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Growing an Email List: Tips for Certified Personal Trainers

You’re an expert at helping people build muscle, lose weight, run faster, and get in the best shape possible. That’s what certified personal trainers do best.

It’s rewarding work to help someone achieve a health and fitness goal. Many personal trainers love what they do, but struggle to attract and retain clients. To be a fully booked personal trainer you need to be doing something more than counting reps and sets—you need to be marketing your services. One effective strategy you should be using to connect with potential clients is growing your email list.

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7 Ways to Grow an Email List 

Building an email list and nurturing those subscribers with valuable content is a great way to build relationships and ultimately book more personal training sessions. Here are 7 ways certified personal trainers can grow an email list.

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1. Create engaging email content. Give your current email subscribers the skinny on diet, exercise, nutrition, and healthy lifestyle habits. You can share client success stories, address common questions and concerns about fitness and exercise, or even riff on the latest fad diets or weight-loss reality TV shows. When you serve up useful and engaging content, your current subscribers will stick around and be more likely to share your emails with family and friends.

2. Write guest posts. Reach out to blogs and websites and offer to write a guest post. It’s an opportunity to introduce yourself to a whole new audience of people. Give them valuable content about health and fitness, goal setting, nutrition, or similar topics. And invite them to subscribe to your email list.

3. Publish videos. YouTube is probably the best option, but there are other platforms where you can publish videos like Vimeo. Create quality video content about topics such as injury prevention, foam rolling and stretching, or proper exercise technique. Make a video about a day in the life as a personal trainer, or interview one of your clients about their transformation. Demonstrate your knowledge as a personal trainer. Be helpful. And encourage people to get on your email list. You can even include a sign-up link in your videos and in the comment section.

4. Host a contest. Create a contest you can promote on social media that requires people to sign up for your email list. Give away something valuable and useful like a free personal training session, customized 8-week training program, coaching calls, or fitness products. It’s a great way to add new people to your list. Places like Hootsuite, Rafflecopter, and Woodbox can help you create a contest and funnel people to your email list.

 5. Answer questions on Quora. Quora is a crowdsourcing site that allows people to ask questions and solicit responses from experts who can help. Build your profile and include a link that makes it easy to sign up to be on your email list. Search the site for questions about building muscle, bodybuilding, weight loss, exercise, working out, nutrition, and other fitness topics. Then start answering questions. It’s a great way to build authority as a personal trainer and send potential clients to your email list.

6. Create lead magnets. You’ve probably downloaded your fair share of these. A lead magnet is basically a mini ebook that provides useful information on a specific topic, often as a PDF. Gate your content piece by requiring a person to provide their email address in order to gain access to the advice you’re providing. It’s a great way to build your list, and can be a good way to get referrals.

7. Use social media. Follow, like, and comment on other people’s social media profiles, and you’ll often have people follow you back. Post helpful fitness tips and advice on your social media channels. When someone leaves a comment and responds to the post, be sure to reply. Establish a presence on social media, and you can periodically invite those followers to subscribe to your email list.

If you want to build your personal training business and book more sessions with clients, work on growing your email list. It’s worth the effort. You’ll build a bigger audience and some of those potential clients will eventually become paying personal training clients.

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