If you sell a high-ticket course or programme, you’ve felt the change. The monthly promotion that used to do the heavy lifting now lands in an inbox flooded with AI-written noise and hardly registers.
The problem isn’t your course. Audiences are desensitised. After the pandemic pushed everyone online, email newsletters exploded. Then AI made it cheap to send something every day, and people tuned out. The direct email pitch, however well crafted, has worn out its welcome.
Better email copy alone won’t repair this. You need a layer of intimacy between you and the people on your list.
The Sales Slump Is Not a Product Problem
Response to high-ticket selling has been in sluggish decline for a couple of years. The trigger predates AI, and it started during the pandemic. When everyone moved online, the number of email newsletters ballooned. Inboxes that used to be manageable became flooded.
Then AI arrived. Now those newsletters are written faster, sent every day, and read less. The signal-to-noise ratio is shot. People are tuning out, and their expectations have hit rock bottom. Making your own emails better helps, but craftsmanship alone won’t cut through that much noise.
The product didn’t get worse. Neither did the market. What changed is the environment your promotions land in, and the relationship people have with their inbox. That is the thing to repair first.
The repair has a name: intimacy.
What Intimacy Means in Online Marketing
Intimacy is the reason anyone does business with one person online and not another. It means creating a more direct, more in-person experience through the mediums you already have.
Email can do a lot if you have a personality behind it. Video does more, which is why so much business has moved to YouTube. Live video does more than recorded video, because while it’s happening the person can interact with you in real time. That’s the closest thing to being in the same room, and it’s the most intimate thing you can do online.
That’s the difference between attention and relationship. Attention is fragile. Relationship is what makes a buyer choose you when your product comes up. Right now, attention is scarce and content is everywhere. Intimacy is how you earn the relationship that direct email used to rely on.
Sell the Live Event Before the Product
The old model was simple: every month, you sent an email whose only job was to sell the main product. You might change the angle, unpack a different piece of the course, but the destination never changed. You sold directly, every time.
Your list has seen that move hundreds of times and learned to ignore it. So the sequence has to change. Before you sell the product, sell the audience on spending time with you. The live event becomes the intermediary step.
Here is the shape: email, live event, sale. The email stops making the pitch and points people to a live workshop, training, Q&A or paid session. That event creates intimacy. Then you make the sale either on the live event itself or in the follow-up emails to people who attended.
I use this flow a lot. It works because it concentrates attention. Think of your audience’s attention as the sun. On its own it’s strong, but it won’t set fire to a leaf. A live event is the magnifying glass that channels all that energy into one place. That is when the leaf catches fire. In business terms, that means someone who has just spent time with you, focused on the topic, wanting to learn more, and buying.
Live Workshops, Q&As, and $100 Paid Events Create the Intimacy
There are a few ways to build intimacy into your marketing, and none of them are new. Webinars have been around for a decade. In their best form they’re simply a live teaching session, not a disguised sales event. A free training or workshop where you teach something useful for half an hour or an hour gives people a reason to show up.
A Facebook Live or Instagram Live does the same thing. The fact that you’re there, responding in real time, makes it feel more like a conversation and less like a broadcast.
A third format is the low-ticket paid workshop. I sell $100 workshops where I teach one specific thing for a couple of hours. The sale of the ticket isn’t the goal. What the buyer has actually done is pay to spend time with you, and that earns you the right to sell something next.
These formats are working again for a simple reason. It isn’t novelty. It’s intimacy. People have been drowning in automated content. A live event is the opposite of that, and that’s why it stands out.
Choose one format to run first. A free live training is the easiest to schedule. A paid workshop gives you a room of people who have already paid to be there.
How to Build a 12-Month Hub-and-Spoke Promotional Calendar
Once you have one live format, you can stop treating your promotional calendar as a schedule of sales emails and start treating it as a system for getting people into live events. Put your main high-ticket product in the centre. That’s the destination. Around it, place a rotating set of live events.
Over a 12-month period, you might run a few paid workshops at $100 each. In other months, run free trainings, Q&As, live teardowns or breakdowns. The occasional direct email sale still works, and you can keep it. The difference is that it’s no longer the only thing you do.
Some events are free. Some are paid. All of them lead back to the main product, either on the event itself or in the follow-up. That’s the hub-and-spoke model. The promotional calendar stops being a direct sales tool and becomes a way to route attention into intimacy, and then into the high-ticket offer.
I’ve seen people implement this over the last year and watched their fortunes turn around. That’s an observation about what happens when you’re the person showing up live while everyone else sends AI slop, not a promise about your numbers.
This Only Works if You Show Up Live
This model is not passive. The days of building and letting SEO run while you sleep are ending. That might be disappointing, but it’s also the opportunity. Showing up is the thing your competitors won’t do.
Your next move isn’t to write another sales email. Pick one live format from the previous section. It could be a free Q&A, a live training, or a paid workshop. Put it on the calendar before your next direct promotion. The email then stops selling and starts inviting.
I’ve also found this way of working more rewarding than the old passive model. Spending live time with your audience is energising in a way that scheduling another email never is. You get to see people respond to your teaching, which is what you got into this for.
That’s the whole change. Where attention goes, money flows. Show up, teach something useful, and let the relationship do the selling that the old email used to do.
