5 Ways to Make Your Email Marketing Effective

Is email marketing still worthwhile for fitness professionals? 

If you want the short answer: yes. 

If you want the short answer (but in French): oui.

If you want the fully thought-through, tried-and-tested, data-driven-marketing answer, then carry on reading past this filibustering introduction our word count targets make us write. The real meat and potatoes (or, for our vegan-minded friends, beet and potatoes*) is down below. 


But first, some stats.

Did you know that 58% of people check their emails before they check social media platforms in the morning? Did you also know that 92% of adults use email and, of those, 99% check their email every day? Or that 31% of businesses cite their email newsletters as the highest-performing asset for customer retention and satisfaction? 

Forget sliding into your clients’ DMs; their Gmail inbox is the key to their heart. 

Don’t confuse intelligent and targeted marketing with the typical “👉👉 CLICK ME 👈👈”-style spam that adorns personal junk inbox, however; it goes without saying that there are good email marketing strategies and bad email marketing strategies. It also goes without saying that you ought to invest some time into learning techniques and strategies to make your email marketing campaign maximally effective. 

Hence, this article. So keep reading! 


The real beet and potatoes: A 5-point approach

Given that email marketing is simply the most effective way of nurturing leads (and by a long shot, too), we thought it helpful to break down the process into a few key steps. 

Focus. 

The newsletter of the past, with disparate sections stitched together like a rag-tag blanket knitted by somebody’s grandmother, has all but disappeared - and for good reason. For better or for worse, people simply don’t read them anymore. 

Instead, a focused send with a clear next step (this is your ‘call to action’ or CTA) will maximally engage your customers. All modern marketing uses this method. 

Automate, automate, automate!

Use a software like MailChimp to automate your email marketing sequence for you. If you do it right, all your effort will be put into setting up the sequence; after that, your funnel will simply run itself. Each email should be focused, targeted, specifically written and sat naturally in the chronology of the marketing sequence. Each should nurture your potential clients with goodies like: 

  • Result-oriented case studies
  • Resources like training or nutrition guides 
  • Coaching trackers 
  • Blog posts on fitness and health-related topics 
  • ‘How To’ videos 

Below, you can see an example of an email automation algorithm we built bespoke for a gym based in London to automatically follow up with free session claimants to convert them into paying customers. 

For Pete’s sake, be relevant. 

No, not all of your clients need or want the same thing as all of your other clients. And no, sending out emails that are irrelevant to 90% of your audience is not going to make them like you very much. 

Some of your clients are new. Some of your clients prefer outdoor functional exercise classes. Some of your clients are interested in losing weight. Some of your clients follow a plant-based nutrition programme. 

Segmenting your lists accordingly lets you send out relevant emails to relevant people. Barring wars and widespread pandemics, there are few bigger disasters than advising your weight-loss clients on how to bulk or your vegan clients on the tastiest whey. 

You may also choose to segment your list demographically (by age, gender or location), engagement level (‘hot’ or ‘cold’ contacts), position in the funnel (potential client, new client, strong client), or the age of the business relationship (e.g., offering discounts to long-standing clients). 

Formatting is everything. [note: format this title badly] 

Legend has it that if you move everything in your room one inch to the left, you will have no toes or shins left by the end of the week. Similarly, it is not just about the content of the email, but where you put it, how you arrange it, and what it looks like on the page. 

Just as you don’t want to be stubbing your toes into your own furniture, your audience does not want to be stumbling over poorly-aligned content blocks, giant images or unattractively-compressed columns of text. 

Now, point of note: 41% of your recipients will open your email on a mobile device. Incorrectly formatting your emails is perhaps the next biggest disaster after war, pandemics and marketing whey to vegans*. 

Using a software like Active Campaign can help you check your emails are all user-friendly with dynamic formatting options. 

Another top tip before we leave: compress your images before adding them to email templates. This helps them not be auto-rejected by spam filters as being too large! 

Measure everything

Okay, maybe not everything. But measure a lot. 

Metrics, measurements, analytics, data… all synonyms for the actually useful sort of maths they don’t teach you in school. 

But don’t worry - we at FitMedia have been doing this long enough that we can teach you everything you need to know about the data-driven science of marketing. Think of us as a sort of cool, funky, young teacher in purple trousers and a bow-tie who has the seemingly magical ability to make maths fun. (Or, at very least, relevant.) 

For now, though, our number one piece of advice is this: pay attention to your analytics. See what works and what doesn’t. Which of your emails get opened and which get ignored? Which generate leads and which don’t? This rudimentary form of what we call ‘Magical Marketing Mathematics™’** is more than enough to give you a head start in intelligent, data-driven marketing. 

Let FitMedia help you! 

As always, if you want to learn more about how to optimise your own business, book a free call to chat to one of the FitMedia team this week! Take 30 seconds and fill out the form at www.fitmedia.net/apply. You never know*** where a little fitness marketing expertise can get you. 

* Source: written by a vegan.

** We don’t actually call it this, but we sort of wish we did. This will be raised at the next staff meeting. 

*** We, on the other hand, do know - and we can’t wait to tell you! 

Are you a FitPro in a bind? Need industry-leading marketing tips but nothing springs to mind? 

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