Pre-Selling With Email: Your Ticket To More Certainty And Less Stress With Product Launches
Dec 15, 2025
One of the worst experiences in the world is spending a ton of time building a digital product-
And then launching it to crickets.
I (unfortunately) speak from experience. I’m the co-founder of a company that teaches people Egyptian Arabic. I lived in Cairo for three years, and spent the entire time creating thousands of vocab cards. When I tried to sell them?
Silence. A few people bought, but not nearly as many as I had expected. Why?
People wanted a more structured approach to learn the language. Vocab cards are cool - but not that structured.
Making only a few thousand dollars from that much work? Not fun.
This is where pre-selling comes in. If you want more certainty and less stress (and more money) with your launches, pre-selling should be a fundamental part of your typical “promo flow.”
(And it would have saved me a bunch of heartache with my vocab cards, as I will show you below.)
In this post I'm talking about:
What preselling is
Why preselling with email is worth it (and the benefits you can expect when you do it)
My advice for running a successful presale through email (so you can be less stressed and make more money from your education business)
What Pre-Selling Actually Is
Alright, in case you don’t know:
Pre-selling for education businesses is when you start selling access to your new program / product before it’s actually ready to be purchased.
Typically you will make the announcement of when your product is actually available, offer something in return for “pre-buyers” (a discount of exclusive bonuses), and then collect money upfront before you have finished the creation process.
Pretty straight-forward.
Why Pre-Selling With Email Is Worth It
There are multiple reasons you should make pre-sales part of your typical launch cycle:
You validate whatever it is you are creating. If hardly anybody buys during a pre-sale, they probably aren’t going to buy when you actually launch either. And if that happens, you can just pull the plug before you spend a bunch of time creating something nobody wants (vocab cards, cough cough).
You get money coming in. It usually costs money (and time) to make new products. Get some of that money upfront, and you have a whole lot more wiggle room with the product creation.
You use buyer psychology to your advantage. There are a number of psychological principles that are well-suited to preselling with email.
You force yourself to deliver. This is huge. Launching a new product or program can feel so overwhelming that you never do it. But gather people's money before you've actually built anything? I promise you that the shame of not coming through (and the embarrassment that comes with it) will light a fire under you. I've never been as productive as when I was working on a presale.
A presale forces you to be good. Kind of related to the last one, but still important. Here’s the thing: a good presale is relatively simple. But not necessarily easy to pull off successfully. Your marketing has to be a bit tighter overall. What that means: run one, and you will become a better marketer. And lastly-
You get “two bites at the cherry”.
Funny story: one of my past managers was Irish and always used this phrase (“two bites at the cherry”) when we were planning our presales. It always creeped me out (feels weirdly sexual, let’s be honest) - but it’s completely true.
What he meant is that you get two rounds of sales: pre-buyers, and “regular” buyers later. The skeptical person might assume that this doesn't really matter (you get the same amount of buyers right?), but that's not actually the case.
Some people aren’t ready to buy now, but will be ready to later. As for the pre-buyers? Set it up correctly (just follow the tips below woohoo) and you can scoop up buyers that might not otherwise have bought at all.
The point?
You will probably make more money overall doing a presale + regular sale than one big promo when your product is ready.
Your 5 Steps To Pre-Selling With Email
Like anything, there's about a million ways to go about a presale.
But after running dozens for clients and myself, here are the five things you shouldn't forget:
#1: Clearly explain why you are doing a presale
There is a natural order of things that people are used to: you pay for something, you get it immediately in return.
Because a pre-sale doesn’t follow this model, it’s natural for people to be confused.
(Imagine if you went to a grocery store. You hand the cashier a few bucks for your things - and she tells you “come back in a few months.” WTF?)
It’s your job to clearly explain WHY you are doing a presale. This clears things up for potential buyers and quiets any fears they have of handing over money so far ahead of time.
So just be clear with them: “your money is funding the creation of this program.” That’s an easy and honest one to use. But how to actually get that money?
Keep reading!
#2: Use buyer psychology to your advantage
Like I said above, a pre-sale naturally plays to buyer psychology. So you best be using this to your advantage. :)
Here is one big thing I recommend:
Telling them they are helping with the creation of this course or product. This is the Ikea Effect at its finest: we feel more connected to something when we feel like we have
The cool thing if you play on enough of these psychological triggers? You can actually build super fans.
#3: Give prebuyers some kind of obvious benefit
Let’s face it: nobody but your “super fans” are going to be excited to spend money now, but get something in later. So make sure you give something to them now as well.
Here are two things that you might only give to prebuyers:
Discount. Make it cheaper to enroll now vs. later. If people have the money and are smart shoppers, they might jump on the chance to save 20-30%.
Bonuses. You can kill two birds with one stone here by making your “bonus” some kind of email or video series that you send out to pre-buyers. That way you 1) send out value to them but also 2) can use that finished “mini product” as an upsell on launch day.
One thing I will say: as great as preselling with email is, you don’t want to do it too far out of the launch date. I’d say ~6 months is kind of the max here. Any longer and it starts to feel a bit weird.
#4: Communicate clearly with your pre-buyers
Nobody wants to give their money, get nothing in return, and then get ghosted. Keep people informed.
I’d say a good rule of thumb is “emailing pre-buyers once every two weeks.” This will depend on the timeframe you are working with (3-6 months before launch is a good window to work with), but your pre-buyers should basically be as “up-to-date as possible.”
#5: Do whatever you need to do to deliver on time
This should go without saying (unless you're one of those d-bags that wants to scoop up some quick cash and then disappear into the night-do not recommend), but you need to deliver.
People that spend money on something before it's actually available are instilling major trust in you. Do what you need to do. Long nights. Working on weekends. Hiring outside help. Whatever it is, make it happen.
Delivering on time is important for a few reasons:
It pushed you to become a better marketer and business owner
It builds your reputation as a business that delivers on its promises
Your pre-buyers, because they took a chance on you, are the ones that are most likely to become lifelong customers
Always remember this!