, I’m a human, not an AI bot. Enjoy the obligatory puppy photos!