The 5 Minute Guide to Profitable
Email Marketing for Fitness Professionals

Do you find yourself struggling with your e-mail marketing? Are you spending a lot of time writing emails, but not getting the response (and the profits) you keep hearing about?

There’s a reason some fitness professionals enjoy such great email marketing success with seemingly very little effort. There’s a pattern, a group of core components that create profitable fitness email marketing systems. And once you really understand (and apply) these core components…

…you’ll be able to produce much greater marketing results for your fitness business in much less time than you’re spending now.

Below is a map of the 5 Components of a Profitable Email Marketing System for Fitness Professionals. Just click on the image below to enlarge it, and then spend a minute getting familiar. Once you’ve had a chance to get the top-down-view of how email marketing works in a fitness business, we’ll go into a little more detail below…

1. Building Your List
You can’t exactly market and promote your fitness business with email until you’ve built a mailing list. Here are some quick tips for building a bigger list, faster…

Develop Multiple Opt-In Offers: The more reasons you can give people to opt-in to your mailing list, the more people you’ll get on your list. Create multiple opt-in offers (a simple newsletter is NOT enough in today’s age of spam and email overload). 

Promote Your Opt-In Pages/Offers Everywhere: Once you’ve created your opt-in offers/web pages, make sure people know about them. Mention them in your regular email communications with clients, in posts to forums, even in your Google Adwords campaigns.

2. Establish Your Approach and Your Voice
The biggest mistake I see fitness professionals make in their email marketing is simply copy-and-pasting other people’s content directly into their email newsletters. Or just as bad, using a newsletter service that provides pre-written content.

Think about it like this for a second – Of all the online fitness experts you follow, how many of them use pre-written content? Ryan Lee, Eric Ruth, Jim Labadie – ALL write their own content! And there’s a damn good reason…

Fitness email marketing is so much more than just sending out a bunch of emails. It’s about establishing your own voice – a trusting relationship with your prospects – and using that trust (and expert status) to make honest recommendations that lead to a profit for your readers AND you. Something that pre-written content just can’t do.

You have to start with a purpose in mind (i.e. know WHAT you’re promoting). You also have to know WHO you’re promoting to (again, both of which pre-written content just can’t do).

It’s about finding out what your subscribers WANT and giving them content that PREsells you, your expertise, and your services/products. Once you know all this, that brings us to…

3. Writing Effective E-mails
This is where the rubber meets the road, where the money is made in list marketing. This is also the part where most fit pros drop the ball completely.

What we’re after here is “useful, but incomplete” information. You want to provide your subscribers with information they can actually USE (whether they buy from you or not). That’s the “useful” part.

But the money’s made from the “incomplete” part. While your information is useful, it’s incomplete in that they could get better results (or faster/easier results) by accepting your offer, whether that’s for your ebook or your private personal training services.

4. Getting Your E-mails Read
Once you’ve crafted your offers and written your email, you’ve still got 2 major hurdles to get past – Spam Filters and Email Overload.

Avoid common ‘spam terms’ in your e-mail subject lines. The words “free”, “money”, “special offer”, etc. are definitely bad. 

And while you’re at it, it’s always a good idea to run your emails thru a spam checker BEFORE you ever send them out. This can help keep your emails out of the junk folder and keep your email address off the blacklist.

Once your email makes it past the spam filters, you still have to contend with the fact that everyone and their mom is sending out massive amounts of emails. You MUST find a way to make your emails stand out in an overcrowded inbox.

Writing effective subject lines is MANDATORY. And the correct use of personalization gives you an even better chance of getting your emails read by your subscribers.

5. Distribution to Your Lists
Again, more than just sending out a bunch of emails. You MUST establish a consistent schedule so your subscribers get used to (and expect) your emails. And knowing WHEN to send your emails is just as important.

Whenever possible, send your e-mails as HTML (not plain text). This will allow you to track your fitness email marketing effectiveness and profitability via statistics. 

Tracking open rates gives you great insight about your subject lines (as well as the topics you chose to cover), and click-thru stats will show you exactly how many people clicked on your offer links.

As you can see, marketing your fitness business with email is a little more involved than the get-rich-quick internet marketing guys would have you believe. It definitely takes a little thought, a little testing, and a little effort to get it all working and earning your fitness business a profit.

If you’re left feeling like that’s a lot of stuff to learn, you’re right, it is. But you DON’T have to reinvent the wheel here. As you can see from my email marketing map above, there’s a logical, systematic way to approach email marketing for your fitness business. And luckily, we can learn a LOT from those who’re already seeing great success with email…

Jim Labadie is one of the people you should be studying intently. I’ve been on Jim’s mailing list for almost 5 years now, and I STILL study every email he sends out. He’s good at this. He knows the in’s and out’s, all the pitfalls and all the shortcuts.

In the past several issues of my Fitness Website Profits newsletter I’ve tried to give you some strategies you can use to build your mailing list – that helps with the 1st component of profitable email marketing for fitness professionals.

If you’d like to learn more about components 2-5…

• Establishing Your Approach and Your Voice
• Writing Effective Emails
• Getting Your Emails Read
• Distribution to Your Lists

I highly recommend Jim Labadie’s “Email Marketing For Fitness Professionals: How to Profit With Emails”. 

It’s the exact system Jim uses to create his highly successful (and highly profitable) email marketing strategy (I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve “borrowed” more than one idea from a Jim Labadie email). 

And as Jim will tell you, “Email marketing isn’t hard, but you DO have to do it right if you want to see significant profits”.

Email Marketing For Fitness Professionals is EXACTLY how to do it right – right now.
http://www.FitnessWebHosting.com/email-secrets.html 

Here’s to your online success,

Allen Hill
CEO, Fitness Web Hosting
President, Fitness Website Design

P.S.  Your time is valuable - don't waste it trying to reinvent the wheel.  Jim has helped thousands of fitness professionals with their email marketing - let him help you too...

http://www.FitnessWebHosting.com/email-secrets.html