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Anyone doing evergreen email courses?
by
Janice
What's your stack?
Any gotchas or recommendations?
Yep, I'm doing it with https://bloggingfordevs.com.
I'm using ConvertKit. Seems to work pretty well, a few quirks:
Nothing has been really dramatic though.
The evergreen nature is helpful for finding and fixing issues. So if something is wrong, I can quickly fix it before the next batch receives it.
Thanks for sharing! To be such a highly focused product, I've found ConvertKit lacking. But it seems to be the only game in town in terms of automation.
What else is in your stack? (Your landing page looks great!) Is the landing page homemade? I see you've a community and using Airtable for the form. What are using for the actual community? And do you offer any paid services or products?
I think there are a fair number of tools for automation, they just all take so much effort to learn and set up! I'm about to start using Active Campaign (costs more than ConvertKit) for my SaaS and I've also used MailerLite (had a fair amount of downtime while I tried them which didn't inspire confidence, but they do have free automations up to 1K subs AFAIK). There's also Drip.
Rest of the stack:
I don't have anything paid now, but I'm planning to experiment with it once I decide on price/positioning:
I tried REALLY hard to find a no/low-code solution for this aspect, but couldn't get anything that would satisfy me in terms of UX. I wanted a single login for the website and community, turns out it requires a fair amount of code.
Long answer, I hope it's helpful somehow!
What are you trying to do with your evergreen email course? Do you plan to use it as a funnel for a paid product? ConvertKit is coming out with a Commerce add-on, seems like the perfect fit for something like that.
Ooh! My own landing page is Gatsby as well!
Presently I've only a paid product. (Grinning) We'll see how that goes.
I first attempted a 7 day trial, but ConvertKit only has a hook for "purchases". (This requires significantly more automation wiring for subscriptions.) So from the Stripe purchase they're entered directly into the funnel.
For the moment, I'm focusing on building and validating a MVP. But if successful, I'll need to revisit ConvertKit and check out the alternatives. I know MailerLit requires a Zapier integration for Stripe. Does Drip? I've a feeling to get what I'm after, I'll need to deep dive Automaton Saas and Stripe's API.
Thanks for the share re Circle. (Looks fab!) That might be an path further down the road. But curious why you didn't go with a tool like Slack?
Ah, didn't realize ConvertKit doesn't support subscriptions. Actually, the subscription setup was the shitty part of working with Stripe -- one off purchases are way simpler.
Honestly I've never used Drip so I'm not sure what capabilities it has!
Re: Circle, I wanted to have useful and organized historical information people can learn from. Since my community is very oriented about learning, being able to find past topics is pretty important. Plus, I think people get burned out from Slack and Discord. It also has 1:1 Messaging when you need it, otherwise most communication happens in topics :)
I've hooked into their API directly and it went smoothly. But for whatever reason, I haven't come across a no-code solution that handles the basics (trial + cancellation). 🤷🏾♀️I'll worry about that if/after I achieve validation.
Thanks for the tip re Circle. I dug a bit deeper into it and it looks great! If I get that far, it'll be interesting to see whether my target audience is onboard.
You're welcome, and good luck!
I'm in a early stage of planning a few email courses with Gumroad's workflows. It's actually a very early stage as I'm just putting together some rough ideas.
Interesting. I didn't know Gumroad had an offering for email courses. Please do share your findings re automation once created! (I'm also interested the payment processor integrations.)
It'll be a while before I have any courses ready for publication, so I'm afraid I won't be able to share my experience soon.
But the tech stack is straightforward as what I have in mind is essentially a drip course. You create a new product on Gumroad and set up a workflow for sending a sequence of automated mails to the customers who purchase the product. The purchase triggers the start of the sequence.
I forgot to mention creating a product leverages Gumroad's existing purchase flow and payment infrastructure, as such an email course is an ordinary Gumroad product.
Interesting. So you're after a one-time purchase rather than a subscription model?
Yes, but, as far as the infrastructure is concerned, you should be able to do something similar with a subscription instead of a product (in Gumroad's lingo, a membership product as opposed to a classic product).
Ah. In that case (and should I be able to validate my idea), I'll definitely give Gumroad a look! Thanks for the mention!
@Janice ConvertKit for anything related to evergreen emails. I’ve used it for tons of evergreen email sequences, I’m writing my first evergreen course right now. Happy to talk shop about how it’s working in a few weeks, just gotta finish writing it first :)
I, too, am on ConvertKit and haven't been terribly impressed. (Hence this post.) Fishing to see if anyone had uncovered anything better, but they seem to be the only game in town.
Ah, good to know! I’m in the early stages of planning out a set of ConvertKit templates as an info product — documenting my evergreen sequence and self-paced email course workflows are part of that. Would love to hear more about what issues you’re running into w/ ConvertKit!
Silly question:
What do you mean by evergreen email course?
(Grinning) Obviously not silly at all since no one has responded!
With most newsletters, a subscriber can jump in at any moment. Newsletters are not sequential and reading one is not dependent on reading the others. They may or may not have access to archives.
With an evergreen newsletter, subscribers always start at the top of the funnel or first newsletter and must read them sequentially for full benefit. Assuming the creator gets a jump start, this relieves a bit of pressure re constant content generation.
Unlike typical newsletters, the evergreen approach requires automation.