You spend 10 hours creating the perfect lead magnet.
A comprehensive PDF guide. 47 pages. Beautifully designed. Packed with insights your audience desperately needs.
You launch it. 1,000 people download it.
Three weeks later, you check the data: 3% read past page 5.
The other 97%? Sitting in a downloads folder they'll never open again.
Meanwhile, Educational Email Courses (EECs) get 70-80% completion rates.
Same audience. Same value. Completely different psychology.
Here's why PDFs fail and EECs succeed, and how to design an email course people actually finish.
Let's be honest about what happens when someone downloads your PDF:
"I'll read this later."
Later never comes.
The PDF sits in their downloads folder with 47 other lead magnets they promised themselves they'd read.
The psychology: Future tasks feel less urgent. Present tasks demand attention. Your PDF is always a "future task."
47 pages of content = overwhelming.
Even if it's valuable, it feels like work.
And when people are overwhelmed, they procrastinate.