How to Prevent the ‘Product Launch Postpartum Blues” with Email Courses

Product launches are dang near magical.

It’s like some kind of spell falls over your audience that makes them go into a buying frenzy.

For my very first product launch, I had a rinky-dink list of just 157 people.

Yet somehow from that tiny list I made something like 32 sales—that’s a conversion rate of 20%!

I’ve seen similar numbers from other entrepreneurs. Nathan Barry says he expects 10% of his launch list to buy.

After my first product launch, I thought to myself, “Wow, if I could get even 5% of my subscribers to buy my book, I’ll be making some serious bank every month!”

Then something depressing happened.

The magic faded, and next thing I knew I was struggling to convince even 1% of my subscribers to make a purchase.

Often what happens next is you think, I know, I’ll launch another product, and then I’ll make 2X as much every month.

I did this, and invested 6 months writing a followup book. But once the dust settled from my launch, I swear it seemed like the income on my first product fell by the exact amount of my “new” sales—like book #2 was cannibalizing book #1.

I rode this rollercoaster for nearly 2 years before I finally found a way to end it. I’ve already let the cat out of the bag here—my secret is **email courses**.

A good email course is like “lightning in a bottle”—it lets you capture the magic of a product launch and “launch” that product to every new subscriber.

You still get that one-time “sugar high” when you launch, but then you flip the switch to turn on your course, and you have a conveyor belt that brings you sales month after month.

I could go on for pages about why email courses work so well, but here are the three biggies:

1. An email course gives you “permission to spam.”

One of the biggest reasons people struggle to make sales with email is fear of being tarred and feathered as a “spammer.”

But during a product launch, your excitement over the launch helps push past this fear and hammer your list for a few days.

And your subscribers don’t really mind—they’re excited too, and they enjoy the extra emails.

With an email course, you’re telling people upfront that you’re going to send them X emails over Y days.

In other words, “they’re asking for it.” And so you can flood their inbox with nary a twinge of guilt or self-recrimination.

2. An email course lets you make your best case for your product.

Because you’re focusing your subscriber’s attention on one topic for several days (or even weeks), you have space to unpack your story, and cover all the critical points your subscriber needs to make the decision to buy your product.

3. An email course allows you to use scarcity to push subscribers “off the fence.”

In many markets, anywhere from a third to as much as two-thirds of your potential customers are going to be “think-it-overs”—they want to deliberate, question, second- and third-guess themselves…

Their motto is “Ready… Aim… Aim… Aim… Aim… Aim….”

They’ll sit on the fence forever unless you do something to give ’em a shove.

I design my email courses to flow smoothly from giving good, educational content to pitching a special, limited-time offer.

In my testing, I’ve found that about 50% of the sales come during the initial, educational part of the course, and the other 50% of buyers wait until the last minute to jump on the “flash sale” offer.

Did you catch the word “design” two paragraphs back?

You usually can’t just bolt a sale onto the back end of an email course and expect magic to happen.

Tomorrow I’ll step you through how I pick a theme for my email course that makes this smooth transition possible.

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