The low cost and relatively high effectiveness of email have seen the fitness club industry adopting email as a cornerstone component in their marketing arsenal for a number of years now. This communication tool is commonly utilized to increase member engagement, build a stronger club community and inform key stakeholders on the happenings around the club to improve client-club relationships. When carried out effectively, the cost-effectiveness and notable benefits of having a strong email strategy can rival those of many of today’s most popular marketing platforms - from social media and influencers to traditional print media. The problem is that while there are gym emails currently filling the inboxes of millions of gym members around the world, only a fraction of them are effective. Writing an effective email is an art which takes practice and ongoing evaluation and improvement to ensure you are getting the best results possible from your newsletters, informative guides, promotions or other outbound email communications. We have created this five-part gym email marketing series to ensure you are getting the best return out of your emails. In this guide, we will take you through the process of coming up with a plan for your email strategy, segmenting your database of members or prospects and selecting the most effective target audiences for the goals you are aiming to achieve with your emails. From here, we will help you create effective email content to achieve your goal with this audience and come up with a schedule for sending your emails. You will also learn how to evaluate and optimize your gym email marketing strategy for the best possible results - and, if you’re a member of GymMaster you can learn how to set up your system to run this campaign for you automatically with the click of a button.
The five steps to getting the most out of your gym emails
Step 1: Planning and Goal Setting
The very first thing you should do when planning an email strategy for your fitness club is to ask yourself “what am I trying to achieve with my emails?” - are you aiming to get more participants turning up to classes? Do you want to increase the number of members at your club? Would you like to get more elderly members to fill an empty gym through the day? Or maybe you want to decrease churn. Having a clear and specific goal ensures helps you tailor the content of your email to ensure you aren’t spamming your audience with irrelevant information, aids you in developing an effective content delivery plan and in general enables you to get more results out of your emails. Goal Setting To evaluate whether or not your emails being sent are beneficial towards achieving the objectives outlined above (or one of your own) we must first establish a goal for the strategy. We recommend following the SMART framework, a guide used by marketers to determine a suitable goal for a campaign. Your goal should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound - it also needs to be closely related to the objectives you are trying to achieve. Here’s a few examples of some common objectives and goals for new gym owners:
Objective
Goal
I want to increase the amount of members showing up to my club’s classes.
Increase class attendance by 30% within the next five months.
Evaluation & Optimization Before you send your email, you need to establish how you are going to measure the effectiveness of the campaign and whether it is fulfilling the purpose in encouraging your audience towards achieving its goal. It is recommended (especially if you are running the email for a long period of time) that you should be monitoring and making optimizations regularly to ensure you are getting the highest return possible. To evaluate the effectiveness of your email strategy, you should measure it’s open rate, the click-through rate of your call to action link (you can use bit.ly for this - click here to learn more) and the impact it has on its relevant goal - for the goal above we would track the amount of people attending the classes at your gym. This small amount of additional work will ensure you are on the right track with your emails and can avoid making mistakes which can cost you hundreds of email subscribers.
Step 2: Segmenting and Targeting
While newsletters can be sent to the full list of members for your club, we recommend that for your general email strategy you might like to consider segmenting your list of members. This allows you to create email content which is more relevant and subsequently more effective at achieving the goal. For example, a member who never attends yoga doesn’t need to be informed of the instructor being unwell and similarly, an experienced member attending the club regularly won’t benefit from tips addressing delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMs) the same as a new member might. You can segment your audience based on their interactions with your club, types of classes they attend or even their stage in the gym member life cycle.
Step 3: Write Effective Email Content
Now the foundations of your strategy are in place, it’s time to start writing your emails and planning when to send them to ensure they are effective. As with all marketing, the content of your emails should be closely aligned to the needs of your audience to ensure you gain the attention and interest necessary to get them to follow through with your desired action (your goal). There are five key components to an email which need to be tailored to these needs, each with their own best practices for writing content for an effective email - these sections are: The Subject Line, Email Body, Call to Action, Sender and Signature. Click here to learn the best practices for writing an effective gym marketing email
Step 4: Evaluating & Optimizing
Before you send your email, you need to establish how you are going to measure the effectiveness of the strategy and whether it is fulfilling the purpose of encouraging your audience towards achieving its goal. Once you have a plan for evaluating your strategy and have prepared for measuring its effectiveness, you can finally start sending your emails out! But don’t just switch it on and leave it be quite yet, it’s important you monitor the performance regularly and optimize as necessary to ensure that your emails are as effective as possible. This small amount of additional work will ensure you are on the right track with your campaign and can avoid making mistakes which can cost you hundreds of email subscribers.
Step 5: Setting up Gym Emails in GymMaster
After you have organized steps 1 through 4 for your email strategy, it’s time to set it up as a gym email template (or series of templates) in GymMaster. You can send this template manually to your audience with a click of a button or have it run completely hands-off using an automated task which triggers without you having to lift a finger. It’s easy to set up a gym email campaign in GymMaster - click here for a complete step-by-step guide.
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