Doing business in the fitness industry requires an ability to communicate effectively with prospects and clients. No matter if it is a gym, personal training business or a retail venture, the personal touch is key to fitness. On the web, this can be harder to convey and secure. But businesses that choose to market through email can go some way to bridging this gap. Email marketing allows for more personal connections to be developed between prospect and marketer. If you want to increase your customer base in the fitness industry, you need to develop more of these connections to keep your diary busy.
Email marketing is easier today than it has ever been, even for those with minimal technical understanding. Email marketing services like iContact enable automation in the email sign-up and mailing process, leaving you to focus on developing the best content. At present, even those with minimal technical expertise can take advantage of services of this kind in order to manage their lists and deliver their emails.
Email marketing has shown itself to be effective time after time, with a proven track record of getting results. It is widely used by fitness businesses, and indeed other businesses in services markets, to take cold prospects closer to being in a position to become a client. But what is it about email marketing that makes it such an effective way to make contact?
Why Email Marketing Is Effective?
Email marketing can be crucial in building your customer base as a fitness professional. People prefer doing business with people - if they feel they can get to know you, in an obtrusive way that is helpful to achieving their goals, the chances are high that they will be more receptive to communications from you. Email marketing allows you to reach out to people worldwide, at any time of the day or night, to provide valuable information and helpful advice. The costs are negligible, and the campaigns easy to run. But the results that can be driven from marketing in this way make it an essential element of virtually any online business.
Email marketing works because it allows many more selling opportunities than a website alone. When a visitor looks at your website, they might never come back, and you can never reach out to them to make a sale in future. When a visitor becomes an email subscriber, you can reach out time and time again, with no marginal effort or expense involved. Email marketing helps make your web campaigns more effective, and makes more efficient use of the website traffic you have managed to secure.
These types of marketing strategies are highly effective. Marketers can use statistics and campaign data at every stage in the process to push their campaigns further, and thanks to modern email autoresponder services this is easier than it has ever been previously. This allows marketers to highlight and test different variables, to find the most effective campaign strategy for driving results.
Email Sequencing And Messaging
An important area of optimization for your email campaign lies in the sequencing of your messages. Generally, marketers use a pre-programmed sequence of messages, at least in the early stages of signing up a new prospect, in order to 'warm' them up for a pitching opportunity a few emails down the line. But the order in which you send these emails, and the type and structure of the pitch you eventually make, can have a real impact on the percentage of your email traffic that ultimately decides to buy. Fortunately, this is easily tested online, and those with sufficient traffic flows can very quickly identify areas of improvement for their email marketing campaigns.
Try to sequence messages differently, and feel free to experiment with different ways of framing your messages. The only right answer is the most effective option, and you can deduce this from a careful strategy of variable testing. Choose one variable element for each test and give two or three options versus the control. This allows for the most accurate results to be drawn up, and means you can pick the most effective from a bunch (rather than leaving it up to chance). The statistics don't lie, and they can deliver invaluable insights into how you can market more effectively.
Timing Email Blasts For Maximum Impact
Timing your email newsletters, promotions and blasts is another important consideration. Timing, both in the month and in the specific day concerned, can have a significant influence on how many of your messages are opened, read and responded to. Like other variable elements, this should always be a subject for testing. But for many fitness professionals, it may be more obvious instinctively as to the times you should target.
Seasonal factors like New Year (when people traditionally resolve to lose weight) are often a great time to be promoting your fitness business more aggressively. People are looking to shape up at this time of the year, and it is no secret that fitness professionals the world over benefit from the early months in the year. But it might also be worth an email blast on the first hot day in summer, for example - that might encourage those who are looking to get fit for the warmer weather to take action before it is too late. There are a number of ways in which more effective timing can lead to better email marketing results, but you won't ever know what is possible until you try and test it for yourself.
Email marketing is a low-cost, easy way for you to start marketing your fitness business more directly. Try it out on your own website. Even getting your existing customers on to your mailing list can have a direct effect on your business, so it pays to get started as soon as possible. With the right content and the right approach to marketing your business, email promotions can be a major boost to your customer base on a consistent and ongoing basis.
