Beyond the newsletter, why you need to use email marketing in your coaching practice.
I think everyone who reads Health Coach Weekly understands that they need to have a newsletter to communicate with their ideal client. This is an excellent first step, but definitely not the end of the story when it comes to email marketing. In this article I will share 3 tips on how to take your email efforts to the next level.
Segmenting Your Email List
Once you have mastered the basics of your email service, setup a list and started to gather subscribers, it is time to look at a few more advanced email marketing techniques. The first one is list segmentation, which is basically breaking up your email list into smaller, more targeted groups. For example, if you are doing a webinar or a teleseminar, those people that have signed up for the webinar are looking for more information on that topic and are expecting reminders about the webinar and probably the replay. If you send your entire list every single email about your webinar, the people that are not interested are much more likely to unsubscribe from your list.
Another time that this is extremely useful is if you have an audience that is not all the same. If you have 2 target markets, like massage therapy and weight loss for seniors, sending the same messages and promotions to both groups is not a very good idea. Segmenting your list will allow you to send your subscribers the information that they are interested in and is relevant to them.
Different email programs make this easier or harder to accomplish. Some let you move people to a new list with just an email click, some require users to fill out a new web form. I’ll get into my recommendations later in this article.
Setting Up An Autoresponder Series
This is a very overlooked, but powerful benefit of using an email management service. It takes a little bit of time to setup up, but you only need to do the work once.
Whatever your free gift is, make sure to setup a series of emails that automatically go out to your new subscribers after they ask for your free gift. Whatever the topic, obviously they are wanting more information. If someone is looking for a solution to their particular problem, they don’t want to wait a month for your first newsletter to get more info from you. When someone first gets on your list, this is a perfect time to start building a relationship with them. Go ahead and deliver on what your promised, educate them more in a series of emails that you automatically send out to them over the following days and weeks. Tell your story, make your first offer, find out more about your potential client.
A mistake I see too many people wait is the fear of being “salesy”. This is especially true I have found of lots of holistic practitioners. I agree that we are here to serve our clients and that being overly promotional is a turn off, but you need to learn to strike a balance. If all you do is send out one newsletter a month with a tiny link in it to sign up for your 6 month program, the likelihood of getting any clients is very low. On the other hand, if you send out an email every day asking people to buy your stuff without providing some very valuable content, most people will just unsubscribe. Like everything else in life, it is finding that balance, which will be different for all of us. I have been on both ends of the spectrum: Never “selling” anything and just providing great content to sending way too many emails to people that probably didn’t want them. Of course, when I never sold anything, my bank account was pretty empty all the time.
The lesson here is to learn where the balance is. If you freak out when someone unsubscribes to your list, then you probably shouldn’t be doing any email marketing. If you are doing successful email marketing, you will be continually adding people to your list, and others will continue to unsubscribe. Those that are opposed to any sort of selling in your emails probably would never have been a client anyway, so my advice is not to worry about it. Of course, if you send out an email and have 50 people unsubscribe, you may want to look at what you are doing and change your tactics.
Creating Marketing Campaigns
Do you have an upcoming group coaching program or cleanse? How does this work with your email list. Of course you will want to email everyone about your upcoming events. These should be mentioned in your newsletter, but you need to go beyond that if you expect any sales. A good marketing campaign can last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and can include a series of emails as well as things like webinar and teleseminars. If you have segmented your list as I suggested you can more heavily promote your upcoming program to someone who has shown interest, either by clicking on a link in your email, filling out a form on your website, or attending a webinar. A few emails to your entire list is always a good idea, but if someone hasn’t shown any interest after a few exposures they likely won’t. This is assuming that they have opened your email. Another best practice when doing a promotion is to segment out who has not opened your email and send them another message, testing out a new subject line.
My Recommendation for an Email Provider
I use and used to always recommend Aweber as my preferred email service provider. I still really like aweber, but now it is my number 2 recommendation. The reason for this is that they don’t make list segmentation the easiest in the world. There is a solution I found recently and if you use and love aweber, then you will want to check out AW Pro Tools. This is a tool that extends the capability of aweber, allowing you to tag people or copy them to new lists simply by clicking on an email link. The problem with switching to a new provider is that if you have been using something for a long time, it is likely that the switch will not be easy, especially if you have lots of different optin forms, email lists and autoresponders already set up. The other downside of Aweber is that they do not allow you to import an existing list unless people reconfirm, which means you will lose a lot of subscribers.
My current favorite email marketing platform is Drip. Drip goes way beyond simple email marketing and also does lots of fancy marketing automation, without the fancy price of systems like Infusionsoft and Ontraport.
No matter if you are just starting out, or looking to up your email marketing game, Drip is a great solution at a very competitive price.
Drip was recently purchased by my friends over at Lead Pages (Which is my all time favorite online tool and is fully integrated with Drip) so there will be massive and continual improvements with Drip in the future. They also have a FREE subscription level for your first 100 subscribers so you can really take the time to build this out and start using it without spending an arm and a leg.
