Treat Every New Subscriber like a VIP Using This Email Automation Template

February 12, 2018 , 21 Comments

You’ll agree that every time a visitor to your website subscribes, it’s a moment to celebrate.

But are you actually treating that conversion with the proper respect it deserves?

I mean, are you just lazily delivering your new fan with a one-and-done “Thanks for signing up, here’s your content upgrade” email? Or are you treating every new subscriber like a VIP and dropping automated value bombs in their inbox every few days after signup?

Look, if you’re not using automated emails to educate, nurture and build trust with your new subscribers, you’re shooting yourself in the foot! Not only are you missing out on longterm sales, but you're also doing your new followers a huge disservice by not providing with them the in-depth content they came to you looking for!

Want to start treating your subscribers like VIPs?

More...

I know you do so let’s analyze a simple, yet highly effective autoresponder sequence that delivers on the VIP subscriber principle. By the time we're done, you'll have a "paint-by-numbers" autoresponder template in hand to apply to your own business...whatever industry you’re in!

Read on to learn how Neville Medhora, the Kopywriting Kingpin behind the popular (10,000+ kustomer) Kopywriting Kourse, uses “Magical Email Slave Machines” to kultivate a massive online kommunity of true fans that buy the krap out of his online kourses.

Added bonus: his emails will also teach you how to write better kopy...

Neville Medhora’s Kopywriting Kourse

Neville is a blogger, professional copywriter and info-product entrepreneur.

I first discovered Neville back in 2015 through some entrepreneurship videos he filmed with Sumo.com founder Noah Kagan. Being an aspiring copywriter and internet marketer myself at the time, that video content led me to Neville’s Kopywriting Kourse Blog.

What’s With All the K’s?

Neville replaces a lot of his C's with K's as a wacky and unique branding strategy.

I think it's also a great example of how Neville polarizes his audience into either loyal fans who love his kooky style or unsubscribers who don’t appreciate his casual approach.

You can listen to Shane explain why such polarization strategies lead to more effective copywriting and irresistible offers here in this ActiveGrowth Podcast episode.

I subscribed to Neville's email list and received a series of 10 emails over the 3 weeks that followed, containing all sorts of valuable info about how to write better copy, grab and maintain a reader’s attention, and – I know this is super meta – use email autoresponders to boost conversions!

In fact, Neville jokes that these autoresponders are his “magical email slave machines" that work nonstop to make passive money for his “lazy bastard” self...his words, not mine.   ;-P

Now, one reason I decided to analyze Neville’s Kopywriting Kourse autoresponder sequence is that it's a great case study for how to teach typically boring stuff in a fun way that ultimately creates a large community of raving – and paying – fans.

If you resonate with Neville’s writing style and content, you’ll find yourself dropping whatever you’re doing to read his emails, whenever they arrive in your inbox.

In our modern day email marketing environment, such an ability to leap out of someone’s crowded inbox and pile-drive them into your copy is a real success, right?

Write Your Own Kopywriting Kourse Style Autoresponder

So here’s the deal.

Analyzing even a simple and linear email sequence takes a ton of work.

There’s a lot of copywriting elements and psychological principles at play that are easy to miss – especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for – so I’ve done all that heavy lifting for you.

I painstakingly deconstructed Neville’s original 10 autoresponder emails into an any-industry template to guide your own efforts to build a high-engagement sequence.

A screenshot of my email swipe file showing Neville's 2015 version of his Kopywriting Kourse autoresponder. Learn how to use Gmail to create your own email swipe file here. The 1st email in the sequence is at the bottom of this inbox image and the 10th email is at the top.

Unfortunately for the template I created from my email swipe file, Neville's Kopywriting Kourse autoresponder has evolved a lot since 2015. That means you can't get the same sequence of emails for your own swipe file simply by signing up for Neville's blog.

You Can Still Get a few of the Original Kopywriting Kourse Emails

Of course, I won't be publishing Neville’s emails here, but I still recommend subscribing to Neville's Kopywriting Kourse Blog as it's an awesome copywriting resource.

Also, you can still get a few of Neville's original Kopywriting Kourse autoresponder emails in his current sequence if you sign up.

Just match the subject lines you see in my downloadable autoresponder template below with the emails you get from Neville to see if they're the same.

If you’re writing your first autoresponder series or want to improve an existing sequence, I recommend that you do the following to get your own up and running as fast as possible:

  1. Set aside 30 to 60 minutes each day for the next 5 to 10 days to write emails.
  2. Each day, use that day's email template to write your own email, applied specifically to your own business. The template is flexible so use, adapt or omit any sections you need to make it work for you.
  3. Rapidly implement the 5 to 10 emails you wrote into an autoresponder that nurtures your new subscribers into true fans.

Just commit to writing one email per day for 5 to 10 days. That’s totally doable, right?

How Neville Cultivates True Fans Through His Autoresponder Emails

Neville is a master of what I like to call "quick and dirty" production value.

Instead of focusing his efforts on less important elements like time-consuming visuals or web design, Neville focuses on providing easy-to-understand, high value content to keep his new subscribers reading.

If you want to achieve Neville-level engagement with your own emails, make sure your autoresponder sequence delivers the following experience and copywriting elements to readers:

  • Entertainment & Fun. Keep your audience reading and eagerly awaiting your next email. Neville's content is a little bit wacky sometimes, but always entertaining even though the subject matter has the potential to bore readers.
  • Build trust and rapport. The value and usefulness of the information you provide needs to be high. Neville is always focused on helping the reader in his emails, not himself.
  • Never pressure sell. The percentage of useful information to subtle soft selling is almost entirely weighted on the valuable information side.
  • Organically mention secondary and affiliate products where appropriate. Neville suggests other products in a way that are useful to the reader and provide extra revenue opportunities for himself in addition to his main product.
  • Use hooks and cliffhangers. Neville is very good at creating open loops between emails to get readers both excited and waiting to read his next email.
  • Simultaneously self-deprecate yourself while also generating social proof. Neville is a pro when it comes to making himself relatable to his audience while simultaneously using backhanded, humble-brags about his products to generate social proof.

Now that you know what copywriting elements to pay attention to while writing your own email sequence, let’s take a look at my any-industry template based on Neville’s original Kopywriting Kourse autoresponder...

The Kopywriting Kourse Autoresponder Template

This post has a problem: it's too epic to be contained in a blog post. That's why we've created 2 PDFs for you, that you can download below. These are direct download links, not opt-in bait, so go ahead and grab them. The PDFs will be your guide to rapidly writing and launching your own Neville inspired autoresponder emails for your own business:

  1. A 10-email, any-industry autoresponder template based on Neville's original Kopywriting Kourse email sequence.
  2. A 5-email autoresponder example sequence I just wrote for Thrive Theme's new Thrive Optimize A/B Testing plugin written using the first 5 emails in the Kopywriting Kourse inspired template. Use it as a reference when applying the template instructions to create your own autoresponder series.

One of the biggest takeaways I want you to notice after reading through both the Kopywriting Kourse Template and the Thrive Optimize Autoresponder Example PDF set is just how subtle and soft the sales pitches are...virtually non-existent!

Yet this counterintuitive email strategy has made Neville a ton of passive income because he always puts teaching and delivering value first.

Now It’s Your Turn

I hope you found this analysis of Neville's autoresponder emails helpful to write and rapidly implement your own high engagement autoresponder.

If you have any questions or comments about the template, my example emails or just general email marketing automation, ask away in the comments below!

P.S. Did you enjoy this kind of content examining the autoresponder strategies of industry pros? Would you like me to analyze and create more autoresponder templates for you? If so, please comment below on which industries or experts you have in mind!

About ​Matt Totten

Matt's a geologist turned online marketer and digital nomad. He's a Modern Manimal on a mission to cultivate a high-tech, hunter-gatherer lifestyle within our exceedingly domesticated world. When away from his tech, you can find him studying complex human movement through random play or practices like Aikido, AcroYoga and Barefoot Running.


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  • Albain Mazereau says:

    Great content, thanks from Paris ;)

  • So useful post Matt! You should definitely examine more autoresponder strategies. I just have a “Thanks for signing up” kind of welcome mail. This was one of the most difficult phase i struggle to find resources while trying to develop this mail marketing thing.

    • Hi Baris,

      I hope you can follow this template and create a follow-up series. I guess you’d have to invest a day or two to get everything done, but I bet it would be time very well spent. I hope you’ll leave a comment in the near future to tell us your results. ;)

  • Awesome post, thank you Matt! Yes please more of this. e.g. Derek Halpern oder Amy Porterfield

  • Hey Matt, I didn’t do the work yet but this seems really awesome! Thank you very much for the lots of work you’ve put into this article.

    As I am running a therapy and coaching practice and blog about self love, I am curious how I will get to transform the templates :-)

    • Thank you for your comment, Susanne! I hope you’ll get great results from applying this to your own business.

  • Hi Matt, thanks for this incredible amount of work you have put in this article! Very thorough and very useful!
    I have a question though: all those emails you have crafted are very loooooooooong. Does this mean that there are still people these days who have the time to read those long emails without zipping away?

    • Hi Harry, I’m replying in Matt’s place because he’s on vacation. Yes, it’s interesting to see the length of the emails. For me, 2 things come to mind:

      1) An email/sales page/video/blog post can never be too long, only too boring.
      2) Long content acts as a filter: sure, many people won’t read it all, but those who do are the real fans. You’ll end up with a smaller group of more highly engaged people and that’s generally a good thing.

      • That’s an interesting viewpoint, Shane, thanks for that!

  • Hi Matt,

    Great article, man! I really like the PDFs you included, and I think it would be better if you supplied Neville’s full original. I was very confused as to what the flow would look like because “Neville’s example” was incomplete.

    • Hi Martin,

      The reason we didn’t include the full copy of Neville’s emails is because that wouldn’t be fair to him. I wouldn’t want someone to publish my carefully crafted email series on their blog, so I won’t publish someone else’s on mine.

      • Hi Shane/Matt,

        Got it. How about you refer us to the place where we can sign up?

      • Hey Martin,

        There’s a content box in the middle of the post titled:

        “You Can Still Get a few of the Original Kopywriting Kourse Emails”.

        I inserted a link to Neville’s blog and signup page there and explain that you can still get a few of his emails as his current autoresponder is different from the original this post is based on.

  • Thank you Matt for thoroughly researching this topic. By the way, your posts are always detailed and informative. You work hard to deliver useful and complete information and it shows. Keep the good work!

    • Thanks so much Sonia! Now that I’m back from vacation, I’ll definitely do my best to tee up some more useful and super detailed content for you soon!

  • Well shucks… I loved the article, and I wanted to access the course, so I made the account on the 2-step form… no confirmation email came.

    So, I guessed what the Thrive apprentice page would be, and found it — but don’t see it there.

    I’m really digging seeing how thrive products work together here… in addition to the content! GREAT STUFF! Keep it up guys!

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