You may have heard the term email marketing, but what does it actually mean for the fitness industry and for you as a personal trainer? Put most simply, email marketing is using email in order to promote or grow your personal training business.
Some of the ways you use email marketing may include:
- Nurturing relationships with your current and ex-clients
- Informing current followers and clients about new brand developments and services
- Sending out coupons to foster loyalty
Some believe email marketing is old news, but in fact, it still remains one of the most successful types of marketing around.
It’s been in existence nearly as long as the Internet itself, so it has had a lot of time to evolve and change.
Hence, it still poses as one of the best ways to reach customers online. Here's how you can get started.
Email Marketing for Personal Trainers. Is it Worth it?
Email marketing can be utilized to build a level of trust with clients you already have, keep them engaged and satisfied to boost client retention and all of the data shows it actually works!
According to statistics from the DMA, email marketing has a huge return on investment.
Email campaigns can also be used as a way to relay information about your brand to your audience and let them know about news, promotions or simply provide value via free resources and content, like blogging.
Anyone that has subscribed to your email newsletter wants to stay informed about what your fitness brand does and email is one of the smartest ways you can do so.
What Software to Use for Email Marketing?
One of the most popular among persona trainers is Aweber. You can send out one-off campaigns, create autoresponders and create multiple lists for the different lead magnets you have set up on your personal trainer website.
This will allow you to segment your subscribers based on their interests. Most email marketing software will provide these features at least.
If your email marketing software is a decent one, you'll be able to check the analytics of your email campaigns. This will give you useful data such as the open rates of your emails, how many people click through and the conversions you’ve made from them.
Email marketing is a very effective tool to grow your small personal training businesses into a bigger fitness venture over time. An added bonus is that email marketing is also quite cost-effective and very easy to keep track of.
What Benefits Does Email Marketing Have Over Other Marketing Types?
Almost everybody has an email address today, whatever niche you are targeting. Even if your ideal clients don't hang out much on social media, you will be able to reach them through email. All you need to do is position your website in front of the right audience via Search Engine Optimisation, so they can subscribe to your email lists.
A study by Campaign Monitor found that consumers prefer to receive email communications from brands when compared to other channels, such as direct mail, mobile apps, social media or push notifications.
A study by Campaign Monitor found that consumers prefer to receive email communications from brands when compared to other channels, such as direct mail, mobile apps, social media or push notifications.
In other words, email is considered the best place to do business and making use of email marketing allows you to strengthen your relationship with your clients, followers and develop a bigger audience.
With data protection laws and regulations in place you can be sure that people on your email lists are actually interested in what you want to share. Your subscribers agree to receive your email newsletter during the subscription process, so you don't need to worry about spamming and cold contacting potential leads.
You just need to make sure you send them relevant, interesting and engaging content so they will want to stay on your list to receive more.
With data protection laws and regulations in place you can be sure that people on your email lists are actually interested in what you want to share. Your subscribers agree to receive your email newsletter during the subscription process, so you don't need to worry about spamming and cold contacting potential leads.
You just need to make sure you send them relevant, interesting and engaging content so they will want to stay on your list to receive more.
How Do You Get an Email Marketing Campaign Going?
Creating and sending your first email marketing campaign is not hard. Once you chose your email marketing software, you can start setting up your account and can customise email templates to your brand. You can even insert tags that grab your subscribers' name to make the email sound personal.
Another great way to maximise your campaigns is to segment your email lists. Segmenting your email list allows you to send different emails to different parts of your audience based on their problems and interests.
For example those who want to lose weight and those that want to bulk up can receive relevant content to their problem when you set them up in separate segments or lists by creating relevant lead magnets and email campaigns for both.
Of course, before you can begin to send emails out to your email list, you have to grow the list itself. There are a few ways to grow your email list from scratch:
- Promote lead magnets for people at different stages of their buyers journey via social media
- Add a subscription CTA to your blog page
- Use paid ads to drive traffic to your resource sign-up pages
What Kind of Email Marketing Content Should You Use?
Once your email list is growing, you can plan out the emails that you wish to send. There are plenty of different types of content that you can choose to include in your emails.
One of the great things about email marketing is that it is customisable – more so than many other forms of advertising. Some of the content you may choose to send in your emails include:
One of the great things about email marketing is that it is customisable – more so than many other forms of advertising. Some of the content you may choose to send in your emails include:
- Fitness articles on your website
- Giving subscribers loyalty rewards
- Sharing success stories
- Promoting new offers
- Announcing services updates
How Do You Optimise Your Email Campaigns?
Optimising your email campaigns ensures that you get the best response possible. For example, a subscriber to your list may not open an email if they’re busy at the time when you send it.
Because of the usefulness of email marketing software, you should be able to work out the best days and times for your email subscribers to receive your emails. Some of the most common times include early mornings before people go to work and after work hours.
WordStream has collated data from email campaign software to figure out the best times with the latest updates from Apr 2019.
Because of the usefulness of email marketing software, you should be able to work out the best days and times for your email subscribers to receive your emails. Some of the most common times include early mornings before people go to work and after work hours.
WordStream has collated data from email campaign software to figure out the best times with the latest updates from Apr 2019.
WordStream: Perfect Timing: The Very Best Time to Send Email Newsletters
You can also use data from past emails to make improvements on how you send future emails. You can even automate your emails to make things easier for yourself.
Email Marketing 101 - Get Involved!
Email marketing is still a powerful force for keeping your personal training clients and online followers engaged and growing your audience.
While email marketing may take time, the time that you do invest it is more than worth it. If you feel you'd like to invest in someone to take care of setting up your software, creating your lists and lead magnet CTAs (Call-to-Action), we offer an Email Marketing Add-On for our Managed Website clients.
While email marketing may take time, the time that you do invest it is more than worth it. If you feel you'd like to invest in someone to take care of setting up your software, creating your lists and lead magnet CTAs (Call-to-Action), we offer an Email Marketing Add-On for our Managed Website clients.
