E-mail marketing is something that can work extremely well for your personal training business. It’s something that I’ve used successfully with LEP Fitness and have been doing so for around 5 years!

Why e-mail marketing? 

Most people check their inbox everyday and it’s a great way to share content, and attract new business.  I use the service ‘Mailchimp’ – which is free until you get over 2,000 people on your e-mail list (that means you probably wont have to pay for sometime, and when you do have to pay, it will be worth it because of the sales that you’ll be making from your internet marketing!). 

What’s great about MailChimp (apart from being free!) is that it’s easy to create nice looking templates and create a professional e-mail marketing campaign to send out to your audience. You can also schedule it to go out at a specific time. For example I usually send out 1 e-mail campaign per month, and usually send it on the last Friday of the month, at 7pm. Why? Because I know most people will have been paid, and are more likely to have disposable income, and as it’s a Friday evening (out of work hours) they’re more likely to read the e-mail.  

Start Early (it takes time to build an e-mail list)…

I’d recommend starting to build your e-mail list as early on in your personal training career as possible, because it can take some time (even years to build up).

You can build up your list by having opt in forms on your website i.e. where you offer something of value in exchange for an e-mail address e.g. 8 week muscle building plan, where the person interested types in their e-mail address, and then you send them the free 8 week muscle building guide. Once you have their e-mail address you can then start to e-mail them regularly with content and attract them towards investing in you or one of your products. 

Provide Value Before Selling…

The way I use e-mail marketing is by sharing my content, for example I’ll share a blog post and then towards the bottom of the article I’ll link to my services or mention the other blogs I’ve written in the month.

The aim is to provide value i.e. free content to help the reader, and then to get the reader to either invest in my coaching programmes, or continue to read more content by me in the future, which will then hopefully encourage them to sign up at a later date.

The likelihood is that when you start out you won’t sell much, it takes time to build rapport, and to begin with I’d focus on providing value, without doing much selling. Once your audience starts to trust you and reads more of your work, you’ll start to get enquiries and be able to convert your e-mail marketing campaigns into paying customers. 

I also use e-mail marketing to sell my 28 Day Keto Challenge e-book. For example last Christmas I scheduled 4 e-mails over a 4 week period (1 per week). In the e-mails I gave away a bunch of fat loss tips and then after the 4 weeks of free e-mails… I mentioned the 28 Day Keto Challenge product that I sell, I also offered a 20% discount on the product. I sold 35 copies, put another way that’s £350 for about 90 minutes work (setting up and scheduling the e-mails) – that’s not bad is it?

Basically I provided value (4 helpful blogs) and built trust with my audience, then in return…a bunch of my mailing list invested in my 28 Day Keto Challenge. If you want people to invest in your products and services you’ve got to provide value first. 

The 4 keys with e-mail marketing are:

1. Know your audience – who are you talking to (age, sex, hobbies interests) 
2. Find a solution to a problem – figure out a way to provide value and help your readers overcome their obstacle i.e. losing weight (provide 5 tips to help them lose weight) 
3. Have an end goal for each e-mail campaign – what do you want to happen once they’ve finished reading the e-mail? Always have a call to action. That could be ‘to get in touch’ or ‘ask for feedback’, get them to read another blog (where you insert a link to an existing web page) or ask for something along those lines. That way you can measure whether your campaign has been successful. 
4. Be consistent – it will take time before you notice a difference. It will take time to build your list and it will take time to build trust with your audience. You may need to send out 10-20 e-mails before somebody will buy from you! Build that trust, provide value and when the times right for your customer… they will invest in you. 

Thanks for reading,

Nick 🙂

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