You're smashing it at the gym - and helping your clients to do the same. But how's your online outreach going? Did you know that even a simple email list can help you to reap the rewards of digital marketing?
Many B2C businesses use email marketing. This is because it's 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. The first step to effective email marketing is to have an email list for the people who may be interested in your services.
Hopefully, you've been collecting client's email addresses as they sign up with you. But perhaps you're only using them one at a time to communicate with individuals, rather than emailing all your clients at once.
There are times when one-to-one emails are necessary. But an email list can make promoting your business so much easier. Here are 9 reasons you need to build one right away.
1. You Can Save Time by Talking to Everyone at Once
Typing out a whole list of email addresses isn't how you want to be spending your time. Definitely not if you're doing it each time you send your marketing emails.
If you build an email list, you'll save so much time for your fitness coach business. Adding new contacts can be a regular job and should only take a few minutes for small businesses.
Not only can you talk to everyone using your email list. You're also guaranteed to actually reach everyone. The same can't be said for social or SEO strategies.
Of course, social and SEO can be useful for reaching people you're not already in contact with. But if you want all your clients to see a special offer or a new workout video you've made, email is the way to go.
Some emails may fall into your customer's junk boxes.
You might want to follow up on recent campaigns with people you see shortly afterwards at the gym. Ask if they got your email and if they're interested. They might realize it's in their junk and go check it out. Or they might just say yes on the spot!
2. You Can Be Yourself
Emails don't have to be impersonal. You can be friendly, chatty, conversational - whatever best suits you and your business.
An email list may seem impersonal in a way, but just think of it as speaking to a room full of energetic gym-goers. You've got their email addresses because they are interested.
They want to train with a personal trainer, and they specifically want to know more about your training services. Give your emails the personal touch to let them know you're the fitness coach for them.
Don't take it over the top. Remember that keeping things simple is often the best way to get clicks. And when we say 'be yourself', we don't mean 'focus on yourself'. Make it about the customer. But always be engaging.
3. Keep Clients up to Date and Manage Their Expectations
Adding your clients to an email list means that you can answer a lot of their questions via that platform. You can keep everybody up to date about what's going on.
You don't want to be sending out the same email every week with your schedules and availability. If you have a website, you might consider investing in some kind of timetabling software to help them visualize this.
But, that could be expensive.
With emails, you can do more basic - but useful - things, such as letting everybody know if you're away or unavailable. It'll take you about 10 minutes. Rather than taking four hours to email everybody individually.
And while you're letting them know you're away, how about pushing them towards some specific exercises to do while you're out of town? It'll keep them occupied, and hopefully out of the hands of your rivals.
4. You Can Personalize Your Email Marketing
Perhaps one of the most powerful things about email marketing is that you can personalize your emails. This means that you can directly address each individual rather than going with a generic subject line.
For this to work, you need to build a strong database with forenames and surnames to fill in variables in your templates. You definitely don't want to send out emails that open: "Dear <<USERFIELD>>".
But "Hey David" is good. It's so much better than "Dear valued customer," or an impersonal "Hi everybody."
In fact, it's so good that it delivers six times higher transaction rates than a generic email, but 70% of brands fail to use them.
However, it's not always as simple as using the right name.
Think about the information you collect about clients, and how personalized emails could help you target specific groups of people from your email list.
How To Use Personal Data
In its most basic form, you could use personal data to send each customer a special offer on their birthday, like a half-price session during the next week.
At a more complex level, when you know lots about what various people's fitness goals are, you can categorize these and use them to target sectors of your email list rather than sending each email to everybody.
If you know you have a lot of clients interested in cardio training, send them the latest information about your spin class. If you've got a group of clients who are more into strength training, send them your next barbell routine.
Using personalized email could get you way out ahead of your competition. It can also make you seem much more approachable. Some of your customers may never even suspect it's a one-fits-all email!
5. Enjoy a Massive Return on Investment
Email marketing has the highest return on investment of any marketing channel. While there's a place for SEO, PPC, social and more when it comes to digital, we can't overstate the importance of email marketing as part of your strategy.
It's fairly cheap to start up and manage an email list. However, there's some time investment to consider when building your list from scratch.
Once it's up and running, you can use various free online platforms like MailChimp to send thousands of emails a month for nothing.
That's probably more than enough to suit a small business, but if you're growing at speed then you can probably afford the pricing set on these platforms.
Either way, in terms of your returns, you're looking at average returns of slightly higher than $28 for every single dollar spent on email marketing.
To achieve such a high return, you'll need to be consistent. Each email should look to support and build on the previous message.
Communicate Value
You need to give your customers 'value'. What this means, is that there needs to be something for them in every email.
That can't be an offer every time. Share new workout techniques, important health and diet information and other material to supplement your core message.
You can also try to build out the content you send with links to videos, interesting blogs and other content. If the only emails you send are pushing your own services, people may switch off. You'll lose valuable revenue potential.
6. It's More Direct Than Search and Social
With a good email list and engaging email copy, you can drive people right to your site.
More importantly, you can bring them right onto the exact page you want them to see.
You can try to do this in search using search engine optimization. But your target audience might get diverted by other results, or they might not land on exactly the page you want them to - and then bounce back out.
You can also make posts on social media about your business. But without paying (and even if you do pay) the exposure rate is relatively low. Organic exposure for small companies on Facebook is around 6% while email open rates are nearly 22%.
Well-known marketer Derek Halpern conducted a test to see which would generate more clicks - a link in a tweet, or in an email list. The Twitter link took 50 clicks. The email link was clicked over 1,200 times.
Plus, the email was highly targeted at a very specific audience. We don't think we have to spell out which is better for your business.
An email list will help you to get straight to the people you want to target. And even if they're not opened, they are far more likely to be seen. So your name will stay on the reader's mind, even if they don't dig deeper.
One more point when comparing email to other channels is that subscribers are much more likely to share content via social networks than other visitors who came to your site without the email prompt.
7. Special Promotions Using an Email List Are Valuable
Have you ever thought about doing a special promotion or giveaway?
Email marketing is a great way to raise awareness of the promotion. And the promotion itself is an effective method to build up your email list - it's a cyclical system that can bring major benefits to your company.
Say that you want to give away six hours of personal training to one lucky winner. Send out a promotional email, start making a fuss on social, and promote the competition when you're next at the gym too.
You're sure to get a lot of interest. But make sure that the people who enter are either already on your email list, or are supplying an email in order to take part.
Hopefully, you'll massively build your email list at the relatively low expense of trading away a few training hours. In the end, the giveaway should more than pay for itself as new clients sign up with you and your business.
Since your existing customers are fairly likely to share the competition with their friends, you've got word-of-mouth on your side too.
8. You Can Follow Up Easily
Just to be clear, you should never send too many emails to people.
You should also give them control over unsubscribing from the list if they really want to. It's your job to keep them interested in what you're sending.
Email fatigue can be identified before it becomes a real issue. Lower open rates on your campaigns and fewer clicks are symptoms of a wider problem that will lead to users unsubscribing. Be careful, and monitor what your audience is doing.
That said, a good follow up contact to your email list can nudge the door open wider. Only do this when you've got something worth talking about - like a competition or a promotion. The extra push might be all they need to click through.
But tread the line carefully, Don't overdo it.
9. You'll Reach People While They're on the Go
You've probably had to encourage people to leave their smartphones in the locker rooms than be distracted by them on the gym floor.
But when they're not in the gym, you want your clients to be glued to their devices. They're probably only too happy to oblige. We're more addicted to our smartphones than ever before.
Most emails are opened on mobile devices (that's smartphones and tablets). Catch your customers in their downtime. They might be walking to work, commuting, or relaxing at home.
Wherever they are, if their phone buzzes, these days it's almost guaranteed they'll at least check out the subject line.
If that subject line is a catchy, personalized effort, expect the phone calls to come in fast.
Manage and train your clients effectively
Once you've built up your email list and acquired new customers, you need to manage and train them to fulfill their potential.
Xerofit is an online platform which helps professional personal fitness trainers to be as efficient as possible. If you're a personal fitness trainer, and especially if you have a strong online presence, our site is full of valuable advice for your online systems and strategy.
Learn how to get clients, retain them and keep them happy - while making more money.
Join Xerofit for free today, and make use of our cutting edge tools to save yourself time, boost your revenue and delight your clients.