You can send more emails.

“But I don’t want to annoy my subscribers!”

You won’t. Here’s why.

The journey someone takes from recognizing a problem, finding a solution, and deciding to pay for it is not a linear path. There are all sorts of interruptions, detours, and lapses.

Online gurus and marketing “experts” would have you believe that if you just ran the right ads to the perfect sales page, you’d land coaching clients left and right with minimal hassle.

That’s all hype, my friends. The reality is that people do not follow a linear path in their buying decisions (especially for a service like coaching). We are all driven by a multitude of forces — recommendations from loved ones, felt pains, what’s comfortable/familiar, how we’re doing on the budget this month, and, yes, marketing messages.

You can’t possibly account for all the complexity that leads to someone deciding to work with you. But you can be a consistently helpful voice (their problems haven’t gone away, even if they’re not always focused on them).

Ship 30 for 30, has enrolled over 10,000 students in their cohort-based writing course. They discovered it takes, on average, 20 emails before someone signs up.

Twenty emails! In my experience, that’s about 17 more emails than most coaches are willing to send before losing hope.

Here’s the takeaway—be patient and diligent. Keep writing, posting, and sending messages that educate, inform, and inspire. Every now and then, include a nudge to work with you.

You may feel uncomfortable sending so many emails. You might think you’re annoying your recipients. But if you aim to be helpful, you’ll move the needle in the right direction. It just takes time.

Grow your engaged segment

You’re probably fine to just send more emails. But if you want to be a little more strategic about it, identify a segment in your list of highly engaged recipients. Those subscribers who open most of your emails and click them.

If you normally send a newsletter every other week, you could send an additional email to your VIP segment on the off weeks (so they’d hear from you weekly). Work on gradually growing this VIP segment.

You can get away with sending more emails. More emails means more conversations. Your prospects get exposed to more of your thinking. This increases the chance that someone resonates deeply with something you said. As people resonate deeply with your thinking, they’ll consider what it would be like to work with you. Then you ask them directly if they’re ready to do so. Some will.

The bottleneck in this scenario isn’t your recipients’ tolerance, but your limited ability to produce more emails.

If that’s the case, consider a conversation with me about how Nice Newsletter removes that bottleneck without outsourcing your thinking.