Maintaining ongoing communication with members is fundamental to maintaining your memberships, engagement and customer loyalty—especially in the wake of the pandemic, when face-to-face contact is at an all-time low while digital consumption is at an all-time high.
Fitness newsletters are a great way to keep in touch with your audience on a regular basis and to keep them informed about your fitness business. But with the average person receiving around 121 emails per day, it’s critical to ensure your newsletters are captivating, relevant and tailored to your audience to avoid going unread or ending up in the trash.
You may be wondering if you really need to bother creating and sending fitness newsletters—and the answer is, yes. Regardless of the size of your business, email campaigns are still an extremely effective and valuable marketing tool. In fact, research shows that email marketing offers the highest ROI of any marketing channel—in fact, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can anticipate an average return of $42.
But in such a competitive landscape, what can you do to increase open rates and the likelihood of your emails actually being read? Read on to learn how you can make sure your emails are the brightest in the inbox.
What are fitness newsletters?
A fitness newsletter is a form of email communication that should be part of your larger content marketing strategy. Fitness newsletters can be used for a variety of purposes—for example, providing updates about your fitness business, sharing relevant industry news and fitness tips, or celebrating members’ milestones.
While the content will vary depending on the purpose and the audience, the ultimate goal of email marketing is to capture readers’ attention and keep them engaged.
What makes the best fitness newsletters?
Preparation is the key to success, so before you roll out your email marketing campaigns, you’ll need to start by defining your purpose and creating a strategy.
Here are some tips to help you get started:
- Set your focus & objectives: Starting with a clear understanding of your goals and objectives is critical to the success of your email campaigns. The focus of your emails will drive the content and design, as well as the relevancy to your recipients.
- Identify your audience: If you want to engage your audience, you need to know about them—for example, their likes, interests and other demographic data. By understanding who you’re talking to, you can create tailored content to pique interest and maximize engagement.
- Segment your email lists: Segmenting your email lists can take some time, but it’s extremely important to the success of your email marketing campaigns. Sometimes general information newsletters are appropriate to send to everyone, but creating tailored lists enables you to deliver the most engaging and consistent content to the right people. If you send too many emails that aren’t relevant to the recipients, you risk getting blocked or even reported for spam.
- Determine the frequency: After you’ve defined your goals and identified your audience, you’ll want to create a distribution plan that outlines the emails you plan to send, what you plan to include, and when you plan to send them. Consistency is key, so outlining your dates and topics in advance will help you avoid the last-minute scramble. It’s important to be realistic with the goals you set, so if you’re just starting out, consider sending one or two emails per month—you can always increase the frequency later).
- Create a template: To make things a bit easier on yourself, considering creating several templates to use for different audiences and purposes. The templates you create will be the foundation of your email marketing campaigns, so it’s important to ensure your branding and tone is consistent in order to build trust and familiarity with your audience.
What’s Next?
Now that we’ve covered the basics, it’s time to start creating and sending your fitness newsletters!
Here are some tips to help you create awesome email campaigns that catch readers’ attention:
- Write snappy, attention-grabbing headlines: The subject line is one of the most important parts of your email. We’re all busy people, and most recipients will make a snap judgment whether or not to read your email based on the headline alone. To entice readers to open your email, your headline should be a balance between being informative and intriguing.
- Include high quality, captivating visuals: Visuals are the first thing we look for, so the reader’s eye will be immediately drawn to whatever visuals you include. Using rich imagery is a great way to highlight an essential point and keep your readers engaged. But it’s important to find the right balance between text and imagery, because using too many images will increase your load times and risk losing the reader’s interest.
- Make your text scannable: The simplicity of your fitness newsletters is key to their readability. The majority of your subscribers will open your emails on their mobile devices, and long blocks of text can quickly cause readers to lose interest. Break up your content into shorter, more digestible chunks.
- Include a clear call-to-action: If you want your readers to take specific action after reading your email, tell them. Guide your readers to a clear call-to-action button so they understand the purpose of your email, and make it easy for them to do what you’d like.
- Optimize for mobile devices: The vast majority of your subscribers will likely be reading your fitness newsletters on their phones or other mobile devices. For this reason, you want to make sure your template is optimized for mobile use to provide a seamless user experience.
Conclusion
Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective and conversion-rich forms of digital marketing. Creating and sending fitness newsletters is a powerful way to build stronger relationships with members, improve conversion rates, and generate new leads.
To learn how EZFacility can help you create customized email marketing campaigns, click here to request a free trial and live online demonstration.