The niche where automation is used most and misused most. Education is a purchase of trust, and trust does not arrive in a first message.
Why direct selling fails
Someone who has never heard of you receives a course offer. They do not know who you are or why you should be trusted with money and time. Response approaches zero and complaints land on precisely these messages.
The two-step approach
Step one is a cold contact that does not sell but demonstrates competence: a useful answer in a discussion, a teardown of someone's question, a specific observation. Step two is an invitation to where you say more — a channel, a breakdown, a free resource.
The sale happens at step three, to people who have read you. The gap in response between that and cold outreach is a multiple.
The role of the channel
Here the channel is not a shopfront but the place where someone becomes convinced. So it needs teardowns and answers rather than cohort announcements. A channel of announcements will not hold the people you paid to attract, and the traffic budget leaks out through unsubscribes.
What to measure
Not cost per sale but cost per list subscriber and the number of sales the list produces in a year. The same list serves several launches — that is the economics of it. More in the DM selling piece.