I couldn’t give away $2500+ of marketing knowledge for $69.

This evening was supposed to kick off the first of six workshop sessions I lined up to teach at our local community college. But the class was canceled. Not enough people enrolled.

I was teaching and coaching students to implement programming that I charge upwards of $2500 to do for my clients. The cost of the workshop was only $69.

For six sessions.

One of my passions is teaching, demystifying the tech and making email marketing approachable and doable for all. What better platform to do this than through the continuing education programming at our local community college?

So I pitched them on the idea, submitted a curriculum, and went through the background checks and “new hire paperwork” to be a bona fide teacher. The course was featured in the Fall Catalog, in a dedicated email to local folks interested in business and continuing education, and even got a plug in our Chamber of Commerce weekly newsletter.

But as of yesterday, only four students had enrolled. We needed six. I had hoped for closer to 20.

Here’s where I went wrong:

I failed to effectively make the case for email

I provided the curriculum and approved the course description and materials. They assumed that the reader would already understand that email was a linchpin in any business marketing toolkit.

But many business owners don’t fully grasp the power of email marketing. Their hold-up isn’t the technology or the marketing strategy. It’s that they simply don’t believe email is that important.

I used insider language and jargon to talk about the course

Donald Miller refers to this as the “curse of knowledge” and man, did I load my course description up with words nobody really understands and acronyms most wouldn’t go to the trouble of deciphering. I mean, check this out…

Small Business Email Marketing Success System
with Erica Walter

Whether you are seeking to strengthen your existing email marketing campaigns and ROI or you are thinking about establishing an email marketing system to stay in touch with customers, this course is for you! Get help navigating the challenges of acquisition, data, automation, content creation, implementation and more. Send emails your customers can’t wait to open.

What in the actual heck? I mean, what does that even mean?

I didn’t tell anybody about it

I put the onus for marketing and promoting the course on the shoulders of the continuing education department at the college. I didn’t say anything about it on social media or to my email list. I didn’t even mention it to prospects that were interested in working with me directly.

So, it isn’t all that surprising that we didn’t get enough enrollments to justify the course. But I refuse to simply go home and lick my wounds. Not only am I going to learn from this “epic fail” – which, by the way, I’ve learned to redefine as a “faithful attempt in learning” thanks to Marie Forleo’s new book, Everything is Figureoutable.

You get to learn from it too.

Over the course of the next three weeks, I’ll dive deeper into what I did wrong in putting together this workshop. I’ll help you apply my learnings to your own business AND marketing efforts.

Let’s learn together! See you next week.