How to Sell ‘Done-for-You’ Services with an Email Course

In an email last week I described how I might go about constructing a “myth busters” email course to sell a product about learning the Go programming language.

Subscriber Craig replied with a question:

Wondering how your approach to this would work for selling a service (like we do for PodcastMotor)? I find that a lot of the typical marketing approaches don’t “feel right” to me with selling our regular production services.

A lot of the email marketing advice you read is geared toward selling a product—specifically “info products” like books and online courses.

And yeah, it can be hard to see how to adapt those techniques to a high-end service like “concierge podcast production.”

There are a lot of similarities in how you sell products vs. services.

For example, in both cases the customer’s desired end benefit is the same:

A professional-sounding podcast that their audience loves and that builds their “personal brand.”

The major difference between information products and services lies in HOW you’re delivering that result.

With an information product, the customer still has to do all the work himself.

The promise is, “I will show you how to…”

Whereas with a service, the whole point is that you’re taking all of the work off the client.

So the pitch is, “Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to…”

To make this more concrete, let’s pick a specific example.

Suppose Craig was going to write an email about professional quality audio.

A quick Google search turns up a great Reddit thread about a comedian who has a podcast with fingernails-on-a-chalkboard audio quality.

The podcast sounds so bad that even his best fans are unsubscribing.

Now if I was selling an info product about podcasting, I might simply tell that and close with a “learn to do this right so this doesn’t happen to you” call to action.

In Craig’s case though, I’d take it a step further.

I’d talk about how much the audio quality can be influenced by the post-production work.

I’d describe all the dials and knobs you can tweak to remove background noise and make the speaker’s voice sound richer.

And I’d mention how doing these steps wrong can make the audio quality worse instead of better.

In other words, I’m *amplifying* the amount of WORK and EXPERTISE that goes into producing a pitch-perfect podcast.

Because the essence of your services pitch is “I’ll do all this for you,” it’s to your advantage to emphasize just how much work you’re doing on their behalf.

The more they understand about what you’re doing behind the scenes, the more your service looks like a no-brainer value—

And the hardest thing they’ll have to worry about is clicking that Sign Me Up! button.