You have put in the work to win over email subscribers, and now you have an email list full of dream coaching clients. When it comes time to write your first email (after your welcome sequence), you find yourself unsure of what to send your email list. The email lists you’re subscribed to seem to send you random personal stories or hourly sales emails leading up to a launch. The last thing you want to become is just another email that your subscribers ignore; you worked way too hard to build this email list in the first place.
3 Types of Emails Coaches Send Their Email List
Generally, the emails you send your email subscribers will fall into one of three categories, nurture email, promotional email, or sales email. Each email needs to fulfil one of these roles; otherwise, you’re just sending emails for the sake of it. Sometimes, an email can fall into more than one category, and that’s okay too.
Nurture Email
A nurture email is a relationship-building email. The goal is to allow your email list to get to know you a little bit better. This is particularly important for coaches because your coaching clients sign up to work with you. A key factor in their decision-making is if they can see themselves working with you.
A common mistake coaches make when writing nurture emails is they forget that it’s not about them. What we mean by this is often, you are writing about your life, but you are writing for your email subscribers. These aren’t your friends and family who love you and so will happily listen to your long rambling stories about interests they don’t share. You do need to curate your nurture emails a little bit, so they are of interest to your email subscribers, otherwise, your open rate will plummet. Consider telling stories that:
- Your prospects can relate to
- Your prospects can learn something from
- Your prospects are interested in (shared values or interests)
Promotional Email
A promotional email is all about selling. This includes selling your usual products and promoting sales or an upcoming launch. These are important parts of your email strategy, and you should sell to your email list often because they are warm leads. That being said, you need to find the balance where you are giving twice the amount of value (through value or nurture emails) that you are asking for.
Value Email
A value email is where you provide your email list with extra value to what you share on social media or your blog. There are many types of value you can provide depending on the type of coaching you do. Here are some examples:
- A short guide to troubleshooting common problems
- Tips and tricks
- A list of resources (from you and others) your coaching clients could use
- Curated content round up
- A list of discounts and sales for commonly used/needed products
- Freebies
- Early access to your coaching programs or masterclasses
- Your take on a newsworthy topic
- Advanced warning of something that could affect them
Not all of those may be right for your coaching business, but you can use a combination of the ones that are to keep your value emails fresh and exciting. Think about what your ideal coaching clients would find useful, and from time to time, ask your email subscribers what they want to see more of. This could be as simple as sending a short Google Form survey.
How to Create an Email Strategy
Now that we know the 3 basic types of emails you need to send your email list, it’s time to create an email strategy for your coaching business. An email strategy just lays out how often you will send emails and what types of emails you will send.
The best way to create an email strategy is to set goals for your email list and reverse engineer what you need to do in order to achieve those goals. Your goal could be:
- To make £X per month from your email list
- To build stronger relationships with your most loyal coaching clients (or prospects)
- To have a pool of warm leads ahead of your launch
You might have another goal that isn’t on the list.
Once you have your goal, ask yourself what that looks like. Let’s say you want to make £1,000 per month from your email list. What could you sell each month to make that amount of money? How many people do you need to have on your email list? For example, you may decide that you want your main focus to be converting your email list to join your membership community. You want to sign up at least 10 people per month, which would give you £500. The remaining £500 you want to make through affiliate sales and selling a low-ticket offer.
Then, you start building the framework of how many promotional emails you want to send each month to reach your goals. You need to work with the assumption that not everyone will read every single email you send. Therefore, if your main focus is getting email subscribers to join your membership, it may make sense to promote it in every email. This could be as simple as creating a small section at the bottom of each email to talk about your membership community. You could also naturally work it into the body of every email you write.
In addition to that, you may decide to send 2 value emails per month where you give your email list a taste of the value they’ll receive in your membership community. Let’s say you hold a mini masterclass or interview someone every month and post the video in your membership community. You could post a short value-packed clip from one of those interviews that would help your email subscribers. Then you could tell them this 2-minute clip is part of a 30-minute-long video in your membership community and give them the details of what’s included in membership, how much it costs, and how to join. Your second value email could be expanding on a conversation that happened in a membership community.
From there, it’s time to figure out how much nurturing and value to give in between to build trust and likeability with your email list. This primes your email list to respond favourably to your promotional emails. If you only ever sell without adding value or nurturing, then your open rates will plummet, and you may even lose email subscribers before long. The exception to this is if the purpose of your email list is to send them daily or weekly deals, for example, travel deals. In that case, you are adding value by sending them deals. Still, we would suggest looking for ways to add more value when possible.
Turn all of that into a strategy of how much you want to nurture your email list before you try to sell them something. Each month or week should also have a mini email strategy where you plan out what topics your ideal coaching clients want to hear about and any information that you need to provide before the promotional email you have planned.
Email Ideas
We’ve covered what types of emails you want to send and how to create an email strategy, but you may still be unsure what to actually send. Here are some ideas of topics you can send your email list. We’ve kept these slightly vague so you can interpret them in a way that suits your coaching business and ideal clients.
Nurture Email Ideas
The goal of nurture emails is to give your email subscribers more access to you so they can get to know you a little better. Tell stories about behind the scenes in your business and your personal life that would interest or be relatable for your ideal coaching clients. Here are some nurture email ideas:
- A lesson you learned the hard way
- Why you got into coaching
- What you like most about coaching or why you are passionate about the topic of your coaching
- How you prioritise one of your values in your life
- How you put a piece of advice you give coaching clients into practice in your life
Promotional Email Ideas
Consider interesting or unexpected ways you can promote your coaching services or products via email. The novelty will increase the likelihood of your email subscribers reading the promotion because it’s not a boring sales pitch.
- Behind the scenes of the coaching course you’re creating to build excitement and show them what will be in the course
- Steal your routine/ how you implement your coaching topic with affiliate links
- A small excerpt from your coaching course/masterclass/membership community
- A small but comprehensive freebie that solves an initial problem or lays the groundwork for the next step, which is your coaching products or program
- Case studies of previous clients or yourself where you provide a little bit of free value and then sell the program that gave them those results
Value Email Ideas
Value emails are about giving back to your email list in a way that they find valuable. There are many different forms this could take, and we would recommend using multiple types of value to keep things fresh and interesting. For example, some of your value emails could entertain, some could inspire, and some could provide practical value. Practical value could be discount codes, a curated reading list of interesting content, actionable advice, freebies, or
- A quick solution to a frustrating problem your ideal coaching clients face
- A curated selection of content that will get them up to date with recent changes on a relevant issue (try to only share content from trusted sources that have the same values as you)
- Tips and tricks
- Small tweaks that can make a big difference to results
- Your opinion on a newsworthy topic with actionable advice or reassurance
Our inbox is always open if you have any questions, contact us here. You are welcome to book a Pick Our Brain Call at £199 per hour if you want to work through your email strategy with a copywriter or get feedback on your email strategy and emails. Another way you can work with us is to hire us to write some or all of your emails. We can write nurture emails, promotional emails, or email sequences for your coaching business. Browse our email writing services here.
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