Creating an Email Course

What is an email course?

An email course is a series of articles sent out as emails that ends with a financial ask. It’s a middle-of-funnel tactic that showcases your reporting, introduces new readers to your publication, and primes readers for donations.

Deliverables

• The publisher is responsible for writing or adapting the articles to be used in the email course. Once we have the content, Indiegraf will support with:
• Mailchimp customer journey (the automation)
• Landing page and UTMs
• Promotion
  • Lead generation campaign over 2-3 weeks
  • Onsite ads (Optinmonster or ConvertPro)
  • Social posts
  • Newsletter CTAs
  • [Optional] Standalone announcement email
    
    

Choosing a topic for your course

You could survey your audience and create a new series from scratch.

• Ex. The Discourse asked their readers what they wanted to know about their community. They turned those responses into a series, Curious in Nanaimo.

But that can be a heavy lift, so if you already have a series that got a lot of interest, you can repurpose those articles for an email course. 

• Ex. Peterborough Currents repurposed three articles into Creek Week. They hired a writer-illustrator to rewrite the original series as a walking guide, and produce original illustrations.
  • Email 1 (confirmation) | Email 2 (intro) | Email 3 | Email 4 | Email 5 | Email 6 | Email 7 (financial ask)
• Ex. The Discourse also repurposed articles about their community into a History of Cowichan email course. In this case, they didn’t adapt the original articles much — they just added a short introduction to each email.

Measuring success

Not only do we want to grow your mailing list, we also want to encourage donations. We will benchmark and evaluate the course’s impact on:

# of subscribers

# of superreaders (>3* contact rating on Mailchimp)

# of supporters

Recommended sprint schedule