How Can Email Marketing Benefit your Club? 

You didn’t become a fitness club owner to spend hours on your marketing strategy, but it’s an important part of acquiring and retaining members. Of all the marketing tactics at your disposal, email marketing is the one you should definitely be leveraging.

With email marketing, you don’t have to worry about unexpected algorithm changes, and you don’t have to wonder whether your audience is reading your content. Email allows you to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time, and to track whether it resonated. 

Read on to learn how you can use email to create a hyper-personalized experience for your members that will keep them engaged with your club and your community. 

Planning Your Campaign

People are inundated with marketing emails every day, and most of those emails will go unopened. You don’t want that to happen to you! Avoid this fate by creating personalized and exclusive value and delivering relevant messages to an optimized list of people. Each person on your list has trusted you with their email address. You don’t want to give them a reason to hit that unsubscribe button.

When you are planning your email campaigns, there are four questions to answer:

• What are you trying to achieve? 
• Who is your target audience? 
• What is the Call-to-Action?
• What can you do better this time than last time? 

Know Your Why  

You need to set a goal for each email you send. What are you trying to achieve with this communication? Are you trying to boost engagement, nurture and welcome new members, or promote an event? Answering this question for your club will help you evaluate the success of the campaign and avoid sending a message that falls on deaf ears. Not setting goals for your campaign will hurt your click-through rate, open rate, and possibly, increase your unsubscribe rate. 

Segmenting Your Target Audience

Segmenting your audience means creating different lists based on your member’s needs and interests. The easiest way to think about segmenting your email list is to consider the types of members you have coming in and out of your gym every day. You would not send an email about updated childcare hours to all of your members because that would potentially include members without children. That would be irrelevant to them! This would ultimately hurt your email health score with low open rates and unsubscribes. Your email health score is important because it determines your reputation as a sender on a scale of 0-100. A low score could mean you are emailing your list too often, you have a cold IP Address, or you’re are being limited by spam filters. Find your score.  

Bucket your audience into groups so you can send content that will be most interesting to that member or prospect. Things to consider when segmenting your email list include:

• Are they a prospect or an existing member?
• How long have they been a member?
• Is this a family unit with children or an individual? 
• Age Groups (teen, adults, seniors) 
• Activities, classes, events they have engaged with at your club in the past  
• Expressed interests 

Perhaps you would like to create a welcome campaign offering exclusive deals to new members or create a week’s worth of activities that families can engage in together when they come into your club. Members will appreciate relevant and personalized content they don’t have to sift through in their inbox. Plus, they are more likely to open your emails because they know the content will provide them with value.

Creating Engaging and Valuable Content

When creating the content for your email campaigns, keep it simple. Outline clear steps for your member or prospects to take, whether it is to visit a link, download a file, or fill out a form. Your members shouldn’t have to search for the Call-to-Action or scroll through unnecessary information to get to it. 

Boost your open rate by personalizing the emails and keeping the copy and subject line direct and conversational. Address the member by name in the subject line and the greeting of the email. Send them relevant information and content based on their interests and where they are in their member journey.  

Whatever your email’s goal or the message you are hoping to convey, you need to map it out and make sure it is relevant. Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself before you hit send: 

• Does this email bring value?
• Is this email timely?
• Is this email relevant?  

Here are a few content ideas to help you engage your members through email marketing:  

• A welcome email offering an exclusive deal to new members
• Workout challenges 
• Meal plans or nutrition guides
• Workout plans
• Family activities 
• Deals and discounts

Test, Test, Test

There is no one-size-fits all approach to marketing. Your success ultimately comes down to what resonates with, and engages your members and prospects. 

To learn what resonates with your members and prospects, you should run tests on everything: subject lines, tone, design, imagery, font size, etc. Use these tests to find out what email elements increase your open and click-through rates. Based on these findings, optimize your content s to ensure your emails continue to perform well.

Your members are at the center of everything you do – so why isn’t your member at the center of your club management software? Learn more about how our system could revolutionize your member experience.