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Why Email Marketing is Essential for Fitness Pros

We are going to show you how incredibly valuable email marketing can be to help you generate more leads and clients and ultimately more profit for your business.

If you’re not building an email list, then you’re making a HUGE mistake. Whether you’re a personal trainer, yoga instructor, gym owner or any other fitness niche you need to start building a list.

In today’s digital world, it’s incredibly difficult to have a viable business without an email list. It doesn’t have to be a big list, but it’s an essential part of getting new leads and clients on a consistent basis and will help to build relationships and differentiate yourself from your competitors. It has become apparent that a lot of fitness professionals are not doing this, and it is not only costing them leads now, but also future clients.

The truth is, for any new business the idea of email marketing can be daunting. Maybe it’s because it all seems far too technical, and people don’t know what to do once users sign up to their list. Whatever the roadblock is we are going to show you; how easy it easy to create a free email marketing account, how to create and write your first email, and how to get people to engage with those emails and take action.

Getting Started

We need to make sure you have an email marketing account setup. There’s a multitude of email services out there, some more complex than others, which may prove too complicated for fitness professional needs. Platforms like Aweber, Ontraport, Infusionsoft and Convertkit all offer great features. They can cost anything between £25 – £300 a month, depending on the features you require and how big your budget is. However, we advise using a platform called Mailchimp.

Mailchimp is an email marketing service provider that allows you to manage your contacts, send emails and track results – and you can start using it Free. Only once you’ve built your subscriber list to over 2,000 would you need to start paying for it, and even then it’s a low monthly cost.

Once you’ve created an account, you can get started straight away. You’ll not only be able to create an email list, but also design your emails, sign-up forms and integrate them with your website or Facebook account – and best of all it’s really simple to use.

After you’ve created your account, you’ll need to know how to structure your emails. This is an extensive topic, which you can find out more about in our Academy. However, i’m going to go over the basics with you so that you can get started straight away.

The most important aspect when it comes to email marketing is to make sure your emails are useful and informative to the subscribers. You want to adhere to the rule of “What’s in it for me?” also known as the WIIFM Factor. This highlights that every time a user opens your email, the first thing they’ll think is “what’s in it for me?”. Remember, they’re not really interested in hearing about your business, so unless they can quickly identify what’s in the email that’s going to help them, then they’re unlikely to read further and won’t take the action you want them to.

If you think about this when you’re creating all of your emails, then you’re much more likely to build up your client base.

Steps to Follow

So, when you’re creating your emails, you need to go through the following steps:

  1. Make a list of everything your client could be struggling with, the problems they are experiencing and things they may need or want.
  2. Now go through your products and services list and match up with the list you wrote down in step one. So for the problems that your clients are having, match them with a service you provide that will help them overcome that problem.
  3. Now when start crafting your emails, keep that list in mind and start helping your clients to overcome some of these problems, make sure the content in your emails offers immense value.
    Just remember to put yourself in your recipient’s shoes and make sure you’re answering the question ‘what’s in it for me’.
  4. Now that you’ve identified your client’s problems and aligned them with you helped solve them with the value that you are providing, you can start to talk about what you offer as a service or product.


If you’re trying to sell something, then you definitely want to make sure you keep it really subtle and keep the sales pitches to a minimum. Even though you might be giving away content and are helping people solve the problems, we both know that for them to truly reach their goals, they are likely to need a mentor or coach, and because they now know you and likely trust you – you’ll be the person they come to.

It’s often asked how do you make money out of email marketing if you have to keep providing content and push the sales of your product or services. The reason email marketing is so powerful is it allows you to build a relationship with your audience, and demonstrate how valuable you and your services are. If you can continually provide value to your email list, then they’ll start to see you as an expert, and then they will start coming to you for help. They will get to know you and trust you, and they factor people are far more likely to buy from people they know and trust.

One key thing to remember is that not everyone will need to hire a personal trainer, a health coach or sign up for a yoga class straight away, but it’s highly likely at some point they will need to. So, if you’ve been providing them with immense value and building your relationship with them, then you’ll have created that brand awareness and be the first person in mind when they come to need help. This will serve you well, to attract a vast amount of new clients in the long term.

Email marketing is an extensive topic, and I realise it can be a lot to take in. You can learn more about improving your email marketing and all aspects of your digital marketing in our Academy. If you need guidance on how to generate new leads and clients online, then we help fitness professionals every day.