Whether you run a well-established personal training studio or a brand-new health club, implementing email as a tool within your gym’s marketing campaign efforts is beneficial. Email’s ability to help drive engagement within your various contact bases (leads, members, and even ex-members) makes it an exceptional vehicle for lead nurturing and client retention within your fitness facility’s sales funnel. And because great content is critical to interest and engagement, we will dive into some gym email marketing ideas to help boost your potential for success.
This content is part of a four-blog series that covers gym email marketing ideas for:
- Gym Lead Nurturing
- Gym Member Engagement
- Personal Training Studio Client Retention
- Boosting Gym Referrals
Note: If you operate a fitness facility and have yet to utilize email, we recommend reading our blog, Why Your Fitness Studio Needs Email Marketing, for more insights into this medium’s business potential.
Email Lead Nurturing Ideas for Fitness Facilities
Often, fitness facility owners will already have an email system set up for their business. Whether they use it with their gym membership management software for notifications and communications or use it for a newsletter communication type of resource, email tends to have a presence already. Unfortunately, many small business owners often under-utilize their resources here to automate part of their fitness facility’s lead nurturing process. However, email lead nurturing usually doesn’t have to be automated to start – but adding it over time in the places that save you the most time, energy, or resources can be an excellent consideration for scaling.
If you are one of these owners currently not implementing email automation into your studio’s lead nurturing process, here are some simple ideas to get started.
- Initial subscription confirmation emails: Confirmation emails can be a great way to implement simple automation and add marketing value to your facility. Adding pictures, FAQs, or even your gym’s mission/values can help make a splash with your new contact from a branding standpoint.
- Conditional pre-made email sequences: This type of nurturing requires slightly more up-front work and coordination between marketing and sales funnel. However, email sequences are just a series of emails that can be pre-scheduled based on set time intervals that initiate when a lead activates a specific trigger (such as filling out a form on a particular landing page).
- No-open report emailing: Depending on your email system, you can run reports based on various aspects of your email activity. One of these reporting factors might include “no opens.” While the data on this point might not be 100% accurate due to the ever-changing tech and privacy initiatives surrounding how it’s collected, it can still be a great tool to help boost lead warmth and interest.
- No activity check-ins: Running reports to check for activity levels within a certain number of days can be a helpful measure when trying to re-warm leads or reduce churn within your sales funnel. You can incorporate automation into your procedures; however, reviewing your data to ensure you aren’t missing part of the puzzle that is reducing lead interest is worthwhile.
- General marketing campaign emails: Building your email marketing campaigns around your leads is wise. Whether running promotions or demonstrating expertise through thought leadership blogs and customer testimonials, building marketing campaigns into your fitness facility’s email efforts can enhance growth.
- Separate newsletter: While some owners utilizing email may already have a newsletter that they send, consider building a separate email newsletter for non-members and leads. With this separate category, you can add additional marketing materials, promotions, or topics that may interest and entice this category more directly.
Ways to Automate Your Gym’s Email Lead Nurturing
Suppose you’ve begun building out your fitness facility’s sales funnel and are dabbling in tying it into your marketing efforts. In that case, you might notice consistent pain points or time sinks when email marketing. If this is the case, investing in your email system or capabilities can be a beneficial next move.
Implement a Business Email Marketing Software
Implementing email marketing software is one of the fastest and most straightforward ways of getting started with more in-depth email options and automation. Features and capabilities will differ from provider to provider. Still, email software will often allow you to perform bulk emailing to lists of contacts, schedule emails, or even automate mailings in the form of list subscription confirmation and email sequencing, to name a few. Other features providers offer may include open and forward tracking, unopened email resending, or reporting features on various data points.
Utilizing a CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a highly utilized instrument for many small businesses. It serves as a database for clients and leads of varying stages (lead, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, etc.). Depending on the type of CRM you are looking at or have already implemented, functionality and ability to connect to other services may vary. That said, when you can connect your CRM to email management software for your fitness studio, you can begin to roll out more automated contact options within marketing efforts. Insights into sales funnel flow and campaign engagement, especially regarding email, can be more effectively managed and analyzed.
Leveraging Your Gym’s Membership Management Software
Email functionality is often built-in (or available as an add-on feature) for owners who use fitness facility membership management software. This integration can be a great starting point for automating email as it connects to your CRM of clients and potential leads. Like stand-alone email marketing software, features such as reporting, tracking, and pre-made programs are typically available through the gym’s management software. However, due to the tie of customer data to your email system, more in-depth reporting metrics and campaign/sequence options are typically encountered.
The combination of accessible data points from the CRM and email aspects can simplify factors like sales funnel tracking, conversion analysis, and client retention/engagement reviews. This access ultimately promotes streamlining processes, reporting, and analyzing your assets. Further, when considering gym email marketing ideas to support lead nurturing, this data connection can foster better insights on lead engagement, interest, and conversion progress based on your campaigns.
Making A Splash
Email can be a great tool to add to your marketing efforts if you are looking to build automation into your fitness facility to enhance your conversion rates through lead nurturing. By combining your gym email marketing ideas and customer data insights (from the CRM or gym membership management software) with email marketing software, you can begin to access and analyze your trends and engagement. This information can then help direct you to what is working from a contextual and conversion standpoint with your marketing campaign and sales funnel.
