Welcome back to another episode of the Female emPOWERED Podcast with your host, Christa Gurka! In this episode, I discuss the ins and outs of email marketing and dive deep into its role in business growth and success.
Some of the topics I discuss in this episode are:
A Sneak Peek At Key Metrics:
AND! I’ve got a special offer this week - check out my resources page and use the promo code EMAILPODCAST for a 20% discount on all of my tried and true business email templates.
Looking for advice and resources to help you market and grow your clinic or client-based business? Visit my website or follow me on Instagram!
Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review for the show to help other female fitness and wellness professionals find our podcast!
Interested in being a guest on a future Female Friday episode? Email me at Christa@pilatesinthegrove.com!
Welcome back to another episode of the Female emPOWERED Podcast with your host, Christa Gurka! In this episode, I discuss the ins and outs of email marketing and dive deep into its role in business growth and success.
Some of the topics I discuss in this episode are:
A Sneak Peek At Key Metrics:
AND! I’ve got a special offer this week - check out my resources page and use the promo code EMAILPODCAST for a 20% discount on all of my tried and true business email templates.
Looking for advice and resources to help you market and grow your clinic or client-based business? Visit my website or follow me on Instagram!
Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review for the show to help other female fitness and wellness professionals find our podcast!
Interested in being a guest on a future Female Friday episode? Email me at Christa@pilatesinthegrove.com!
Welcome to female and powered a podcast are female fitness and wellness professionals and business owners looking for real talk about the ins and outs of the industry. I'm Krista Gurkha, an accidental entrepreneur, turned founder and CEO of a multimillion dollar Health and Wellness Business. In this podcast, I'll be sharing expert insights and having real conversations about what it means to show up thrived, and of course, get paid. We'll talk about what works, what doesn't, and what really happens behind the scenes of a client based business. Also, you can take away sound advice and actionable steps that help you become a more successful and confident business owner, all on your own terms. So let's dive in. Everyone, welcome back to another episode of the female empowered podcast. I'm your host, Krista Gurkha. And is this first episode of March, the first episode of March, can you believe we are already in March of 2024? Amazing, I don't know how if Time goes by so fast these days. So today, we're gonna be talking about a topic that I actually really love. Because I've been really excited over the last like three to four years of really diving deep into email marketing, and really trying to what's the word like, optimize my email marketing as much as possible? And yes, it has certainly taken a little while, like, three years. But now I'm really, really starting to see the difference. The increase in conversions, increases in open rates increases, people that are buying directly from my emails, which is really amazing. So when we're first starting a business, it's overwhelming to think of like one more thing that we have to do. So I'm just going to throw out some information today. That should help you you can bookmark this episode, if you're not there yet. But these are some real, actionable, tangible things I'm going to talk about today that you will be able to put into effect right away, like, right away. So why is having an email list important? So email marketing allows direct communication between you and your existing customers and even potential customers. All right, it's a very cost effective way to share news, share updates, drive sales, create community, promote your services, all of that. And one thing now, are there a variety of ways to do that? Absolutely. But one thing about your email list is that you own that list. So the what what, what do we mean when we say that? Well, what we mean is that with social media, if Instagram goes down, or Twitter goes down, or they decide to take away, or ban your account, you lose all of the traction that you've gained there. And I remember listening to a podcast, I think it was Simon Sinek, Adam Grant, and maybe Tim Ferriss, we're all on the podcast together. And they were talking about would they rather have a million Instagram subscribers or a million people on their email list, and all of them said, hands down a million people on their email list. So it's something that you know, it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen overnight. But little by little learning how to grow your email list and what to do with that list. Once you grow it, is very lucrative. Okay. Now, the other thing that it does is once you start growing an email list, you start to create a kind of community where you're nurturing clients, where you're fostering loyalty to your existing clients, and you're getting new and prospective clients to know like, and trust you. Okay, so this way, like I said, we're talking about owned media, this is what we're talking about your email list and gives you much more control over what to do with it, who's going to get it, who's not going to get it, etc, etc. So, that's really why it's important to have an email list. Alright, that's just why it's important to start. And if you have to do anything at all, anything at all at the end of this episode is just start collecting emails, just start collecting emails. That's it. So now I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how to start and grow your email list. Okay. The first thing you can do is try to have some sort of opt in somewhere on your website. You can do it on your social media channels. You can do it at the bio on your Instagram account where you can be like join my newsletter, okay. But in order to have people give you their email, you have to usually be giving them something of value. emails don't have to be long. They don't have to be a novel. In fact, you want them shorter, so they don't go to spam all the time. So what are ways that you can use to get people to give you their email, I mean, one way is you can have a freebie. Okay, so let's think of some freebies that you could have, let's say, if you want a Pilates studio, maybe you give people free access, if you have an on demand channel, you get free access to on demand for 30 days by signing up for the newsletter, or you get a free five Pilates exercises you can do at home by signing up for the newsletter, something to that effect, right? You could do discounts, sign up for our newsletter and get 50% off your first session at the studio. Sign up for our newsletter, get 50% off your evaluation at the physical therapy clinic, sign up for a newsletter and get a free session of NormaTec compression boots at your first session, something like that. You just want to base it make it enticing enough that people are willing to give you their email. So like I said, you can use workout guides, you can use ebooks, although I mean, it has to be something really valuable. You can do like for example, maybe you could say, take this quiz to find out if your back pain is coming from your hips, right. And it's for people that are suffering from back pain. And it's like, you know, three little assessments and there are going to do that. Or maybe even better, this is an even better one. This is how my brain works. So you get people to take the quiz. And then in order to get the results, they have to sign up for your email, because now they've already gone through part of the process and an order. So now they're more likely to be like, Oh, I already did half of these questions. Let me see what score I got in the quiz. So then it says, enter your email once that will deliver your results directly to your inbox. Okay, so now you're starting to grow your list, you want to say you can run ads to this, if you want that's down the road. We you can certainly run ads, which will optimize the amount of people that are that are signing up for your opt in, okay. But now Now you are finally growing your list. So now what do you have to do, you have to start sending out emails. So I recommend at least a monthly newsletter, or email. Some people I don't know if any of you subscribe to the. So it's a monthly newsletter that comes out by James clear, and it's like three to one. And he gives like it's very short. He gives like, like three ideas from himself. Right? And then he gives two quotes from others. And then he has one question for you. And so it's James clear. He's on the road, atomic habits and all that stuff. So anyways, it's very short. And it's goes out once a month on the first of every month. So at the very least you can start a newsletter that goes out once a month, right, make it very simple. Same day, same time every month, you can put what's coming up for the month in your newsletter, you can put you can introduce new staff members, you can do changes to your schedule, you can do a promotion, I try to say not to do all of those things at once because it gets confusing. You can even do a quote like we didn't have that much to announce in February. So for our mid month email, we're just doing like a Valentine's Day email that says, you know, we're grateful for all of you. We love our clients. So be consistent. I know some people that send out emails weekly. And some people send out emails monthly. So for Christa Gurkha, and for my coaching business, I send out emails every Tuesday. And then for Pilates in the grove, we send out the first of the month and the 15th of the month. All right, unless they fall on a Saturday or Sunday, in which case we do it the next Monday. So just be consistent. So once you're starting to get information out there and enter your an email, then you want to start tracking the metrics. And that's the majority of what we're going to talk about the rest of this episode, we're going to talk about which metrics you want to track. What are the industry standards that you want to shoot for and how you can optimize and improve those if you are falling below what industry standard is. So the first thing you want to track when you're starting to do email marketing is open rate Open Rate basically means the percentage of people who receive your email who actually open it. Okay? So some suggestions that we recommend. Make sure that the from the sender name is very clear as to who it is. So if it's Pilates and the grove make sure it says Pilates and the grove if it's Krista Gurkha, make sure it says Krista Gurkha. Okay, the other thing you want to do is improve your subject line that really, really, really entices people whether to open or whether just to skim and become one of the 48,129 emails that I currently have in my inbox. Okay, so open rate is something you want to track. The next thing you want to track is what we call click through rate, which you'll see as CTR click through rate. So what that metric is, is the percentage of people who open your email who click on any link in the email, okay, so what that's telling you is not only are people opening it, but they're reading it, and then they're taking action and clicking on the link. Okay, the next metric you could track is conversion rate. So if you were selling something, if you were having a very clear call to action, how many people that are clicking on a link are taking the action and either purchasing or scheduling or replying or whatever that is. And then finally, bounce rate. Bounce rate means the percentage of emails that were not delivered successfully, so they bounced from their email list. So now you don't want to have a high bounce rate. If you have a high bounce rate, what the interwebs start to think is that your mail is spam. And so it starts to send all your stuff to spam. So you don't want to have a high bounce rate, you really, really want to keep that low. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about some industry standards for these metrics. Now, I'm not gonna say that these are 100% true, because I found these on the internet, and so and do my research. So I can't say that they are 100% True. But I will say based on research that I've done over the last three years, they fall within this range. So the standard open rate for a wellness fitness wellness brand is 25 to 35%. So if your clinic or studio has an open rate of 50 to 60%, you're crushing it, you're crushing it. Okay? If your studio has less than 20%, or your business 20%, then there's something going awry. Okay. So you want to try to improve that. All right, click through rates, right, how many people are clicking on your on those links, usually, it's two to 3%. One to three, two to three, I like to shoot for 2%, or my team likes me to shoot for 2%. I'm a little below that right now. I'm at like 1.5%. So we're trying to increase that, okay. So if you have like a five to 10%, click through rate, again, crushing it. All right, conversion rates. Conversion rates are very low. Usually conversion rates are one to 3%. One to 3%. That means if you have 100 people, open your email, or click on the link that one of them is going to buy. So again, think about this in terms of numbers. So if you want 10 people to take action, and by that means that you have to have 1000 people click on your link, which means and if a click through rate is three to like two to 3% How many people have to actually open your email, which means how many people do you actually have to have on your email list? Okay, or you need to get those rates higher. So 50% of people are opening your email, and you're getting 50% click through rate, that's amazing. You don't necessarily have to improve, increase the number of people on your list, but it's still gonna be very little in terms of how many people convert, so just think about it that way. So instead of thinking, Gosh, I'm sister failure, I only had one person by if you had one person by and you have 1000 people on your email list, that's amazing. That's a really good conversion rate. Okay, and bounce rate, we want to keep that below 2% below 2%. So now, how many ways can we optimize open rate? We talked about it, having personalization, having personalization in the subject line, having personalization from the sender and also having a really good subject line. So let me give you an example. So instead of saying something like February newsletter, how about you use something like Sarah, you're exclusive February fitness tips inside openly now. So that is a much better subject line than February newsletter. And most things that say newsletter go to in Gmail, they go to newsletter spam anyways, so a lot of people aren't even looking at that. Okay, so how about some other ways some other examples of how you can improve subject lines? Okay, so trying to, like evoke curiosity. So how about something like, Get Fit faster with this challenge? Or I left you a message. Right? And then you're talking to them about maybe leaving them a message of a promo that you're doing? Or what about Open me this offer ends today? Okay, also things with numbers and lists do really well like five Pilates exercises to stop your back pain, or 10 yoga poses to get rid of sciatica, right? Something a problem, and then the solution. milestones, good milestones, how about, it's your birthday, here's a special thank you gift inside, right, so maybe they're gonna get a promotion or something like that. So just think outside the box. The other thing that we tried to do a Pilates and Grove is we try to use auditive. We're wording versus negative so instead of Don't miss out, grab this now. All right, comes from a little bit of like NLP neuro linguistic programming. So another thing that you want to try to do with your email list as soon as you have the capability to do so, is trying to segment your list. Now what do we mean by segmenting your list, you divide up your list based on factors such as past purchases, demographic location, niche. So let me give you a perfect example. For Pilates and the growth, we have two locations. So we'll segment our list. People that go to location A and the people that go to location B. We also have different services, physical therapy, services, and Pilates. So we'll segment our list based on people that were doing physical therapy and Pilates. We'll segment our list based on gender, we'll segment our list based on age, okay, so that if we want to send out an email that's specifically targeting menopause and a program that we're going to run, we're going to send it to a demographic that's going to be interested in that. And then we could curate the email specifically with messaging that really is going to resonate with that specific group of people. So the other thing that I think is really important is make sure that your email is optimized for mobile. Alright, so one of the things we found recently, and my CEO Lauren brought this to my attention is that on the mobile, our email, our font was really, really small. And even though you can blow it up, that's kind of a pain. So one of the things we did was we just made sure to optimize it. So the formatting was great. So that's one thing you want to format it for mobile, but we also needed to make sure that the font was big enough that people could read it. So a lot of email, software's do this, we use ConvertKit I really like it a lot. MailChimp does it, Constant Contact, Active Campaign, keep mailer light, there's a variety of things that you can use, but make sure that you're because most people are opening their emails on their phone. So make sure it's optimized for mobile. Then, really, if you're gonna use calls to action, which are CTAs calls to action, which means you want them to click on a link or you want them to take a specific action, make sure they are clear. And again, positive. So instead of just saying learn more, say book now. And instead of saying grab your free trial, say I want my free trial, because that's the action they want to take, I want my free trial. I want to get fit in 2024 I want to learn how to eat healthier. Okay, so use very clear, concise and compelling calls to action. So see, see, see see clear, concise, compelling calls to action, the four C's. Che trademark it not really. Okay, so now here's some more. Here's some more examples. So I gave you some examples of subject lines I think you can use and I'm going to give you some examples of very clear calls to action, so they don't confuse your customer and they really compel people to get that. Okay. claim my free trial today. Grab my spot, or or say you're going to discount something for 20% off, you can say something like, I want to save 20%. Click, grab my spot for 20% off, click, okay, people don't people have FOMO they don't like to miss out. So also with an expiration, okay? What if you want someone to upgrade into a different type of membership or package, upgrade now and grab these exclusive results or benefits sorry, upgrade me now I want the upgrade. So if the if it's upgrade for VIP benefits, maybe it's like, I want to be a VIP. So again, make them really compelling, make them be like what people want, people want to be a VIP, I want concierge service, I want to be at the front of the line or the front of the list for when something comes out. I want a free consults. Okay, so making sure that those calls to action provide clear direction, and they're also giving them really clear value proposition. So that you get these people to take the desired action, which is going to improve your conversion rates. One thing that you can do to test, you can test things like your subject lines is you can do what's called a B testing. So it's like a slash b testing. And what this does is it will test two different subject lines. And it'll send it'll send one subject line to like 30% of your group, another subject line to another 30% of your list. And then the subject line that has the most opened wins, and then it sends that subject line to the rest of your list. So a b testing is a way that you can check and you can test two different subject lines against each other. That kind of helps, I don't use it often. But every once in a while I do if I'm like back and forth between good subject lines. Okay, this is another thing you can do using chat GPT, you can take the email that you are going to use and you can copy and paste it into chat GPT. And you can say to it, please give me five s e o optimize subject lines that are less than five words that will increase my open rate for this email, and let it spit out a few different options for you. And then you make the decision on which one sounds the best. Or take two of them and do the ABX testing and see which one works. Right? A lot of times this stuff is just a matter of testing, testing, testing, testing, testing. All right. So what actions are you going to take at the end of this episode, if you don't have an email list already, you're gonna start creating one. If you do have an email list, but you're not being consistent in email marketing, you're going to start being consistent at least start with maybe one newsletter a month, same day, same time, so make it the first of the month or the 15th of the month. Number three, you're going to start analyzing your data. What are your open rates? What are your click through rates? And then four, if you're analyzing the data, how can you optimize and improve that test out different subject lines, clear calls to action, and keep growing your list? All right, well, I have a great offer for you. In one and the done for you resources that I have up on the crystal Gurkha website, that is a bunch of my email templates that you can have nurture sequence emails, all of that stuff. So if you go visit Krista gurkha.com. And you look at the resources and go to the done for you resources, you can see email templates in there. And you can go ahead and grab them. All right. If you use the promo code, email podcast, you will get a 20% discount. Okay, so check out Krista gurkha.com, go to the Resources tab. And the email one, if you use the promo code, email podcast, you will get 20% off. Okay, and we'll go ahead and link that up in the show notes as well. And until next time, my friends I hope you enjoyed this episode. Go grow your email list. Bye for now. Hey there. Thanks so much for listening today. But before you go, could I ask you to take a minute? Okay, so maybe like two minutes and leave me an honest review about the podcast. It really does help me get this podcast in front of more women in health care, wellness and fitness. And also really lets me know that I'm actually sharing information you all like to listen to. Thanks again and catch you all on the next episode.