A worthy Newsletter is Your Gateway Email to Loyalty & Growth
The simplest way to break the seal on your email marketing strategy is to curate a weekly newsletter.
That's whether you own a gym, run a successful coaching business or sell a fitness product service. The most exciting part about that strategy is that word: Curate. Hold that thought. I promise I'll come back to it.
Building a strong fitness business is basically building a strong ideological community of people.
Big brands will call that their culture. Small brands we'll call it experience, but let's call it what it really is. It's a cult. Not the bad kind. It does start to feel that way, though. You know, it’s like if somebody's not wearing your brand on a their shirt or doesn't have it tattooed on themselves someplace... You sorta feel like you're not really winning. (You are, BTW.)
So... cult. ;-)
Much of this experience, this sort of almost cult-like experience — if you'll permit me to continue to use that word — it comes from the in-vivo experience of training with a group of people or a small group of people. If it's one-on-one, it comes from the experience of training with you.
A newsletter email, or an email newsletter permeates deeper into the lives of your audience. It goes beyond just your existing clients and also can reach your prospects. A really good newsletter resonates so well, the recipients will share it with other people. You can see where I'm starting to go with this...
Not only does shipping a weekly newsletter empower your audience and reinforce their feelings of loyalty, it also provides a direct pathway to the top of your funnel. That's goal achievement plus bonus points.
But, who has the time to curate a newsletter? Well, the truth is nobody... Nobody who doesn't plan the time to curate it. Or, everybody who plans the time has the time for it. There's that word again: Curate. I promise I'm getting there.
If you see value in reinforcing the loyalty of your existing clients and increased creating on auto-magic pathway for those who you've not even met yet, then can you really afford not to make the time?
Here's how simple it is in three steps:
1) Put time on your calendar right now to plot out the structure of your newsletters.
Consistency will be valuable in all the ways that it's valuable to your business. So try to get a form for that newsletter and don't, don't get too hung up on design. Keep it super simple to start. You can complicated later, but the simplest newsletters that connect with people matter way more than the most complicated ones that don't connect with anybody.
2) Schedule time each week to put that newsletter together.
You'll find that like a new workout at first it goes slow, but you get more efficient over time. You'll also find that you sort of absentmindedly start to curate content for that newsletter leading up to the actual date that you organize the newsletter.
So it'll get easier and faster every time. Now it's also okay for you to repeat relevant information, like an approaching event that you might start almost like a countdown for, and then update with new information as you approach it.
3) Just ship it.
Ship the dang thing. Like just do it wrong the first time.Just assume that with every subsequent newsletter you'll get better. It's more about getting the habit in place. Just like working out and over time you improve now.
If you're not sure at all, what to put in your newsletter, a good place to start is to take a look at what's out there. Take a look at businesses that you respect either in similar spaces or is it no matter, take a look at what newsletters are out there, see what they're doing, and then try to emulate that to the best of your ability.
If you don't like that or if you find that nobody out there is doing anything that you respect, then great. Here's your chance to demonstrate leadership. You're going to be the one teaching them how this is done.
Here are a few ideas (from a short list and off the top of my head as I recorded) that you could use for curating sections of your newsletter. That would be pretty simple to do.
Member Focus
I would start with your members or your clients if you prefer. So start by featuring one, who's made some type of achievement.
Coaches Corner
If you work with other coaches, if you say, for example, run a business, like you run a gym, then have a coaches corner or coaches two-cents corner.
Founder’s Insight
A third idea is you should have your thoughts on what matters right now. And this is probably the part that would take you the most time is to just do a little, this is what I see happening in the world, and here's how we're responding to it. Or this is what's on my mind right now.
Local fitness events and news
You could also include local fitness events and news.
Internal events and news
You could have a section that's internal events and news.
Fitness Tech
What about of section that's a technology that your recipients might consider like some type of a wearable device or just anything that might help them with sleep or overall health and wellness.
Social Media
You could have a section that's. Just social media screen grabs, as in these are things we're sharing on Instagram. These are the things that we're sharing on Facebook.
Offers
You could also even include discount offers, maybe, Hey, this week, we want to make sure that if you have any friends that are interested, use this coupon and they can get involved in, in this way.
Tip of the iceberg, obviously there's no end to it, but you can start to come up with these ideas and you'll see that come out of you.
If you just sit down and think about like, What would matter to my recipients if I just sent them a weekly newsletter? Most of these wouldn't take that much time to actually organize and get into a nice, simple, easy to read newsletter. Again, you can complicate this more in time, start with something simple and just let it build.
Note that most of what I just said talked about is communication. It's curation of other information from other sources, put into a single place to help build your community, getting regular community involvement with email.
The plus-plus to your goal achievement is that you're teaching your members that email is a way that you communicate. So that when you desperately need email as a means to communicate with them, it doesn't seem like a foreign channel.
You're also teaching Google or Outlook, as the case may be, or Yahoo... teaching them that I send people emails and they open them because it has content on in it that they love. That really matters to your email marketing deliverability.
So once you're doing this, congratulations. You're officially reinforcing loyalty with your existing clients. And you're creating that automagic pathway to the top of your funnel.
After you have that in place for some time, you might decide, Now I want to take on some type of lead nurturing or some type of welcome series. A newsletter is a really good place to get started with this and something that you'll just want to keep in place once you have it going... if it's good, if it's valuable, if you're delivering value.
If you have questions about that, if you want to talk about that in any way, please shoot me a message. I love to talk about email marketing. I love to talk about fitness. I love to talk about how email marketing helps your fitness business grow.
Let's talk.
Damon