Email marketing for gyms: A comprehensive guide

Are you looking for a solution to revamp your gym business? Nothing can beat the power of email marketing. If you think email marketing is an old-fashioned approach, you are right. However, it is still the most effective way to drive business growth. Leveraging social media marketing is helpful; however, email marketing is still the supreme marketing technique.

According to PR Newswire, 86% of customers prefer to receive emails for promotional purposes than ads. In addition, email marketing offers 40x more conversion than other marketing techniques. So, when it comes to building strong relationships with your gym’s members and prospects, gym email marketing is the prime route.

Since email marketing is the backbone of your business, it must be used correctly. It means firing bullets without a specific aim does not bring any good. So, if you want to drive massive growth using gym email marketing, this is your post!

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a powerful marketing technique in which emails are used to promote a business, products, or services. Using emails, you can create awareness regarding your offerings among your target audience. 

In email marketing, the audience is segmented based on their social demographics, interests, and status as lead, and then targeted emails are sent to segmented groups.

Leveraging email marketing helps you build a strong relationship with your audience. In addition, it drives organic traffic to your website, social media accounts, and your establishment.

Categories of email marketing

If you want to initiate email marketing in your gym, you must be aware of its two significant categories, i.e.,

Inbound marketing

Sending emails to your existing customers is known as inbound marketing. The purpose of inbound marketing is to nurture your relationship with your existing customers, making it stronger every day. In addition, inbound marketing provides meaningful, relevant, and valuable information to your customers. It helps make them feel more connected and also keeps them updated about new offers.

Outbound marketing

Sending emails to your potential prospects is known as outbound marketing. The purpose of outbound marketing is to reach out to potential consumers proactively in order to make them interested in your offerings. In this process, the organization sends an email to initiate a conversation with the potential lead so that they can persuade them to convert.

Why is email marketing for gyms important?

To make your gym business successful, it is vital to have a strong client base. However, building a client base does not happen overnight. It requires consistency and patience to make a relationship and nurture it to the core. If you are wondering about the significance of email marketing for gyms, take a glance at the following pointers:

Build trustworthy relationships

Email is an excellent tool for building trustworthy relationships with prospects and existing clients. The key components of an email is relevance and personalization. If you use these two components in your emails, they will speak directly to the reader, making them feel associated with and understood. 

So, create valuable, relevant, and professional emails for your marketing campaigns, building your brand’s trustworthiness and credibility among your audience.

Spread brand awareness

Gym email marketing is the best way to educate your audience about your business and offerings. With the right and useful content, you can spread the exact message of your business, depicting the real picture. This way, your audience will feel a better connection once they get to know you.

Nurture and retain consumers

By leveraging email marketing, you can nurture and retain your existing customers. To do so, you need to engage your audience by sending targeted and personalized emails. This way, you not only foster stranger relationships but also brand loyalty and reliance. 

In addition, sending emails to your existing clients nurtures your relationship since they feel valued, leading to better customer retention.

Audience ownership

Unlike social media marketing, where you have a large audience reach, email marketing allows you to choose your audience for a specific message. In addition, email marketing offers you the opportunity to make a significant impact. In this process, you can categorize your audience and run different campaigns simultaneously.

Money-saving

Gym email marketing is a cost-effective marketing strategy with a hefty ROI. According to Statista, the average return on an email marketing campaign for each pound spent is £38.33 in the UK. In addition, if you have gym management software incorporated into your gym, you can use its built-in email marketing feature, saving you money.

How to grow your email list?

Growing your email list may be intimidating at first. However, it is not that daunting. There is an effective way of growing your gym email marketing list, and that is “Lead Magnet.”

What is a lead magnet?

A lead magnet is a terminology used in marketing, meaning giving away a free service or product purposefully to collect contact details. In marketing, this technique is used to attract sales leads. For instance, it can be free consultations, samples, audio recordings, workout videos, PDF manuals, or trial subscriptions.

Creating a lead magnet

Creating a lead magnet is not as difficult as you think. The following steps will help you generate quality leads easily:

• Understand your target audience
• Identify the problems of your target audience
• Come up with an impactful solution for your audience’s pain points
• Determine the value proposition of your lead magnet
• Build a landing page for your lead magnet
• Create a delivery email to promote your lead magnet

If you want your lead magnet to be high-converting, ensure it possesses the following crucial elements:

• Ensure your lead magnet speaks directly to the leads.
• Consider the pain points of your leads.
• Offer a valuable solution to their pain points.
• Give your leads a quick win to make them experience the pros of your lead magnet.

Distributing lead magnet

Once you have created your lead magnet, offer it to your followers and subscribers for their email details. This way, it will not only help you grow your email list but also boost conversions in the long run.

To distribute your lead magnet, offer it on your social media platforms by running ads or featuring it in the groups and on your website. While sharing your lead magnet, make sure that you do not post it without any context. Instead, you create a content strategy to build interest among your target audience. 

How do you start email marketing for your gym?

Are you ready to launch your gym email marketing campaign? The following steps will help you initiate an effective email marketing campaign for your gym. So, let us move forward:

Create a strategy

An email marketing strategy is the most thoughtful and crucial step of a campaign. Basically, it is an overarching plan for your marketing campaign. An email marketing strategy includes objectives, methods, analysis, and, most importantly, specified goals.

In addition, enlist the tactics since they are a significant component of an efficient strategy. They help you achieve your goals if you establish your objective behind the strategy and streamline it with your tactics.

The following are the guidelines for creating an email marketing strategy plan:

• Setting SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-sensitive) goals along with success metrics.
• Do thorough research to understand your target audience completely (since 71% of consumers buy from brands that align with their personal values).
• Check the marketing trends from last year to reduce the risk of mistakes.
• Segment your email list according to the status of your contacts.
• Create a calendar to initiate the email marketing campaign.
• Set a schedule to craft your emails so that there’s no delay.

Choose the best software

To carry out your email marketing campaign, you need to buy a marketing tool. For that purpose, your gym management software can work efficiently. The best gym management software comes with a built-in automated marketing tool that helps you schedule and automate a marketing campaign.

So, if you want to run your email marketing campaign with your gym software, look for the following features in it:

• Allows you to send emails to prospects and customers and keep track of the complete lifecycle.
• Comes with a segmentation option to boost relevancy for prospects and members.
• Ability to send automated emails to the right prospects and members when required, considering their journeys.
• Capable of scheduling and sending emails to specific categories of your audience.
• Offers forms on the website to track details of the prospects to enhance your email list.
• Equipped with abandoned basket technology to encourage prospects to join if they fail to complete a signup the first time.

Categorize your audience

It seems easy to send emails to all your prospects and members at once, but this is not an efficient approach. Rather than using the spray-and-pray technique, be mindful of your email marketing campaign and categorize your audience into groups with similar interests.

If you are wondering why categorization of the audience is necessary, take a look at the following pointers:

• Enhance relevancy

Send out a relevant email campaign that resonates with the audience’s interests since it has more chances to bring sales. In addition, segmented emails are 30% more likely to get opened and 50% more clicks than unsegmented campaigns.

• Increase customer loyalty

Relevant emails help you spread brand awareness, meeting and exceeding customer and prospect expectations. Engaging the audience with meaningful and relevant content will help you build trust and respect for your brand.

• Boost ROI

Categorized emails use personalization to boost the engagement of your prospects and members. So, they have the tendency to increase sales rates manifolds. Simply put, the more sales, the higher the ROI of your business will be.

Create a message

After audience segmentation, it is time to create attention-grabbing and captivating content for your emails. Choose the right words and images that resonate with your audience’s interests. The first step is to create a tempting and persuasive headline. To create a perfect headline, the following tips might be helpful for you:

• Add a name to speak more personally to the recipient.
• Keep your headline short but captivating (20 characters are enough).
• Leverage emoticons to add emotional value.
• Keep it interactive and funny for better engagement.
• Capitalize the keywords to carve an impression.

Now, craft the body of your email, making sure it is relevant to the subject. Keep it as interactive as possible.

Send out emails

Now that you have your segmented audience and the relevant messages prepared, it is time to bite the bullet and send out emails. Ensure that you have incorporated the element of personalization since it helps you generate 5.7% higher revenue. In addition, when you mention someone’s name in emails, they are more likely to get opened.

One more important factor to consider before sending out emails is the time slot. Research the peak hours and send out emails during that time of the day to enhance engagement.

Ways to measure the success rate of an email marketing campaign

Once you have sent emails, it is time to EVALUATE. In order to measure the success rate of your gym email marketing campaign, it is important to consider performance metrics critically. For that purpose, the following KPIs will help you measure the success rate:

Click-through rate

Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of the number of clicks on the link you provided in your email. If your metrics show you high CTR, it means you are getting high engagement on your campaign.

Click-to-open rate

The click-to-open rate is the percentage of the members and prospects who opened your email and clicked the link as well. If your metrics show you a higher rate of click-to-open, it means your content is encouraging the recipients to open and click the link in your email.

Open rate

The open rate is the percentage of emails that are opened by recipients. If the metrics show you a high open rate, it means your headline is captivating and grabbing the audience’s attention, leading to better reach.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate is the percentage of recipients who have completed your desired action or fulfilled the purpose of your email. The higher the conversion rate, the higher the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of undelivered emails. This may be due to invalid email addresses or full inboxes. The higher bounce rate depicts you need to re-do your email list to collect functional email addresses.

Unsubscribe rate

The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of recipients who have unsubscribed your channel not to receive any future emails. Try to keep your unsubscribe rate as low as possible and consider your content to figure out what is making recipients unfollow your channel.

How to reduce the unsubscribe rate?

In fitness email marketing, it is important to pay heed to your unsubscribe rate. Keeping your members and prospects from unsubscribing from your channel is crucial to carrying out an effective campaign. If the messages are irrelevant, people unsubscribe from the network. So, it is on your shoulders to communicate with your audience in an effective way to keep them connected.

Why do people unsubscribe from email marketing?

Suppose you have a higher unsubscribe rate and are wondering why members and prospects keep unsubscribing from your emails. In that case, the following might be the reasons:

• You are not meeting their expectations
• Your emails have poor design
• The content is irrelevant, i.e., no email segmentation
• You are sending too many emails

What are the ways to lower your unsubscribe rate?

If you are looking for effective ways to lower your unsubscribe rate, take a look at the following pointers:

• Do not buy an email list
• Segment your email list properly
• Map your content efficiently
• Offer personalization in your emails
• Test your email frequency
• Offer your contacts different communication means
• Plot a schedule to send out emails
• Make sure there is enough gap between the two emails
• Use the element of exclusivity
• Allow email feedback

Leverage these pointers in your gym email marketing campaign to reduce your unsubscribe rate.

Gym email marketing – 5 mistakes to avoid

Initiating a gym email marketing campaign for your fitness studio is a big yet efficient step to drive growth. However, there are a few mistakes that most of us do not know while starting our first email marketing campaign. No worries, we have got you!

The following are a few common mistakes that you must avoid while sending out promotional emails:

Sending BCC

BCC stands for blind carbon copy, meaning sending out bulk emails to your audience without segmentation and personalization. So, recipients find no value in such content and end up unsubscribing. In addition, you will fail to build a strong and trustworthy relationship with your audience. That is why it is a big NO for an effective promotional campaign. 

No clear CTA

Your audience wants to know precisely what you want them to do. If you are missing a clear call to action in your email, you will lose the recipients in the way, and it is possible that they will not get the whole purpose of your email. So, spell it out for them by providing a clear and concise CTA.

Lengthy emails

No one has time to read long and wordy paragraphs. Nowadays, people admire clear and concise text that can convey a message in a compelling way. So, sending out lengthy emails may result in losing a strong client base since it can easily annoy your members and prospects. So, make sure you write a catchy subject line along with an intriguing yet to-the-point body.

No incremental value

If you do not incorporate the element of incremental value in your emails, this will not work for you the way you want it to. For instance, if you just write, “Hi, buy this from our store!” it will not work. Rather, it will be a big turn-off for your prospects and members.

No personalization

Personalization is the key to an impactful email marketing campaign. For instance, if you do not incorporate their name in the email, it will instantly cause impersonalization. So, make sure to add the elements of personalization to connect with your audience intimately and to make them feel connected.

Final takeaway

Email marketing is the backbone of your gym business. Without effective gym email marketing, enhancing your business efficiently is pretty challenging. To ensure seamless growth, it is significant to understand your audience and craft email marketing campaigns accordingly. In addition, incorporate gym management software to automate your promotional emails. It will help you focus on the core strategies to build stronger and better relationships with your audience.