Course creators don’t have time to waste. Building landing pages here, sending emails there, connecting it all with duct tape and hope? That’s old news, and it’s costing sales.

In 2026, email isn’t just about newsletters. It’s about smart automation, clean deliverability, and a system that turns new subscribers into buyers fast.

After trying every tool under the sun, one platform stands out. It’s simple. It’s powerful. And it’s running a seven-figure business without the mess.

Let’s break down why this tool crushes the rest, and why switching could be the smartest move you make all year.

Useful Episode Resources

FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketing

If you want to write better emails, come up with better content, and move your readers to click and buy, here's how. We put together this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here.

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If you want to chat about how you can maximise the value of your email list and make more money from every subscriber, we can help! We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The Email Hero Blueprint

Want more? Let's say you're a course creator, membership site owner, coach, author, or expert and want to learn about the ethical psychology-based email marketing that turns 60-80% more of your newsletter subscribers into customers (within 60 days). If that's you, then The Email Hero Blueprint is for you.

This is hands down the most predictable, plug-and-play way to double your earnings per email subscriber. It allows you to generate a consistent sales flow without launching another product, service, or offer. Best news yet? You won't have to rely on copywriting, slimy persuasion, NLP, or ‘better' subject lines.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

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Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes so more awesome people like you can discover the podcast.

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00:00.00

Speaker

Over the past 20 years, I've tried all of the big email marketing platforms. I even looked at some of those weird self-hosted ones where you had cobble a cobbler bunch of stuff together. Anyway, today I'm going to show you which one I'm using, why I'm using it, how it compares to others, and why I'm using it to build a seven-figure business, and show you some of the tips and tricks on the inside as well. Let's play the video.

00:23.41

Speaker

The Email Marketing Show.

00:26.34

Speaker

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the show. If you haven't already, make sure you hit the subscribe button because only about 25% of you who watch these videos actually are subscribed the channel. Make sure you do that. And if you haven't already, grab free access to my brand new email marketing course about the psychology of email marketing. It's called Email Marketing Sorted. It shows you the exact...

00:49.02

Speaker

process the entire engine that I used to take one of my offers from $27,000 to over half a million dollars. It's absolutely amazing. And you can get it for free by going to emailmarketingsorted.com. So,

01:03.90

Speaker

What we need, if we're gonna go to six or seven figures in any business, we need a system that doesn't just let you send out newsletters. That's really, really important. The days of just sending out pretty looking email newsletters are over. And so what I've done is I've looked at all of these email marketing platforms, right? And I've looked at them in terms of a few different categories. First of all, automation. This is what helps you to serve more people without you having more stress of one-to-one communications. It allows you to take care of everybody and react to things and actually get more out of what you've already got because you're there when somebody needs you. I'll get more into that in a bit.

01:46.90

Speaker

Secondly, deliverability. Do your emails actually get delivered? Because you can do all the work you want in the world. No one's seeing your emails. It sucks. Third, entry points. How do people actually get onto the email list? We're going to look at that. Analytics. Can you see what is working and what is not?

02:06.97

Speaker

Because I'm surprised at how many of the massive email marketing platforms don't tell you the information you actually need. Customer support. Can you talk to someone on the odd occasion when you actually need some help?

02:21.70

Speaker

You'd be surprised at how many times you can't with some of these platforms. And pricing. Some email platforms... or as much as $500 and more per month. And some start off really low cost and they lure you into false sense of security.

02:39.19

Speaker

But as your business grows, they basically take your eyes out when they cost of your fortune. So look, I've used many email marketing platforms over the last 20 years, including ActiveCampaign, Keep, MailChimp, which I find hard to use, by the way, GetResponse, AWeber. I even use one called OneShoppingCart.

02:55.19

Speaker

03:22.49

Speaker

So let's get into it. Well, I'm to share my screen. So we're going get into, first of all, automation. We need to be able to automate. So when someone joins your email list, they receive some emails from you. Or if they take certain actions, if they engage quite a bit in your emails, you might want to sort of put them through an automated pipeline of emails that follow up with them.

03:41.30

Speaker

So we want to have automation. When someone buys something from you, you want them to receive it. Always kind of good thing. So let's share my screen. And as you can see, this is not like a logical, really difficult to get your head around thing.

03:53.43

Speaker

It's no logic puzzles. if you Literally, it's very visual. If you want someone to come and join your email list, and we'll talk about how they join in another part, then you want it to wait for, i don't know, 10 minutes.

04:08.22

Speaker

Wait, time delay, 10 minutes, save action. And then you want it to send them an email. You literally... does that you type in the from name you type what the email's gonna say hi there blah blah blah you merge in their name save the action and oh it was gonna ask me to put a subject line in hello

04:34.23

Speaker

Save the action, and you carry on. You wait a few more days and send them another email. Really visual, really easy. You literally click and you drop drop things in. Really, really, really cool.

04:46.62

Speaker

Second thing we're going to look at, so it's really, really simple to do that. like You don't have to be smart to do that. You can literally do it in a bunch of steps right inside the builder. Second piece, deliverability. right Deliverability, getting your emails actually delivered is much more weighted on your website address than the email platform that you use these days. It to be a case that spammers and and and naughty marketers used to jump from one email platform to another email platform to get better deliverability.

05:17.24

Speaker

05:48.95

Speaker

So people who don't open and click your emails are... are dead subscribers. So it's easy to set up a really simple automation in high level that removes people who don't engage, for example, for 60 days. And actually, I'll show you one of my other automations.

06:05.37

Speaker

I have an automation set up so that, let's share the screen here, so that if an email bounces... So that we send an email out, whether it's automated or live, if it bounces, we immediately unsubscribe them. So we are never going to be sending emails repeatedly to email addresses that bounce, because that's going to give us a really bad reputation.

06:26.26

Speaker

So we can set that up. You can just see the event I set up here is at the top, an email bounced. And then if that happens, do this and do this. Unsubscribe the contact, put a little tag on them to say we unsubscribed them, and hey-ho, there you go.

06:40.24

Speaker

It's amazing to me how many people are not doing this simple thing. Don't be shady. Don't email people who are not paying attention. Because honestly, the people who are just mailing people and not unsubscribing people are generally doing that because they see their their subscriber count, the number of subscribers they've got, is a pure vanity metris matt metric valueity to metrics. Right?

07:06.49

Speaker

Oh, I've got 10,000 people on my email list. Yeah, but like only 2,000 of them ever open your email. So I've actually deleted the other 8,000. Those 2,000 people who really like your emails are going to see the emails. It's to be so much better. So I would definitely go for less people who are way more engaged. And to begin with, if you've got less than 5,000 email subscribers, I would use what's called a shared IP address.

07:30.10

Speaker

right which is what you can set up inside a high level you can basically have a dedicated ip or a shared ip address let me explain what i mean right a shared ip i want you to imagine that you live in an apartment building right and you share this same building address with dozens or even hundreds of other people. But if one of your neighbours is a troublemaker, i.e. they're sending spam, not keeping their list clean, all that kind of stuff, it affects the building's reputation with the postal service. Right. But the upside of it, not all doom and gloom because I i am saying if you've less than five thousand subscribers, you should have a shared one because the upside is the building already has an established reputation and you benefit from all of the good residents who've been there longer than you, which is great when you're first getting into the platform. Whereas a dedicated, that's called a shared IP address, where you're sharing the sending address that your emails are coming from through the email platform.

08:32.15

Speaker

You can do that in high level. The other option is a dedicated IP address. And I recommend you do this once you've got 5,000 to 10,000 and up over subscribers. A dedicated IP address is where you own the house with your own address. You get your own unique address that's only yours.

08:50.87

Speaker

Your reputation is entirely in your hands. So you've got no neighbors to worry about. Here's the catch. If you've just moved into that address, if you've got a brand new account, it's a brand new address.

09:04.05

Speaker

The post service doesn't know you yet. So it doesn't know whether it trusts you. It's a little bit cagey. So you have to build your reputation from scratch, which takes a bit of time, takes a bit of consistency, takes a bit more strategy.

09:17.53

Speaker

So the nice thing is when you do get up above that 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers within high level, you can get your own IP address. It actually has the ability to get your own IP address without paying for third-party services. I know what I used to use. Keep.

09:34.97

Speaker

Love Keep. Great platform. Used to what we we called Infusionsoft. But we have to used to have to pay for a third-party integrations company so that we could actually use our own IP address when we had a larger list, which makes sense. You don't have to do that in high level, which I really, really love.

09:51.80

Speaker

So the next is entry points. How do we get people onto and into your email marketing platform? Well, in high level, you can make some really simple forms. Let me yeah let me grab some of these forms for you. So for example, if I share this.

10:08.98

Speaker

You can make some really simple forms on some landing pages where people can join your newsletter. So I mentioned my Email Marketing Sorted program. Actually, if you want to see this page, that was built on high level. So yes, it builds. You can build the page and build the forms. So this was all on high level. So if somebody goes to emailmarketingsorted.com... and they fill in this form, they're now going to be on my email list. And because High Level builds the forms and runs the email marketing, there's nothing to there's no gaps where it all doesn't get connected. You also make landing pages where you can offer people free stuff. So in this case, this is a free ah free course. um Or it could be your newsletter.

10:47.15

Speaker

And the other thing you can do is you could build registration pages for your event. So, for example, we have this webinar that we do sometimes. And again, this was built on high level. And when somebody registers for my webinar, my online masterclass, then again, they're going to enter my email marketing platform where I can follow up with them, nurture them, take care of them, and and make offers to them. You can even make full sales pages. So that like this, this is for my... um for my academy membership. So this all built at high level, but when somebody buys through this sales page, they're now on my email list. You build these things right inside of the high level platform, right? And that means every person who signs up, every person who buys, every person who registers,

11:38.58

Speaker

is now on your email list. You're building your email list. There's no extra tools why you need to use Zapier or something in the middle, like the duct tape of the internet, to actually integrate them.

11:50.14

Speaker

This, having it all in one place, saves me hours. Now, let's talk about analytics. Yeah, snooze fest. It can be a bit boring, but here's the thing.

12:03.03

Speaker

When you can look back at your emails and see which ones got high opens, more clicks and made more sales, that just tells you what to do more of, right? since your emails and your forms and your sales pages all happen in this one platform, You can easily see how well something is performing so you don't need to do more of the stuff that is not working and you need to do more of the stuff that is working. I'll tell you an example. I had a meeting with my team about about maybe 18 months ago. We sat in this boardroom that we hired for an afternoon or a day or something.

12:40.79

Speaker

And we pulled up the numbers and we've been paying a social media manager to take care of our various social media. We've been paying like a thousand or so dollars ah a month, like quite i put up quite a bit of cash. And we looked up where all of our leads, who how people were getting onto our email list. And our social media at the time had generated something like five leads in five months. So we'd been doing this for five, six, seven, eight months and basically bringing in no leads. So when you can look at the analytics and go, oh, our social media channels, our Instagram at the time or whatever it was,

13:15.61

Speaker

It's not bringing us any leads. know what going to We're going to stop that. but It's just not working. The strategy is not working. Do we want to put the effort into it? No. So I just immediately messaged the person who was our social media manager and said, look, i think we're going just stop doing this. We cut a massive expense from the business, not just ah a financial expense, but the fact that every week I had to create social media content which was also a big time suck that I i could be doing other style other stuff with. So I could only do that because I can look into inside the GHL and I can say in a high level and go, oh, this is where these leads came from. This is what they bought. This is what they did. And here's a big one.

13:53.14

Speaker

When it all goes wrong, how easy is it to get customer support? Look, if you want help finding out how to do something or you need some help and we want to know that we can actually reach out and get good help. I've been amazed over the past 20 years.

14:13.69

Speaker

And how many of these email marketing and CRM and all these platforms, how terrible their customer support is. You have to send them an email and wait three days and they come back with a question. and You reply and you wait another three days. It just takes forever.

14:29.53

Speaker

Yes, in high level, I love the automation builder. I love that I can build sales pages. I love that I can take payments through it. I love that it's all in one place. So i only have one platform to log into and I can give different users to different different people, different usernames so they can log in and help me with different tasks. I love all these things about it.

14:49.37

Speaker

But the thing I love the most that blew me away was when I realized if I needed help, like, where is this thing? How do I do that? Is this possible or is this broken? By the way, it's never been broken. It's generally me. That's just like, oh, I'm an idiot. I didn't realize it was there. i That's how you did it.

15:05.83

Speaker

Here's how you can actually contact a customer support. First of all, you can, of course, chat to an AI chatbot, which will often just show you the answer. Hey, where do I do this? Oh, it's just here. Instant, done, awesome.

15:17.27

Speaker

The next thing you can do is you can live chat with a human being in the chat if that chatbot like runs out of steam. And of course, you can email as usual, but here's when it got really insane for me. twenty four seven you can get on a real-time Zoom call one-to-one with their customer support.

15:38.52

Speaker

And they literally will get on, share their screen, or be on camera. You're sharing your screen. You go inside of your app. They know the app inside out. And they will walk you through it and solve any problem with you. This is probably the best tech customer support I have ever seen.

15:57.18

Speaker

So that's all really good. That's me singing the praise. But now let's get into the pricing. Because I know pricing is important to people. Now, this is one of those platforms...

16:08.09

Speaker

17:04.18

Speaker

I go to the USD and I do monthly. It's $12 a month to have the calendar booking system. Well, there's a calendar booking system which looks exactly and works pretty much exactly like Calendly already in JHL. And then you've got your email marketing platform. Okay, let's take a look at a few different examples, all right? So we've got Keep, which is what I used to use. used to be called Infusionsoft. For about 4,000 contacts, all right, um you have to have two users with Keep. That's $383 month. Now, the good news is

17:35.58

Speaker

Keep also used to charge $2,000 as a setup fee on top of that. They don't do that anymore, thankfully. So you can just get going for $383. And it's really good. I used Keep for years. It was best in class. So $383. MailChimp is the one that some people get sort of pulled into because it starts off as free. But then as soon as you start getting any decent number of subscribers... So if you get, again, i'm trying to get that sort of 4,000 to 5,000 subscribers. If we got subscribers...

18:04.73

Speaker

On their standard plan, it's going to be free for 14 days, and then it's going be 100 a month. okay And then, and bear in mind, that doesn't do calendars and and all that sort of stuff. Or you've got ActiveCampaign, another massive player in the space. And basically, what you're talking about for ActiveCampaign, ooh, they really don't want me to go. ah What they want here is basically $79 a month for, because these ones here, noticed when was looking at this, they have like um basic automation stuff, like or um limited segment, sorry, limited segmentation.

18:36.12

Speaker

Like I want to be able to pick and choose like how I divide my audience up so I can segment and and talk to my audience about what's relevant to them. I don't want any limitations around that. That seems crazy to me. So um I think the only one that I would really want to go with was $79 a month. Okay, and that's if it's billed annually. where's the Where's the monthly plan? I can't even find the monthly plan. So i don't know how that's going work. So it's probably going to be, i would say, my guess is it's going to be about 99 a month or something like that from then.

19:06.52

Speaker

So that's what you could do. The total for that, right? um If you did ActiveCampaign's most basic um plan, including the ah having a page builder like ClickFunnels, having a calendar system, and having ActiveCampaign's sort of plan here, this plan, um then you'd be talking about $188 month.

19:27.61

Speaker

and And they all have limits on how many email subscribers you can have. It says email contacts. Actually, that's more. Oh, my goodness. That's $205 a month. The smallest plan would be $79 a month if it's billed annually, which is going to be $99 a month if it's billed monthly, I'm guessing, right? So it goes much, much higher.

19:47.45

Speaker

Now, one of the things I don't like doing is worrying about how many contacts I've got. Because every time I get more contacts, what we used to do is go, there anyone we can get rid of? Because I don't want to go to that next tier where I go from 5,000 to 7,500 and my bill jumps up like that. like I don't want to be having that additional worry in my business.

20:06.62

Speaker

What's really beautiful about high level is the pricing, the package that I use. I don't use the $4.97 package because I'm not creating an agency where I'm selling high level. I don't even use the $2.97 a month agency ah but but ah package. I use the $97 a month package.

20:26.68

Speaker

You can have three different sub accounts. mean, you can basically run three different businesses from this if you want to do one for you and maybe a side hustle and a and a friend's one. And unlimited contacts.

20:38.46

Speaker

And to be fair, Keep charges you more to have additional users. So High Level allows you to have additional users. I forgot about that until just now. So to bring all of those things together under one roof, right, for the best price and the best feature set, everything that natively connects to each other and it lets you grow,

20:59.60

Speaker

I can't find anything that even comes close to high level, which is why we are all in on it. It's why we use it in our business and we help, you know, we obviously help people with it, right? We actually don't have an agency where we help people, but like we love seeing people use it. Actually, I might even do a full video about my whole high level setup that runs my entire business automatically. So it like serves everyone, turns subscribers into buyers day and If you'd like me to do that video and just let me know in the comments and I'll,

21:25.98

Speaker

i'll Let me know and I'll show you all the cool stuff that I've got going on inside of my high level account. Now, if you do want to think take this for a spin and go, know what is? I like take this for a spin and go and use the same platform as me and my businesses are using. Go use the link below and get a 14 day free trial and go and see why I like it so much and see how much stuff you can do with it. Now, if you want to see my entire automated system for turning brand new subscribers into paying clients really, really quickly, check out this next video and I'll show you exactly how we do that and we do we even do that in high level. See then.