Time has flown.

And I hope you had fun! In this email I want to leave you with a few errant ideas, tricky-to-fit-in comments, helpful tips and suggestions, and make you aware (at a level that is slightly less than "acutely") of some of the pain points I expect you'll run into.

Language

If you're gonna build in self-pacing, don't use words like "yesterday", "today" or "tomorrow" when referencing your emails. Instead, use "previous", "current", and "next". I can feel you thinking, "wow that is pretty specific".

Business Model considerations

To charge or not to charge… I think this concept can work either way. If you charge you need a lot more proof points on your landing page. If you offer free, you still need a good number of proof points. Personally, I prefer charging something because it pre-qualifies intent and, in my personal experience, increases engagement. People pay more attention when something is on the line.

Content Strategy/Repurposing Content

The great thing about EBCs is that you are writing a TON. I implore you to cross-post your content. Some repurposing or reformatting is often required, but it's a small lift for the reach that you can achieve on LinkedIn and Twitter. And hey, I always plug my EBC at the bottom. Win-win.

Pain Points with Email

For Gmail (the most common inbox), you gotta be aware of clipping. Clipping happens when your email size goes over 102kb — at least that's what they say... I've sent emails that are 112kb and they didn't clip. Usually when emails clip it's the footer ("unsubscribe" and social icons) that go first. I can live with that.

The most annoying thing to update

The progress tracker is a major boon to readers, but a gigantic pain in the ass to update if you add or subtract emails. As you've noticed, we only show the full image of the progress a few times. Within a chapter, we only show the chapter specifics so that if we DO have to make changes, it's only to a handful of emails and not every single one.

Automations can also be painful (if you get one thing wrong in the template and have to make a change in several other places, that’s no fun).

Content, with a tool like beehiiv, is super easy to update. You don’t have to turn the course off to make edits. Nice.

Best practices

Depending on your subject matter, there may be content that requires updating on some interval (years? quarters? hopefully not months...). For Big Later, we have to do this with things like 401k and IRA contribution limits. I suggest keeping a log of what changes need to be made in a doc somewhere (Notion is my preference and I think you knew that).

Test everything.

Put yourself through the course. Click every button. Put friends and family through the course. Test changes. Test literally everything because email can be finicky. The stuff I look for when glancing through emails and automations are...

• is the self-pacing feature working?

• did I update the pre-header?

• do my images have alt text?

• are my subject lines right?

• are my buttons missing links?

Just test stuff. Again, this is one of those "big upfront costs" things.

And that's pretty much it

There's one email to go. I'm gonna be bummed when this is over (but the EBC life is never really over...), and I expect you're ready to stop receiving my emails and work on your course.