Email Marketing for Personal Trainers

Email marketing is a tool that, when used correctly, will allow you to engage with both current and potential customers.

The best part is that it can also have higher conversion rates than other marketing channels.

You can use email to build brand awareness, help build interest for your fitness products or service, and drive your potential customers to purchase.

While also helping you retain customers once they have purchased your fitness product.

Building your email list and creating an effective email is vital to growing your personal trainer business.

This post will take you through the steps needed to make your first email.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a marketing tactic that allows you to send emails directly to your current customers and potential customers.

Looking at my Inbox now, I have dozens of new emails. Either from brands keeping me updated while trying to get me to engage.

But, of course, the ultimate goal of these emails is to engage with me for me to take action.

Many people have announced the death of email marketing. However, data privacy rules such as GDPR in Europe, the Privacy Act in Australia, and stricter regulations in California have not stopped the rise of email marketing.

Email marketing still has a higher conversion rate than other marketing channels.

We always recommend using tools to help you save time. Email marketing is no different.

To save time concentrating on your clients, we recommend looking at email marketing software. Check out our review of the 11 best email marketing software for personal trainers.

Email List Generation

Before you can start sending emails, you need a list of email addresses. But how do you get these? There are multiple tactics.

Contact forms on your website are a great way of having your customers fill out their details for your to contact them. For example, you could capture the following emails, leading to sending two different types of messages.

1. Collect email addresses for people who have not converted into fully paying customers. Why? People are busy, so they may be too busy to purchase fitness packages. Instead, contact them with information about your fitness products, price, and testimonials.
2. Collect the email address of your paying customers. You can do this when they add their card details. Then, you can send this cohort emails about your fitness packages and even try and upsell other packages and products.
3. Offer something of value to your potential fitness client, which could be a free workout, nutrition advice, or even a free consultation. Doing this warms any cold leads and makes it look like they are getting something of value for them to give you their email address.
4. Asking for referrals is also a good way of getting past/current clients to become your marketing channel. You could even use some of the content for your brand's promotion.
5. Use your social media channels to promote your fitness brand and packages to your social media users. Great for boosting your social impressions.

Check out our top tips for building your email list.

Creating an effective email

Let's face it, we have many emails in our Inbox, but the best and the ones we tend to click on, read and engage with have some similar characteristics.

Therefore, we recommend that when creating your emails try and add the following:

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Clear campaign objective

Email allows you to target people at different stages in your customer's lifetime. It would help if you ensured each email had a clear goal.

We recommend keeping it simple at first. Have one email for current customers (retention) and one email for customers who have been on your website and not converted (Remarketing).

Ultimately this ties in with your marketing objectives. Check out our post on how to create a marketing framework.

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Subject Lines

The best emails have subject lines that stand out from the noise of your Inbox. Good subject lines are short, compelling, and personalized. Aim for around 40 - 50 characters.

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Header Image and Title

This will help your customers quickly identify with your brand and also your chance to tell them what the email contains.

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Call-to-action

This is a must. It needs to be clear and relevant to why you want your customers to click through to your website. For example, it could be "Read More" or "Sign up for free fitness package" Test your CTA to find the one with the best engagement.

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Social links

Adding social sharing links will give your content the chance to be shared on social channels, which will increase your reach and engagement.

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Footer Content

This is where you will have company details, links to the privacy policy, and any other privacy requirements.

Personalizing your email marketing strategy for better results

Email personalization involves sending targeted, relevant messages to your subscribers based on the information that you have about them (eg, location) or their behavior (eg, recent actions taken). 

Personalization is about recognizing that different people are interested in different things, and require different information at different times.

It’s about identifying and delivering relevant messages in order to meet your subscribers’ needs, make them feel more nurtured, improve their experience, help them on their journey, boost engagement and strengthen your relationship.

Here are six things that you can do to move up to the next level:

1. Collect the right data to allow you to segment audiences: Optimize your sign-up forms in order to collect as much useful data as possible. This will enable you to segment your subscribers in various different ways and personalize their emails accordingly.
2. Design emails with dynamic content: Design emails to pull in personalized content dynamically. The most obvious example is your subscriber’s name; use it in the subject field and in your salutation, but take care not to overdo it in the main body as this can start to feel unnatural.
3. Set up emails to send at key stages: Send timely, relevant messages to nurture your subscribers and help them along their journey. These can include practical, helpful messages like onboarding emails and event reminders.
4. Use personalization to add value and boost sales: Personalized emails to follow up after classes. For example, you could send relevant tips and links to your attendees to add value to their experience, or you could send information about other related services that they might be interested in.

Email equals more clients

Make sure you add email marketing to your marketing plan this year. It is an excellent way of creating content for both current and potential customers. In addition, doing email will increase both leads to your fitness business and help retain the clients you currently have.

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Editor's note: This post was originally published in May 2022 and has been updated to give you up-to-date information.