Email drip campaigns are one of the best ways to “work smart” for your local fitness business’ marketing.
You can engage with your members and leads on a regular basis without lifting a finger, thanks to the power of automation. Use these e-principles to craft a drip campaign that works both smart and hard for your business.
Niche Down Your Prospects
An effective drip campaign has a clear goal and offers compelling content. You want your emails to be valuable, not as spammy. That being said, focus on niche audiences with your drips.
If some of your prospective members are looking for fat loss, put them into their own audience list, and have an email drip campaign with content specific to them. Demonstrate how your fitness studio helps them achieve what they want.
Maybe your audience niche is men in their 40’s and 50’s wanting to be healthier and more athletic. Same thing, put that audience in its own list and provide valuable emails that demonstrate how you can help.
Use a CRM program like HubSpot to make things easier. CRMs give you an easy-to-navigate database to store your lead information. HubSpot is great for drips because it tags your leads.
This can either be done manually or through an automated campaign that applies a tag itself. So for example, you can tag contacts based on the offer they opted in to, based on whether or not they’re a hot or cool lead, based on the service they want, and so on.
This allows you to segment your audience into different niches. You can then create drip emails targeted specifically at these groups.
Your drip campaigns boost your Facebook marketing too. You can input your email lists into Facebook to create audiences for your ads with “custom audiences.” This allows you to show your Facebook ads specifically to the people that you build in your CRM.
Then, you can take advantage of Facebook’s Lookalike Audience feature, which lets you create audiences that are similar to people who are already invested in your business. You can create a lookalike audience of your email list based on their similar demographics, interests, gender, etc.
Follow-Up
Build your campaign through your CRM from the first initial confirmation. You can schedule your emails to go out on specific dates (March 13th) or by days (send email in 3 business days).
Specific dates are best leading up to events or with limited time offers. Drip campaigns based on days offer a bit more flexibility: You can trigger them to go out a day or two after the first contact email, then a few days after that, a week afterwards, and so on…
When a consumer sees your business for the first time, they might not invest right away. If they sign up for an offer via a contact form, that doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed to visit your location.
But at this point, they’ve at least opted into something which allows you to capture their contact info through your CRM… and this puts them into a drip campaign.
The strategic email reminders, then, make it so that when they are ready to take that next step they’ll know what to do. This increases conversions significantly because you actively follow through with your leads – they never go cold.
Enhanced Experiences
The cornerstone of a great drip campaign is content.
Enhance your reader’s experience with infographics, images, compelling text, videos, and special features like countdown timers.
You can also use your drips to distribute ebooks and white papers. These are a great way to add value to your emails and give yourself more credibility. Y
ou can offer extra deals and coupons that only customers who are part of a particular drip campaign can take advantage of. Special holiday promotions are another way you can reward your email lists and keep them engaged.
One last thing to keep in mind when crafting your email drips: Keep them short and sweet!
Most pageviews are less than 15 seconds… because people skim. And the average is pageview time is only 62 seconds.
So, break your text into segments and make it easy to scan and pick out essential information in your emails.
What other tips have you learned when building your email drip campaigns? Let us know in the comments below.
