Email campaigns one of the most effective and important aspects to a personal training business or brand. From offering deals to invite existing customers to rejoin your classes or book a session, promoting new training offerings, to providing ongoing motivation and education around nutrition and workouts - email marketing comes in all different frequencies.
Campaigns differ based on what you're selling, who you're trying to reach, and what your desired result is. There are a lot of tools available for free or with a small monthly fee, that you can use to organize your customer contact list and set up automated campaigns that go out regularly. If you choose to set up a "drip campaign" (an automated campaign that goes out with time delays to specific groups of people), you can take your hands off the wheel and check in and make tweaks on emails every week or month.
A few of our favorite email marketing tools are:
As you make decisions on the best email software tool for your business, here are some starter questions for any personal training business to answer while getting ready to utilize email marketing:
Three important reasons to use email marketing is to retain existing customers, increase your brand recognition (which means getting new clients eventually), and showing off your expertise by educating your audience.
A way to keep existing clients engaged is by offering a seasonal discount, showcasing a new workout goal they can try to achieve, or offering motivation. Increase brand awareness and exercise your expertise via blog articles and videos that show off your methodology and training style.
Set trackable goals for your campaign. Are you hoping that customers respond back, purchase something, or refer a friend? Know what you want to achieve from every email that goes out.
Most tools offer some form of analytics, the most important rates to think about are: Open Rate, Click-Thru Rate, and Subscribe/Unsubscribe Rate. An open rate between 15-20% is the average rate that is considered successful, and an average click-thru rate of 2.5% or higher is decent.
Of course - you want to see more people subscribe and less people unsubscribe after reading your emails, but if you see a drop off from subscribers, take the time to figure out whether someones expectations are being met. For instance, if you entice people to sign up for your email newsletters to learn about health and wellness routines, but then you only try to sell them on booking a class... they would probably unsubscribe.
Learn how to get more personal training clients
Think about your own inbox. What emails from services or companies do you open and why? Picture your customers receiving an email from you. What's your subject line? What's enticing someone to actually open the email? Proof read your email and subject line out loud to check for any grammar or spelling errors.
Consider these subject lines:
Your Spring Guide: Workouts, Recipes and Motivation
Your New Favorite Breakfast for Summer
The One Item You Won't Be Able to Live Without This Winter
Top 5 Excuses To Not Workout - Debunked
It's Almost Tee-Shirt Weather, Tone Triceps, Biceps and More
Stop Hibernating with These Sunny Playlists, Podcasts and Books
10 Travel Workouts to Exercise To Stay In Shape While Traveling
An email with big images or videos can take time to download properly. Be conscious of load time. Test your email many times on all devices. Make sure your layout is optimized for mobile and desktop, and see that your images look good on Apple and Android devices.
What action do you want your reader to take? If you're sharing a blog articles, allow readers to click through to the article. If it's a workout, link out to the video. If it's your website to book a training session, link to that website page. If you want clients to call you about your holiday offer, leave your phone number.
Every email campaign is different. Daily, biweekly, weekly, monthly - no mold fits all. If you're a one person business, it's hard to do it all! You don't have to go crazy with emails, but when you do - make it count. Build a campaign a few months at a time and set clear goals. If you have seasonal offers, monthly updates, and an occasional blog post to share - that's great.
Email marketing is a rewarding and trackable marketing strategy that any company, big or small, can do. A successful campaign leads to a loyal following and an audience that will look forward to receiving your news!
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