Are you a coach or consultant? Then you need to learn how to build a system that helps you sell on autopilot so you don't have to hustle to fill your next coaching group or programme. This is why we're here to tell you all you need to know about email marketing for coaches. 

Ready to learn how to get more of the right clients in less time and with less work? 

Let's do this! 

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 

(0:10) Join our FREE Facebook Group. 
(6:10) Why should coaches focus on email marketing?
(8:56) How email marketing helps coaches and consultants.
(13:57) Email marketing helps you move people towards buying from you.
(16:31) Create an email engine to sell on autopilot. 
(17:55) The typical sales funnel for a coach.
(21:29) What happens when people don't qualify?
(24:51) The best lead magnets for coaches. 
(26:34) Social media vs email marketing for coaches.
(29:39) How can coaches sell using email marketing?
(31:37) Subject line of the week.

Why should coaches focus on email marketing? 

Coaches who sell high-ticket items, small-group coaching, or one-on-one coaching often worry about how email marketing might apply to their specific businesses. And coaching is indeed different.

First of all, as a coach, you’re selling high-ticket items, so you tend to have a much more intimate relationship with your audience. You're giving more personal attention and help. And that requires someone to have a high level of trust in you before they go ahead and spend that amount of money. For example, we have a coaching programme called The Email Engine Accelerator. This is a larger investment and an intensive experience. And we use email marketing to communicate to people that they can trust us and that the process works.

Another reason why coaching businesses are different is that often service providers feel they need to hustle for the next client. Long before we were working together and even figured out how to do email marketing, we both had a high-ticket coaching business for small groups. And it always felt like we had to hustle to find the next cohort of clients or fill any spots. 

How email marketing helps coaches and consultants

With email marketing, you can replace the idea of hustling. Email helps you generate leads, so you're attracting new prospects for your coaching programmes. But it also helps you nurture those leads and build both the perceived value of the outcome and people's confidence at the same time. You need to give people reassurance and make sure they believe that your progamme works and will give them results despite what they have or haven't tried before.

Through simple, automated email sequences, you need to give people confidence in your, your system, the results they can get, and the fact that they can successfully follow your approach. And the way to do that is by overcoming objections. Show people how your programme works in spite of their previous failings or the fact they might have no experience of doing this before. 

If you have a coaching business (or have a coaching element in your business), you can write emails (once) that will move people from one place to the next. Focus on building people's confidence and moving them through the stages of becoming paying clients.

The great thing is while you're busy serving your clients and delivering a round of your coaching programme, you are also nurturing future clients. You could be selling all your spots for the next cohort way in advance! With email, you no longer have to hustle because your coaching clients are already lined up. This benefits your cash flow too because people pay in advance, and you can use that money to generate more leads. With email marketing, you can sell on autopilot. Filling your coaching programmes is completely hands-off.

Email marketing helps you move people towards buying from you

One of the reasons why this works so well is because with coaching often you don’t know where anybody is in your world. How close are they to buying from you? That’s why you feel you have to hustle. So the reason why we say coaches specifically should focus on email marketing is that you want to move each person towards their next step.

Through email, you can send people specific content, such as a video where you pitch, for example. Or the link to a webinar or to an application form. You want to drive people towards applying to work with you, and that might have to be done in stages.

First, they book a call, then you get them to attend the call, and then you close them on the call. And while all of this happens, you also want people to renew or join you for the next cohort, or whatever the case might be. It's a whole process. And if notice that people are dropping out at specific phases, maybe you need to reassess and look at what you do closely to understand where you can spot opportunities for improvement. 

Create an email engine to sell on autopilot

The great thing about all this is that you write your emails once, and you have a consistent process. Every single person who goes through a particular phase receives the same emails. If they work, that's great. If they don't, you go and change them.

We often talk about creating what we call email engines – or chains of email sequences. This is the asset in your business that you're building. You build it once, and it turns into more sales. It gives you a bigger return than what you invested.

We just gave the example of sales calls earlier, but you don’t have to do those. We have a member inside The League (Sheila Bennett) who filled a significant amount of spaces in her high-price mastermind without talking to a single person. Because with the right conversion tools, you get to move people from one stage to the next. They consume some key content, qualify, and move on to the next phase.

The typical sales funnel for a coach

When it comes to sales funnels, as a coach, you have two major options. The first one (which is something we see a lot of coaches do) is to have the prospect fill in a form that takes them straight to the coach's calendar booking system so you can book a call with them. The problem with doing that is you'll have people booking onto calls who, for whatever reason, aren't ready to work with you. At this point, you don't know much about the client, and they potentially don't know much about what you do. 

So what we do instead is to have people raise their hand for something – we want them to say they're interested by replying to an email, clicking on a link, watching a video, etc. Ultimately, we want them to fill in an application form where they answer a bunch of questions about who they are, what they’re looking for, why they want what we offer, etc. The questions are designed to pre-qualify them and only if they pass a set of specific filters, do they get the calendar booking system for the call.

Of course, the decision is made by a system, and whichever one you use, it's always going to have limitations because it's not human! But the key here is that having an application form in our funnel pulls out people who aren't serious. And that means we get fewer and better-quality people showing up on the calls. The people you talk to are more likely to buy your stuff, and that’s what we’re looking for. 

What happens when people don't qualify? 

When someone doesn't qualify at your application form stage (for example because they're not ready to invest), you still don't want them to get to a dead end. For example, we send those people to a page where they can play a video that tells them that based on their answers, it looks like we might not be a fit to work together. But in that same video, we also explain what's involved in the programme, what the price is, etc.

Now they have all the information, they still have a choice. And we present them with two buttons:

• The first button allows them to tell us they still want to talk to us about applying for the programme and takes them to our Calendly form to book a call.
• The other button is for people who think they’re not ready for this programme. But they still get access to a 2-minute summary of a down-sell offer, which, in our case, is for our membership The League. This means that the funnel doesn't have a dead end!

The best lead magnets for coaches

When it comes to lead magnets, we see a lot of coaches make the mistake of using something that doesn't attract the right people. As a coach, you want to make sure your lead magnet attracts the right people for you and pushes away anyone who doesn't want what you sell. So don't have a lead magnet that does the wrong thing!

Focus on attracting people who are at the phase of fixing the issue you solve – not those who are in victim mode or still basking in their problem. Because if someone isn't searching for a solution, they're hard to sell to! So always check how your lead magnet is framed – make sure it attracts people who are looking for a solution and not those who are addicted to their own misery and still in victim mode. 

Social media vs email marketing for coaches

When it comes to social media and email marketing, coaches need both. That's because you need somewhere to build an audience (social media) and somewhere to convert them (email marketing).

You want to create this cool infrastructure and loop where people come through our social media, and you get them onto your email list. It's a two-directional relationship between the two. Social media and email marketing work together as long as you push the same agenda. For us, our social media focus is on our Facebook group. And we might not have a huge audience there, but we have the right audience. And from there, we use email marketing to convert. Rember that you'll always get much higher engagement and profitability from emails than you do from social media.

We’re not saying that email marketing replaces social media – it simply has a different job. Email is used to sell – it’s for conversion. It allows you to know what someone is interested in because they’ve clicked on the links in your emails. So you get to create a sensible path to move people closer to buying. And that's something you can't really do on social media. 

This is why we recommend that coaches use email marketing to convert. If you haven't already, go and check out our membership The League. We have all the campaigns you need, such as The Temptress campaign, The Explorer High Ticket campaign, and even our Open Day campaign. This is a type of free trial campaign where you could let people sit in and maybe observe some of your sessions for free so they can try before they buy. 

How can coaches sell using email marketing? 

As a coach or consultant, these are the four things you want to do with email marketing:

1. Identify people's specific problems and narrow them down to the specific problem you solve. 
2. Get them to raise their hand and say they're interested. 
3. Create the desire for your specific solution to that problem. You want people who are interested in what you sell, specifically. 
4. Move people onto some kind of conversion event (a webinar, a sales call, a video sales letter, etc.) and sell!

So the biggest opportunity coaches have to stop this hustle mindset is to have a system that’s generating leads and converting them into coaching clients. With email marketing, you can do this time after time and on autopilot.

You get to create an asset where you use emails to nurture people and move them towards the sale. If you want access to our campaigns, go and check out The League, and you can start using them immediately. 

Subject line of the week

This week’s subject line is “This guy is selling our stuff!” followed by the shocked face emoji. And this is pretty much the definition of how we try and grab people’s attention with an opening hook.

The email was about the fact we did a partnership with someone. We got in front of his audience, and he's now selling some of our products for us. Of course, this is great for us because it helps us build an audience and make money from it, too.

The wording in this subject line helped people go and open the email. There’s an implication that someone might have stolen our stuff. And you can tell it's a fine balance between generating interest and curiosity and being too clickbaity, right? So go check it out!

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

Stop Wasting So Much On List Building by Using Traffic Loops.

Why We Started an Email Marketing Agency.

How To Get Your Customers To Buy Using Buyer Psychology In Email Marketing.

FREE list to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes. We share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing. Best news yet? You can apply everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode (all about email marketing for coaches) and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.  

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And please do tell us! If you don't spend time on email marketing, what do you really fill your working days with? We'd love to know!