Best Practices for A Successful Fitness Newsletter

Apr 13, 2023

 by Tina S.

If you’re looking for something that’ll increase website engagement and kick off your gym’s marketing, consider a fitness newsletter. But wait! If you already have a fitness newsletter, it’s not time to stop reading! 

It’s a fact that many gym owners don’t offer the right content in their newsletters to effectively transform leads into paying customers, upsells current members, and re-engage absent members – all while building up brand authority and improving brand loyalty. 

When you invest your time in developing a comprehensive plan of action, you build personality and awareness, making you immediately recognizable in a crowded inbox. By creating and delivering robust content in regular newsletters, you’re keeping your fitness brand top of mind, and you’re building a relationship that other gyms aren’t. 

You might be wondering in the day of social media and the immediacy of our world today, if you need to bother with a fitness newsletter – yes you do!  

You may see some stats from various marketers out there that email needs to be updated, but the statistics are proving otherwise. Email is still the most effective strategy – in fact, email marketing still boasts the highest ROI of any marketing channel. 

To create an effective fitness newsletter, there are some best practices and key considerations to keep in mind.

1. Define the specific goal of each newsletter so that your readers know what to look for and expect. Defining relevancy is key.
   
   
2. Segmenting your email lists will ensure that relevant content is going to the right people. General information newsletters are ok, but if you can segment based on goals and interests, it will be a lot more successful.
   
   
3. Create a distribution plan that outlines future topics and when you plan on sending them. This not only keeps your contacts from receiving too many emails, but it also helps you to avoid throwing together a newsletter at the last minute.
   
   
4. Create a professional-looking, branded template ahead of time so just insert the content when it’s time. You also have the option of creating multiple templates for different audiences and purposes – for instance, a newsletter for current members and another designed for leads.
   
   
5. Writing a subject line is one of the most important parts of your email so make it attention-getting. We’re all busy people and most recipients will make a snap judgment to open your newsletter based on the headline alone. A balance of being informative and intriguing is needed – but no clickbait subject lines!
6. Include high-quality, appealing visuals to draw your readers into the newsletter. Use images of your members, your gym, and things of interest over just random stock images as much as you can. Remember: too many images will increase load time and lose the reader’s interest so having the right balance between imagery and text is key.
   
   
7. Make your text scannable and easily readable by breaking up your content into shorter, more digestible chunks instead of just one long block of text. Most people read these days by scanning bullet points and bolded headlines to read the text they find most valuable and then expand from there.
   
   
8. Although you don’t want your newsletter to be just one big sales pitch, you do want clear call-to-actions so that your members and leads can follow up with ease.
   
   
9. Everything these days needs to be optimized for mobile so that your newsletter is easily read from any device. If your newsletter doesn’t provide a seamless user experience, the chances of that reader going back later to read your email from a laptop are minimal.
   
   
10. There’s nothing worse than a reader being interested in finding out more information, signing up for a new class, or following a link for an event and that link not working. Broken, missing, or easily overlooked links can make a huge difference not only in engagement but in credibility as well. 

We realize that this is A LOT of information to digest. That’s why we offer our VA services so that our teams can design, write, automate, and implement your newsletters that go out to your leads and members in a professional, timely manner.

Find out more about how we can ensure your newsletters include the best practices and key elements to increase your open rate and boost your ROI. 

Next week, we’re going to go over what type of content to include in your newsletters. Although snappy, intriguing headlines may get them to open your newsletter the first couple of times, it’s the useful and relevant content that consistently helps them reach their health & fitness goals that will keep them reading!