Tips to Help You Master Email Marketing for Your Fitness Business
July 31, 2023
Welcome to the ever-evolving age where the importance of gaining and retaining business is more critical than ever. With 59% of consumers reporting that email marketing regularly influences their purchase decisions, and over 50% buying from a marketing email at least once per month––having a good or bad email marketing program can, quite literally, make or break the long-term success and growth of your fitness studio.
If you’re looking for ways to create a strong email marketing program and are curious if the one you currently have in place is hitting the mark—keep reading. We’re here to tell you about seven simple steps for email marketing that will increase revenue at your fitness studio.
1. Break through the noise
Make sure your efforts stand out in a crowded inbox. Customers are, most likely, receiving dozens of emails per day. This means the very first step you must address in email marketing is how to get your customers to open what you’re sending them. You could have perfect, intriguing content inside your email––but if your customers aren’t enticed with your subject line, they aren’t going to open it. To drive the best open rate, you need a quality subject line. Your subject lines need to be informal, enticing, and answer the number one question––does it grab your attention? If you do this, you will retain more sales and more success.
2. Build a frictionless checkout
Making the checkout process as seamless as possible will ensure that your customers do not get frustrated, leave in the middle of checkout, and most importantly, associate your checkout with that of convenience. To make sure you’re doing this right, it’s important to address your business’s priorities beforehand. Ask yourself these questions:
- What is your number one goal with your email?
- What will be your button text?
- What link will you use?
Being specific and answering these questions ahead of time will ensure an increase in sales and a better email marketing program overall.
3. Promote your video classes
Promoting your video classes is a powerful retention tool—especially if it’s a part of your memberships—for giving yourself something to talk about. It’s a great opportunity to put your valuable content into your customers' inbox and get them more familiar with your content. Doing something like a weekly round-up or video of the week is an efficient way to give your customers something to engage with while also getting them back into their workout.
4. Use email to nurture your customers
First, let’s consider newsletters vs. email automation. With a 20-30% open rate over the last twenty years, newsletters are great tools in pointing out one-time events or changes. Email automation, on the other hand, gets about a 50-60% open rate on average—making them much more personalized to your customers. They are much more targeted, with subject lines being more personalized to the customer—making it special to them and specific to their goals. If you want to focus on nurturing your customer with email marketing going forward, you need to be looking at email automation.
5. Use email to automate your outreach
Consider this the sister strategy to nurturing your customers through email. Whereas nurturing is for customers who are already engaged in your business, automating your outreach is primarily used to target lapsed customers who are disengaged and have stopped coming to classes. This is like the “we miss you” emails, but more specific. With automated emails, you can pinpoint customers based on how long it’s been since they’ve been to your business. Based on personalized specifics, you can give them an offer that’s focused on their unique experience––making it more likely for them to reengage with your business.
6. Convey your brand message
The small details and words in your brand messaging matter a lot. Your images matter. Including real-time photos of what is going on in your studio is a great way to connect your customers to what’s going on in your business. Analyze your brand to decide what voice and tone you want to adopt in your emails––whether that’s humor, emojis, or stories. Read your emails to yourself to avoid any dull corporate jargon that may disengage your target audience and break it up into short concise paragraphs that readers can skim through on their phones. Incorporating these strategies is an effective strategy to personalize your brand.
7. Build your subscriber list
You need to create value in your first email to get customers engaged. Once you do this, you can continue to nurture them to retain continuous engagement. You should also get rid of the “subscribe for studio news and updates” and replace it with something more personalized that your customer cares about. Once you have their attention, it’s best to follow up with a welcome sequence. Identify your business’s main goal and build your subscriber list through an intro offer tailored to it.
When it comes to increasing your sales at your fitness studio, email marketing is one of the most efficient tools to do so. These tips are guaranteed ways to fine-tune your existing email marketing strategy or guide you in the process of building a new one.
