First of all, you may not have to write them. Depending on what you are doing and if you are on a team and so forth. I have been on many team build projects where the email series were pre-written for me. I just had to get a share code from the team leader and then the emails would all be there. Usually this ties you to a certain autoresponder though. An example would be that Marcy has a website. She invents a program for the website. This program also includes working with an autoresponder as part of the marketing. In this case you will use the autoresponder that Marcy tells you about because it will be specific to her program. The good news is, you will not have to write the emails because she will provide them too you as a share.
If you are not part of a team or cannot find any pre-written emails then you will have some work to do. Each email will have to be properly written and understandable. You don’t want spam words either or the emails will end up in the spam or junk folders. Then the recipient will not get to read your emails.
What are you doing? Your first instinct will be to sell somebody something or tell them about the awesome program or item that you have for sale. This will make them hate your emails. Don’t do it. Instead you will provide value to your potential customer. Give them great information, free ebooks, free programs, tools, anything that will help them in what they are doing. They contacted you and signed up for your list, not because they like you or want to give you money. They want to help themselves and they want you to help them. So do it! Help your customers. The sale can be on the back end or on your main site. Once they trust you and get to know you then they might check out your website. Show them a website but still do not try and sell them anything. Once they see the site let them look around. Now they trust you and they know you. They will be so curious to find out what else you have or can do for them. Make sure your website is obvious as to what you have available to them. Then if they see something the are interested in they might buy it from you.
I have spend many hours either writing or editing pre-written email series for autoresponders. Let me tell you, this can be a lot of tedious work. You must be mentally ready for something like that and have a good amount of time to do it. If you are not good at writing these emails you must come up with something. Maybe you have heard of PLR or articles. If you can find some PLR , articles, ebooks, etc that give you the “rights” to use the material for whatever you want this might help you for content. Let us say that you find an ebook that the author has given you the rights to copy the material in that book and use it any way that you want. Well, you could break this book up into a series of emails instead of keeping it in the ebook format. See how this can be done? Not only that, you want to rewrite the paragraphs a little to give your own spin on it. Maybe you talk a certain way or are humorous. You should show or use your personality in these emails. It will come off better for the person reading them.
How many do I write?
This can be different for each project that you do. I know some people that have a series of emails so large that they send one a day to people every day of the year. This is a huge email series and will take you forever to write, but hey if you want to, be my guest. I normally do between 7 and 10 and I space them a couple of days apart. I don’t like to overwhelm the subscribers. Your emails may be about a specific program or service. If this is what they are, this usually means that you put an ad out for something specific, like a toaster. You really have this amazing toaster! You show them a photo of the toaster in the emails and tell them all about how cool this toaster is. They filled out some form expressing an interest in this toaster that you have, so now you are sending them an autoresponder email series. You write a set amount of emails about this toaster and includes some bad-ass pics of your toaster. There is a link where they click to then go to a page to purchase this toaster. The main study goes like this. Someone sees something about 7 times before they decide they will buy it. So, if you write about 7 to 10 emails about this toaster that should do the trick. If after the 10th email they still did not buy this toaster, it is a good chance that they are not going to buy it.
If instead, you are doing an email series based on an ebook that you got some reprint rights on, like I described before, then you would do enough emails to make a small email course that makes some sense. Maybe take the first 3 or 4 chapters and create a short email series. Then you could use the rest of the book later to do another one.
In conclusion, it is really up to you determining how many emails to write unless the series has been previously created for you.