Building Your Email List
Want a quick boost in your business? Build your email list!
Imagine spending a few minutes writing an email, hitting send and then having dozens of people jumping on your next transformation contest or special program!
That’s the power of an email list, but only if it’s used the right way. Too many fitness pros are abandoning email in favor of SnapChat, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
While those are all effective means of marketing, there’s nothing that trumps email when it comes to being able to build your business. Getting attention in someone’s inbox, while challenging, is still more effective than grabbing their attention on social media.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t use social media. In fact, you should be using it in tandem with your email marketing to make both of them even more powerful!
Does Size Matter?
If you want to use email marketing you need to be proactively building your email list. Luckily, as a local business you don’t need a 100,000 person email list to be effective.
In fact, a few thousand people on your list will allow you to produce incredible results. Quality trumps quantity! You want an active, engaged list not just a big list. That means they are opening and clicking on your emails.
Ethically Bribe Them
If you want to really grow your email list you need to ethically bribe people to join. It’s not a trick or gimmick, rather an exchange of value.
You give them a gift that helps them solve a problem or provide value to them and they give you their email address. We call these Lead Magnets at FR and we use them to build our own lists.
Don’t be lame and have an opt-in form that says “Sign up for our FREE Newsletter”! That’s not going to get you very many leads. Just think about it…
Why would someone sign up for your newsletter? You didn’t tell them what they’d be getting or why it benefited them.
You need to provide a ton of value to get someone to give you permission to add them to your email list.
So think of a problem you can solve for your Ideal Client quickly. Then create a pdf or video that solves it for them. Don’t worry about creating a massive e-book or a long video series. The highest converting gifts are those that provide a solution quickly.
Here are a few ideas:
- Meal Plans
- Smoothie Guide
- 10 Minute Workouts
- Metabolism Boosting Grocery List
- 7 Toning Exercises For Women
I can already hear the haters bashing me for using the word “toning” in the last bullet. I guarantee you that if you work with women that want to lose weight or are trying to change their bodies that 99% of them know what toning is and it appeals to them.
Provide your gift on the main page of your website and create a unique landing page for it. Here’s a great example from Vaughn Bethell, an FR License Partner, FR Elite Mastermind Member and Coach for two of our Mastermind programs.
Spread the Word
Now that you’ve got your lead magnet ready to go, it’s time to use it to build your email list!
To do that you need to make sure people can find it. That’s why it should be on the main page of your website (like the one above that pops up after a few seconds), so every visitor can get it.
There are several other ways to get people to grab your free gift and join your email list including:
- Sharing on social media
- Running Facebook ads to it
- Having other businesses send it to their email lists
- Getting your current clients to email it to their friends
- Using local media like radio, tv and newspapers to send it to their email list instead of you buying advertising
What Works Better Than Regular Advertising?
The last bullet point above is how I built a 5,000+ person local email list quickly at my gym.
As a business owner you’ll get hit up all the time by sales people asking you to buy ads for local media like TV, radio and newspapers. It’s expensive and usually doesn’t produce results.
However, most of these media channels have an email list that you can pay to get access to, either instead of ads or as an add on to running an ad. Getting them to agree to send out a couple of emails to their email list along with running your ad can provide you with a ton of leads!
For a couple hundred dollars I was able to get up to 1,000 people to opt-in for a free gift when I used this method. To make a profit on that investment I only needed 1 person to join as a client!
What’s Next…
Now that you know how to build your email list you’ll need to start taking action!
Don’t get caught up in the details. Just get your free gift created, put up your landing page and start promoting the offer across the marketing channels you have available.
Once you’ve accomplished those things you can begin to explore new marketing channels to grow your list!
Optimize Your Email Marketing Plan
Building your email list is just the start. Now that you have a list, you need to set up a schedule to continue to provide them with value and occasionally make them an offer to join your programs.
If you need a bit of help figuring out the right email marketing plan for your business, make sure to grab our Free Cheat Sheet today.
