Four Sequences, Not Seven Emails

The smallest possible version of an email launch is one email.

Subject line, a paragraph about the course, a link, send. People do this, and it works — a little. Some fraction of your list buys, the number is disappointing, and the conclusion drawn is that email does not work very well.

What actually happened is that you did about a quarter of the job. Not because seven emails would have beaten one, but because a launch is not a sequence at all. It is four of them, and they fire on four different events.

The four

Welcome. Triggers when somebody subscribes. Three to eight emails. Introduce yourself and the business, deliver whatever you promised at the opt-in, and point them at your best existing work. Think of it as a tutorial for your business — by the end they should know who you are, what you teach, and what you sell.

Nurture. Triggers a week or two after the welcome ends. This is where you hand somebody your ten best pieces of content over a month. Not a pitch — the actual work. It builds the credibility that makes a later price look reasonable.

Sales. Triggers when you run an event. Written in advance, scheduled across the days of the event, so that the week itself requires nothing from you.

Post-purchase. Triggers when somebody buys. This is the one that gets skipped, and it is what this article is really about.

Three of those four are aimed at people who have not paid you. The fourth is aimed at people who already have — which is to say, at the only group who has proven they will.

The post-purchase sequence, marked up

Here is the shape I would build, email by email, with what each one is actually for.

Email 1 — immediately on purchase. Thank you, here is how to log in, here is what you have access to and for how long. Purely logistical, and it prevents the single most common support email you are otherwise about to receive.

Email 2 — a few days in. Point them at where to start. A new student opening a hundred-slide course does not always know which end to pick up. Telling them costs you one email and materially raises the number who finish, which matters more than it sounds.

Email 3 — end of week one. One piece of teaching that is not in the course. Something small and useful. This is the email that establishes that buying from you was not a transaction that has now concluded.

Email 4 — around week two. How are you getting on? Any questions — just hit reply and I will answer. Send this one and mean it. Some of these replies turn into the second sale, and all of them tell you what your course is unclear about.

Email 5 — week three. The next step, if there genuinely is one. Another course, the membership, a coaching call. This is the only email in the sequence with an ask in it, which is exactly why it works.

Email 6 — around week four. Ask for a review, with a direct link. Four weeks is the right moment: long enough that they have used the material, soon enough that it is still fresh. Reviews are the thing you will wish you had started collecting a year earlier.

Email 7 — whenever the community exists. Point them at wherever your people gather. A buyer who joins the group stops being a customer and starts being part of the audience.

Notice what is not in there: six pitches. One ask, in the whole sequence, and everything else delivers something. If a sequence is generic filler wrapped around an upsell, subscribers work that out in about two emails and stop opening.

Two rules for the emails themselves

Front-load the subject line. Most inboxes show five or six words. Whatever the email is actually about has to survive inside that window. Membership now open. Your course access. Not a clause that gets to the point in word eleven.

Never put the whole thing in the email. Two paragraphs and a button. The destination is your website, always — including for somebody who has been subscribed for two years, because the day they are finally ready to buy is a day that starts with them clicking through to read something.

Both rules point the same direction: the email is a doorway, not a room.

What to expect, honestly

Two numbers worth having in your head before you start, because both of them look like failure and neither is.

Roughly one subscriber in ten ever becomes a paying customer. That is the shape of it. Nine out of ten people on your list are there for the free work and will stay there, and that is a perfectly good arrangement — they cost you almost nothing and some of them tell colleagues about you.

People unsubscribe during sales events, and this is fine. They joined to read your articles. The moment you ask for money they remember they were never buying. Twenty unsubscribes off the back of a promotion is not a signal. Three hundred off the back of a single piece of content is — that means you said something that landed badly, and that one is worth investigating.

Why this is worth the afternoon

All four sequences are automated. You write them once, and they run on every person who arrives, forever, without you touching them again.

That is the whole reason a course business can be run in something like ten hours a week at real scale. Not because the work is small, but because the repeated part of it was written down once and handed to a machine. Everything else — the content, the products, the decisions — is what you spend your actual time on.

And the responsiveness is real. Send something worth opening to a list that trusts you and the effect is close to immediate; I have watched sales start inside a minute of hitting send. That does not happen because of the email. It happens because of the two years of sequences that came before it.

So: build the welcome sequence this week. Build the post-purchase sequence next week, before you convince yourself it can wait until there are more customers to receive it. The other two can follow.

Seven emails is a fine number. It is just the wrong unit.