How to write a 5-day email course

1. Start from the promise, not from the subject

A subject is a territory: “email marketing”, “freelancing”, “sourdough”. A promise is a sentence with an outcome and an owner in it: “by Friday you will have a sourdough starter that rises, and you will know what to do when it does not.” The difference decides everything downstream. A territory can absorb an unlimited number of emails and therefore never tells you when to stop; a promise tells you exactly what belongs in the course and, more usefully, what does not.

The test for a good promise is that a stranger can tell, before they sign up, whether it is for them, and can tell on Friday whether you kept it. If either half is fuzzy, the course will be fuzzy. “Learn about pricing” fails both. “Set your day rate, and be able to say it out loud without flinching” passes both, and it has the further advantage of being small enough to genuinely deliver in five short emails.

Write the promise down as one sentence and keep it visible while you write. Every time a day starts drifting into something adjacent and interesting, the sentence is what you hold the draft against. Adjacent and interesting is how a five-day course becomes an abandoned twelve-day course.

2. Cut the promise into five mornings, on paper, before writing

Five is not arbitrary. It is one working week, it is short enough that a reader can see the end from the beginning, and it is long enough for the daily rhythm to do its work: someone who opened day two is far more likely to open day three, and by day five your name in a From line is familiar rather than unexpected. Nothing else you can write earns that in a week.

So sit with the promise and write five lines, one per day, each naming the single thing that day is for. Not a title yet — the job the day does. If two of your lines are really the same job, you have four days and one of them is padding. If one line contains an “and”, you probably have six days and should either cut something or accept that the course is longer.

A shape that works for almost any practical subject, and is worth starting from before you invent your own:

• Day one — the reframe. The one thing the reader believes that is quietly making the problem harder, replaced with something better, plus a two-minute action so the week starts with a small win.
• Day two — the groundwork. The unglamorous step everyone skips, explained well enough that skipping it stops being tempting.
• Day three — the middle, which is where courses are abandoned. Give this day the most concrete, most immediately useful thing you have.
• Day four — the failure modes. What goes wrong, how to recognise it early, and what to do about it. This is the day that makes readers trust you, because it is the day a brochure would never include.
• Day five — the close. What they now have, what to do next week, and one honest invitation.

3. Write the last day first

The last email is the only one whose job is unambiguous: it has to land the promise and say what happens next. Writing it first tells you, immediately and cheaply, whether the promise you chose is actually deliverable in five emails. If you cannot write a satisfying day five, no amount of work on day one will rescue the course, and you have found that out in an hour instead of a fortnight.

It also fixes the destination, which makes the middle days much easier to write. Days two, three and four stop being “more content about the subject” and become the specific moves required to get a reader from where they started to the state day five describes. Anything that does not move them along that line is cut, and cutting is where most of the quality in a short course comes from.

Day one is best written last, once you know exactly what you are recruiting people into. A first email written before the course exists is always too general, because it is the only one that can afford to be.

4. What one day looks like

Assume a phone, a commute and ninety seconds of attention. That is not pessimism, it is the median reading condition for anything that arrives in the morning. Three hundred to six hundred words is a comfortable range. Below that a day rarely says enough to be worth the interruption; above about eight hundred, on a phone, the scroll bar itself becomes an argument for reading it later, and later usually means never.

Open with the thing itself rather than with throat-clearing. “Welcome back to day three of the course” is a sentence that costs a reader their whole first line and tells them nothing they did not know from the subject. Start with the idea, the observation or the mistake, and let the course structure be implicit.

End with one action, and make it genuinely small. Not “restructure your pricing”, but “write down the last three quotes you sent and the one you wish you had sent”. A five-day course works by accumulating five small completed things, and a reader who has done four of them is a different person on Friday from a reader who has read four of them.

Some things that reliably make a day worse, collected from the way courses actually fail:

• A recap of the previous day at the top of each email. Readers who remember do not need it, readers who forgot will not be rescued by two sentences, and it pushes the actual content below the fold.
• A different call to action in every email. Five different asks in five days reads as a sales sequence wearing a course as a costume.
• Images doing work that text should do. A screenshot with a caption is fine; a paragraph rendered as a picture is invisible to anyone reading with images off, and to anyone searching their own inbox later.
• Anything that depends on the reader having clicked a link in an earlier day. Some will not have, and a course that punishes them for it loses them entirely.

5. Subject lines and preview lines are the envelope

A subject line and the preview text beside it are the only part of an email most people ever see, and they are read together, as one sentence, in a list of forty other things. Write them as a pair. The common failure is a subject that promises and a preview line that repeats the subject, which wastes the one line you had left to be specific in.

Numbering helps more than it looks like it should: “Day 3: the quote you wish you had sent” tells a reader where they are in something finite, and finite is the whole appeal of a course. It also makes the sequence legible in a search of their own mailbox six months later, which is a real and underrated form of value.

Resist cliffhangers. A course is not a serial drama and a reader who feels manipulated on Tuesday is gone by Wednesday. The honest version — say what is in the email — performs better over five days precisely because it is what makes day four get opened.

6. What to do before it goes to anyone

Read all five days in one sitting, out loud. Reading aloud is the cheapest editing tool there is and it catches the two most common problems at once: sentences that cannot be said in one breath, and days that repeat each other. Then read them again in the order a real reader gets them, one per morning, with a night in between — the seams show up in a way they never do in one sitting.

Send the whole course to yourself, on a real phone, in a real mail client, and read it there. Everything about an email that is broken is broken in a client, not in an editor: an image that is three times too wide, a link whose text is the raw URL, a signature that duplicates the footer, a paragraph that renders as one unbroken block because the line breaks came from somewhere else.

Then check the legal furniture, because it is not optional and it is invisible until it is missing. Every commercial email needs a working unsubscribe that is honoured immediately, a real physical postal address, and a sender name that matches who the reader believes they signed up with. These are requirements under the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States and, in slightly different words, under the ePrivacy rules in the European Union — and the large mailbox providers now enforce their own versions of them regardless of where you are.