Email Newsletter Tips for Gyms

Email may seem like an overused marketing tool of the past, especially if you are looking at an inbox with thousands of unread messages. For your fitness business, the challenge is to break through your clients’ crowded inboxes and to deliver value through your email newsletter.

A common metric for measuring email performance, although its effectiveness is debated, is open rate percentage. The open rate of an email campaign is the percentage of opened emails from total emails delivered. According to marketing platform Mailchimp, their customers in the health and fitness industry show an average open rate of 20.06%. While this is a low percentage, 20.06% is close to the 20.81% average reported across all industries.

Master Your Subject Line

Subject lines are your email’s first opportunity to capture attention. If the subject line doesn’t capture attention, your open rate is likely lower than what you are aiming for. First impressions matter online like they matter at your gym’s front desk. According to Convince & Convert, 35% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone.

To master the subject line, it must be relevant to the email’s message and also inspire action. In 2019, you may consider using emojis to make your subject line stand out. According to an Experian report, 56% of brands using emojis in their subject lines had a higher open rate. With each operating system update, the use of emojis in everyday communication grows.

Another thing to be mindful of when it comes to subject lines is your recipients spam filter. The most popular email clients have pretty tight filters when it comes to spam, and one wrong word in your subject line can land you in the “junk” folder. The list of words to avoid is pretty long and includes some obvious SPAM triggers like “This isn’t spam” to more innocuous words that are common enough in the fitness industry like “Free trial”.

Looking for other digital marketing tips, checkout our SEM Checklist for Fitness Businesses!

Format for Fun

Well-designed, interactive emails are more likely to inspire action than lengthy text blocks, no matter how interesting your message is. The formatting challenge for your gym’s email newsletter is to look interesting and to clearly deliver a message. Three elements you can add to your email are videos, GIFs, and emojis. Beyond the subject line, emojis can also be tastefully added to the email’s body. According to a MediaPost report, the use of emojis in email marketing increased by 775% from 2015 to 2016. Videos are a powerful marketing tool in the fitness industry, and they can exponentially increase your email’s impact. Adding videos to your email, from client testimonials to exercise demonstrations, can increase click rates by 300% according to Martech Advisor.

Create a Personal Touch

Personalizing your email newsletter has never been easier thanks to affordable marketing platforms and business software. By using placeholders in your email template, you can customize the “To” field with each client’s name. You can even place your clients’ names in the subject line. According to HubSpot, emails that include the first name of the recipient in their subject line had a higher clickthrough rate than those that don’t.

Are you clicking “refresh” on your gym’s marketing strategy? Check out Zen Planner’s exclusive SEM Checklist for Fitness Businesses!