How To Market Your Digital Product Launch Using Email

Nicolas Cole outlines a two-week email launch system: seven days of educational emails building to a waitlist signup, then a sales week addressing objections and driving purchases. He shows how to use Substack with Kit, send from a warmed Ship30 domain to avoid the cost of warming a new one, and automate the whole sequence with Zaps.
Chapters
Little marketing crash course for, um, like launching. This is really true. It doesn't matter if it's live or async. What we do is, and granted, like, this is a little advanced. You don't have to do all of this. I'll just tell you what we do and you can decide. But 2, 2 weeks out, we start our first sequence number 1, and this is all education. So this would be a full week. So this would be 7 emails, 1 per day, and each email educates the person on some sort of problem and/or outcome related to the thing I'm going to pitch them next week. So these are not sales emails. These are like, you know, 2 weeks out, email number 1. You're a DJ in 2026 and you're trying to book gigs in XYZ city. The number one reason why venues aren't calling you back is like each email is just something education. Does that make sense?
Yes.
And then what you want is at the end of the email, what you want is you want to make your CTA basically join the waitlist. So you're not launching it yet. You're saying Next week, I'm, I'm going to launch something that will help you with the thing I talked about today and tomorrow and the next day and the next day. And so at the end of every email is, and if you're interested, click here to join the waitlist. The reason you want that is because, A, you want to know everyone who joins the waitlist. Those are your potential customers. And B, there's sort of like a bias that happens when someone clicks. Yeah, I'm interested. Is there almost like pre-agreeing with themselves? And so you want to facilitate that action. Then one week out, you have sequence number 2, and this is your sales sequence. So you've done all the education, you've educated them on problems. Like, now they're very aware of, oh, this person could really help me. So then sequence number 2 is the week before you would launch it. Email number 1 is like, all right, we talked about how to solve this problem. Here is exactly how I solve this problem in this 30-day thing. Like, now you're talking about the thing. Like, it's available for sale, it's available all week, and each email is addressing a different interest or question or objection, you know. Like, maybe the most common objection DJs have is they're like, I don't think— or they're like, I think Instagram is too saturated to book gigs now. So maybe one of your emails is, no, Instagram is not too saturated. Here's why. And then it's like, that's what we talk about inside my 30-day program. And then the CTA for all of these, so CTA week 1 is join the waitlist. And CTA week 2 is buy and join. Like click here, checkout page, buy and join. And this is, and it's essentially like a 2-week launch with 1 week being available for sale.
Got it.
Got it.
This is great. Yeah. And I'm connecting the dots to, for like Substack starter sprint, how like that happened or the bootcamp, Claude bootcamp. This is great. And then you are still, so you're sending out everything, all these emails via the Ship 30 for 30 email and you're still putting out your articles on Substack, right?
Correct. Correct. Yeah. So, the ways that this could work inside, like, pairing with Substack, this would be like Substack plus Kit. So, Substack would be your newsletter. And then you can either send to your newsletter list and then you could basically do like one email that's like, hey, next week I'm launching Uh, 30-day bootcamp for DJs. If you're interested, click here. So you're basically pinging your whole newsletter list and saying, I'm going to be talking about this thing over here inside Kit emails. Click here if you're interested. And so when they do, you're moving that email from Substack over to Kit. Okay, that's one way of doing it. The other way, if you wanted to pitch everyone on your newsletter list is you, you can export your whole CSV from Substack, throw it into Kit, and then just email your newsletter list via Kit with this whole launch sequence separately. Okay, does that make sense?
It does, it does. What I had done was take my email list and imported it into Substack, and now I have new Substack subscribers. Maybe I can just take that.
Exactly.
But I think I like the first, like, hey, if you're interested in this, click here, and then that'll take them to the list.
Yeah, that's, that's what we do a lot of times. I, I would do like 1 to 3 emails, you know, some people might miss the first one. I think sending them like 2 or 3 emails is fine, but you really, you want to execute this whole launch sequence via Kit. You don't want to do that via Substack, right?
Okay. Uh, that sounds good. And then another, just a curious question. All your different programs are sent out, the, the sales emails and the education emails are sent out through the same email for your PGA, for Substack Starter Sprint? Yeah, everything's on hello@. Okay.
Yeah, the re— the reason that we do that, um, it's been on our list. Like, in an ideal world, I would like to have them separated out more, but the reason that we do that is because domains get warmed up over time, and like our Ship30 domain has so much authority, so it, it makes a lot of sense to send all emails from that. And just like, we have so many Zaps set up, like the infrastructure that we've set up is like very advanced. And so to just go start sending emails from a completely new domain or so, like there's a huge switching cost for us at this point.
Makes sense. Yeah, makes sense. Great, this is helpful. So I'll get things going. I have a couple weeks of lead time to get the emails ready, so that helps.
Awesome. Yeah, great question. I hope it goes well. Let us know how it goes.
I will.
Thanks, Shami.
By the way, if you're brand new to writing online and want a really easy place to start, I recommend reading The Art and Business of Online Writing. I wrote this book after I'd been writing online for over a decade and accumulated over a billion views on my work, monetizing my writing in all sorts of unconventional ways. And I wrote this book to give other writers like you a way to skip all the lessons that I had to learn the hard way and start seeing success from your writing a whole lot faster than I did. So if writing online is something you're thinking about or something you're actively practicing, I recommend picking up a copy of The Art and Business of Online Writing.
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