3 Features to Consider When Choosing an Email Marketing System for Your Health Coaching Business

Health coaches ask me about email marketing services all the time. You know how essential it is for growing your business.

Building relationships and communicating consistently are key to a successful health coaching business. Using email marketing to send your newsletters or ezines is an opportunity to visit your reader’s inbox on a regular basis to share your expertise and offer your products and services.

Social media has its many merits, but there’s still more intimacy available via email than social media. By writing directly to your ideal client, you can make it feel much more personal than the average status update or tweet.

I’ve found these are the top 3 features (you may not even know you need) to look for when you’re choosing an email marketing system.

1. You’ll want your emails to reach more of your subscribers

Some systems allow you to manually add subscribers without them getting an email asking them to confirm their interest. Better services, on the other hand, will allow you to manually add new names, or import a whole list, but each subscriber will get an email with a link to confirm.

This is called “double optin” and it makes internet service providers (ISPs) happy. What that means is more of your ezines/newsletters will actually reach your reader’s inbox and not end up in spam. That’s a very good thing.

To overcome your “but no one will click to confirm their interest” concerns:

• be sure the people you’re inviting to your list are the right fit for your business
• offer a valuable, relevant free gift as an incentive (which they get when they confirm)
• add their name to your list as soon as possible after meeting them so it’s fresh in their minds
• at a live event, use a list sign-up sheet and make it clear they’re subscribing to your list
• go ahead and tell them directly to look for a “confirm your interest” email

And don’t sweat the folks who don’t confirm. They’re just not that into you. It’s OK, you’ll be fine. Just keep your focus on the ones who are.

2. You’ll want custom lists for your products and services

Choose an email marketing service that lets you create multiple lists in one account and makes it easy to send a message to all the fine folks on your assorted lists at once. You don’t want to waste time sending a broadcast message to each list individually.

Not sure why you’d ever want more than one list?

Think ahead for a moment. You currently offer private health coaching, and then let’s say you want to sell an ebook or a detox teleseminar course.

You’ll need a system that can be integrated easily with PayPal and/or other merchant services you use. You’re going to want to be sure that each customer will be subscribed to your list automatically.

Some services will add all buyers to the same list, which limits their effectiveness. Everyone would get the same welcome email, the same followups, the same links.

I recommend choosing a service where you can have as many lists as you need, all integrated with PayPal: a list for people who purchased a breakthrough session, a list for your ebook buyers and yet another for your detox series.

This allows you to customize the welcome email for each list: a link to your calendar for the breakthrough session buyers, access to the download page for ebook readers and the dial-in number for your detox group, followed by links to the recordings.

While you may be hoping to just get a newsletter out a couple of times a month for now, the minute you think of one new thing you want to sell from your website, you’re going to hit a wall with the limited one-list-for-all-buyers systems.

3. You’ll want an attractive list-building optin box on your site

There’s no point to any email marketing system if you’re not consistently building your list. For that, you’ll want a nice optin box that highlights the benefits of joining your list and the awesome free gift you’re offering.

Choose an email marketing system that makes it easy to have a beautiful optin box (aka, sign-up form) on your website. Some systems offer easy-to-use templates to choose from, and make it possible to have your custom graphic easily integrated.

Avoid systems that offer only plain optin boxes and require a lot of coding and customizing to make them look any good.

It could be the best money you’ll ever spend on building your business.

I get really fired up about steering passionate health coaches like you away from the cheap-but-pain-in-the-butt systems, towards the way-bigger-bang-for-not-a-whole-lotta-bucks solutions. I’ve worked with so many clients who spent too much time and money struggling with cheap sub-par systems, before we met.

There are plenty of options for email marketing, and everyone has their favorites. Some people choose a service not fully understanding its features (or take advice from someone who doesn’t understand them either) and this is a decision worth the time to do a little research and ask questions. Find the balance between budget-friendly and feature-rich.

I recommend making these kinds of decisions with the business you want to build in mind, not the just-getting-started business you might have right now.

If you’re serious about building a health coaching business and want a solution you can grow with, I strongly recommend AWeber. It’s what I use for my own business and recommend to my clients every day. At only $19/month (or less if you pay quarterly or annually) it’s a very reasonable cost-of-doing-business, and if you use it well, offers a very high return on investment.

In general, the free services are going to be very limited. Like everything else, you get what you pay for.

Get Started Today

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To your awesome business,
Heather