In this concise, tactical episode of the Marketing Muscle Up Show, host Richard (Speaker A) and guest Ev discuss practical email‑marketing strategies tailored for fitness studio owners. They begin by debunking the myth that email is dead and then walk listeners through four core hacks: (1) consolidating and segmenting the email list (current members vs. non‑members, prospects, friends/family) to ensure relevance; (2) devoting the majority of effort to compelling subject lines and message previews, including testing multiple headlines and using the preview text effectively; (3) automatically resending the same email to contacts who didn’t open or click the first send, a simple way to boost open rates; and (4) timing sends based on the audience’s daily routines, avoiding late‑night sends that get purged in the morning. Throughout, they recommend using a CRM such as ActiveCampaign, Zip Leads, or MailChimp to manage contacts and automate these tactics. The episode emphasizes relevance, psychological engagement, and low‑effort automation to improve open and click‑through rates, ultimately turning email subscribers into loyal clients.
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Welcome back to this episode of the Marketing Muscle Up Show, and today I want to introduce something that's quick and fast. Actionable tactical marketing strategies that you can use to grow your fitness business. And I've got Ev joining me today. How you doing?
I'm great. How are you?
Amazing. Well, this episode is going to be short.
Yep.
And to keep it short, we're going to keep it tactical.
Okay.
So remember, when we do tactical things, team, we want to put context to everything that's tactical. So if you haven't yet watched any of our other episodes, please go and watch my other episodes. So you can kind of get the strategy around why you need to be doing these items. And so these items hopefully will get you thinking about doing your marketing in a better, more efficient, effective way to grow your fitness studio. And today, today, I just want to pull out one of the many tactical hacks that will help you to do that. So I thought, What a better way to start this than to talk about where it all begins and where I think one of the marketing hacks has never gone out of fashion, and that is email marketing.
They say it's dead, but it's not.
They do say it's dead, but it's definitely not. It's just, just, it just wasn't shiny when Facebook was bright.
Yes, but it can still be It can be a hard slog, you know, trying to get into people's inboxes and, you know, get people to open your emails. And open rates and click rates have definitely gone down, but I think there are some things that you can do to help you kind of get either into the inbox or get your emails opened, right?
Totally. So as a starting point, Hopefully you've got on some sort of CRM by now. ActiveCampaign, we personally recommend Zip Leads. Zip Leads is one of our partners. That's a great option too. You might be using a thing called MailChimp, the monkey as well. The monkey's pretty good. Yeah. And so right now, hopefully you will have all the emails from anybody that you've worked with. It could be a promotion, it could be when you did run Facebook, it could be any old clients that decided not to work with anymore. So you want to first of all, step 1 is compile emails in one section. And so the first step out of the 5, I think we're gonna give 5 today, is we want to segment your databases. So instead of sending the same email that you've always sent to the same, okay, that list is my fitness list and you hit send, what you want to try and do is segment the fitness list to obviously people current clients, existing clients, prospects that we haven't talked to, and maybe friends and family or super old people. And what we can do is by like just the basics of splitting the database, I would definitely split it up between current members and non-members. That would be the easiest way and the simplest way. That's where I would sort of— and if you want to go more complex, you can. So that would be the first thing. Anything quickly to add on that one, Ev?
I don't think so. I think keep it simple. And but definitely, like, if you're not doing that, you're, you are really— like, the thing with email marketing is if people get bored of your emails, they'll stop reading, they'll stop opening them. It's just psychological. So you have to be relevant every time you hit the inbox. So if a member is getting an offer for a non-member thing, that's irrelevant to them.
So relevance is key.
Yep.
All right, so what you can do, guys, is spend, uh, spend your nights or spend your weekend one day and just, just doing it the hard way, just splitting it up. Okay, that's a good way to do it as well.
Yes.
Um, okay, number 2, I want to talk about, um, headlines. Now the concept here is that most people spend 90% of their time on writing the email up, like getting the information together and putting in the email and then, you know, getting the images and fonts and all those kind of things. The concept I'd like to introduce you to is I want you to spend 90% of your time on the headline and 10% on the copy. Now, maybe not 90% of the time, maybe 80% of the time at least on the headline and 20% of the copy. Reason being is because as I mentioned before, you've got very low Open rates. And so the, the most important thing you can do is get people to initially open up your email. And so yes, we want to fill our inbox, like we want to have amazing content. However, the first problem we're going to fix is so your, so your head— so your email actually gets opened. Um, Ev, what are some fast ways that, you know, some options that they can have headlines that actually work?
Yeah. I personally, every email that we send out, I write 10 headlines like straight away just to get in the flow. But I think anything that's like, you know, anything that's interesting or like catches someone's eye or that kind of thing, you know, I think I wrote one that was like, when life gives you lemons. And that was like a really high, you know, open rate. So I think, you know, be— Sometimes you need to be really specific. Other times you can be a little bit more just like, yeah, I suppose interesting, but something that's gonna land in their inbox. I would, if I was you, go through your inbox, look at the ones that get your attention and work out why did that get my attention and start to write headlines like that. I do that a lot.
I always look at I always look at it about like if, if somebody was sending me an email, would I open it? And yeah, just go through any personal emails you get, or a friend or family would send you an email, you know, I look at that headline and does it capture the attention as well? So I think that's a really good reminder about headlines. And also too, just on headlines, remember, um, you can have the first few lines. Yes. So when you're looking in your box on Gmail, you've got I'm seeing 1, 2, about like 20 or 30, 10, maybe 20 words there that I see. So the first paragraph is key and that's something you can adjust in your email system.
Yeah. It's called the message preview, I think.
Message preview. And be sure to change the message preview because the last thing you want to do is keep the same message preview every single email. I've done that before. It doesn't look good. So always change the message preview. Okay. That's number 2. So the first one was split your database. Number 2 was the headlines, using the right headlines, emojis, trying to find some cool things. Number 3 is, I like this the best because this is the lazy man's way. Number 3, it's basically send the email out again for those who don't open it.
This is like This is literally the secret hack that most people don't do. Yeah.
So good. So the concept here is that you have, you send an email out and then it's going to tell you the people that actually, one, opened your email, sent it out, and then the people that didn't, the people that did not open it or click, you can actually send out the email Again and just send it out. It's so simple. And then you'll have another percentage of people that will open it. So that is a simple, super simple way to do that.
Really simple.
And it's an easy one for anybody. And the open rates are very similar to the first round that you do. You have the same amount of people that do open it.
Yeah, basically doubles it, which is great.
Amazing.
Nice. Number 4?
The 4th one and final one is the time. So be sure when you send your email out, send it out at an appropriate time. And the next question I'm going to ask you, Ev,
you're
sending a lot of emails out, is what's the time that we should send out? Because that's the question everybody asks. What time do I
send? People ask me this all the time. I just, you know, it's actually so simple. Just think about who your people are and when they might be opening emails. So, you know, I send emails to fitness professionals all the time. So I'm not sending them emails when they're in the middle of sessions. Like, you know, not like— that just doesn't make sense. So think about when people might be reading emails. So if you have a lot of corporates or, you know, people who work, guess what they're doing between, you know, 7 and 9 in the morning? They're on a train. They're on a bus. They're looking through their emails. They're getting to work. So send emails at that time. Lots of people kind of check their emails later at night, you know, once they've put their kids to bed, that kind of thing. They do it kind of like, you know, closing off their day. So just think about the behavior of your people and send the emails at that time and try all different times. That's it.
One definitely tip I would say not to do is don't even send your emails too, too, too late. in the evening, because what happens, it's called purging emails first thing in the morning. So I don't know about you, Ev, but what I do in the morning is I purge emails. So anybody that's sent emails through overnight, I just want to get my inbox clean. So delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. And then you get the ones that I want to work with. And usually it's any autoresponder or any company I'll have deleted. And but I will read those, you know, other times. But in the morning, I just want to make sure I'm not being clogged up with things. So I, I would say don't send it super late at night.
Yeah, agreed. You, you'll find the right time if you play around.
Awesome. Okay, there's 4 hacks to get your emails back on track, back working, get them going. It's a lot of fun emails. And I can tell you one thing, that your best databases, your best clients will always come from your emails, especially if they've been following you for a period of time. And in those emails, you've, you know, you've built a know, like, and trust factor, and then they're ready to respond back to say, I'm keen to work with you, keen to join the offer. So that's all about emails. All right, team, that's it on this episode. I wanted to keep it relatively short and tactical. Go and log in to your email database and go and make those 4 changes. And I'll see you next time on the Marketing Muscle Up podcast show. Bye for now.
