Did you know that email marketing has an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent? With the rising use of things like SMS marketing and mobile push notifications, you may be surprised to learn that email is still one of the most effective forms of marketing communication. There are many different types of emails you can send out to your fitness club audience, but perhaps the most powerful is a newsletter.
A fitness newsletter is an email that educates your audience about the latest club news, industry trends, fitness tips, and other valuable topics. Newsletters are an excellent tool for engaging prospects and club members alike. They also help you build brand familiarity and a memorable brand personality.
In this article, we’ll go over the best tips for creating a fitness newsletter that drives member acquisition and engagement!
1. Make sure you have permission to email your audience (if you need it).
Depending on where you are, you may or may not need users to give their consent to receiving marketing emails. In the UK, by law, you’re only allowed to send marketing communications to individuals who have given you permission. You can encourage prospects to opt in for your newsletter with an incentive, such as a free club pass or discounted membership for signing up.
In the U.S., you can send marketing emails without users opting in. In both countries, however, you must provide an option for users to opt out of receiving emails.
2. Keep your newsletter content focused.
Newsletters that feel cluttered and random are newsletters that no one is going to read. Choose one topic or theme and stick with it. Try to keep your promotional content to a minimum. It’s okay to include some, but remember, a newsletter is about updating, informing, and educating.
Here are some topic ideas for your fitness newsletters:
- Club news and updates (e.g., new classes, staff members, events, and fitness challenges)
- Member success stories
- Workout and nutrition tips
- Latest health and fitness research and trends
- “How to” guides for workouts, exercising without injury, and so on
3. Consider segmenting your audience.
Segmenting your email audience means splitting them off into different groups based on shared characteristics. You’ll want to segment your prospects into one group and members into another, for example. Or you could group your audience by age, fitness interests, or club activity. Segmenting allows you to deliver more targeted and valuable content.
4. Balance text and design.
The average time people spent reading brand emails in 2021 was only 10 seconds. So, that’s about how long you have to convince someone to keep reading your fitness newsletter. The key to making them want to stay until the end is high-quality design that aligns with your brand paired with the right amount of copy.
Your design and copy should be concise and minimal, leaving plenty of white space to keep the email from feeling cluttered. Creating a newsletter template that you can drag and drop new content and images into for each email will help you maintain consistent and concise brand design.
5. Measure email performance and use results to test new things.
The last thing you want to do is waste any of your precious time creating newsletters that aren’t converting. By looking at metrics such as opens, click-throughs, bounce rates, and unsubscribes, you can get an objective idea of what’s working for your audience and what’s not.
Play around with different elements of your newsletter to see how they affect performance. Experimenting with different subject lines, call-to-actions, personalization, design, and content can shed some light on what gets subscribers to read your newsletter and engage with it. Just make sure you test things one at a time, so you know which one is affecting performance.
Get Easy-to-Use Tools to Create an Engaging Fitness Newsletter
Creating a great newsletter from scratch every week or month is a lot of work. Fortunately, ClubWise’s Campaign Manager makes email marketing easy.
With our Campaign Manager feature, you can create beautiful and professional-looking emails quickly using an intuitive drag-and-drop editor. Once you’ve perfected your content and design, you can segment your audience to send targeted, personalized emails that are more likely to convert. After you’ve sent a campaign, you’ll have access to key performance metrics that allow you to refine future emails.
To learn more about the Campaign Manager and other ClubWise features that can make your job easier, book a demo today!