If you’re a personal trainer, health coach, or a nutritionist, the key to growing your business is motivating your leads and customers. Text messages can help you motivate your customers while growing your business.
The Benefits of Text Marketing
Text messaging has numerous benefits. First, your customers are still used to receiving texts from their friends and family. When you text your customers, they’ll automatically feel like they know you. This builds trust in the short and in the long term. Secondly, we associate text messages with individual senders. Even if you are using software to send text blasts, the action still comes across as you being personally interested in every individual.
When you text your customers, you’re showing them that you care about their personal progress. And when you’re running a health and/or fitness business, this is a significant competitive advantage. Your competitors aren’t texting – they’re still posting.
Texts also have much higher open rates than emails. Your customers open texts 98% of the time.
Text messaging also helps you reach a wider demographic since practically everyone knows how to use smart phones. Since texts aren’t as popular for marketing as emails, you’ll be able to reach busy audiences that don’t check their emails regularly.
Ultimately, text messaging marketing helps you:
- Build meaningful and strong relationships with your customers
- Adapt to the mobile customer experience
- Communicate critical messages
- Get competitive advantage
- Grow your business
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How to Retain Customers with Text Messaging
When you’ve already created a connection with your customers, it’s important to nurture it. Communicating with your customers will help you get competitive advantage right now, and allow you to come out of this period stronger.
You can maximize the value of your existing customers with text message marketing by:
Sending Appointment Reminders
Think about taking back some of your time and automating your customer’s appointment reminders. For example, if your customer has an appointment scheduled in two days, why not send them a text to remind them? You can also invite them to ask any additional questions they may have before your session or send them a link to a blog post or web page you’ve created about the first appointment with you.
Appointment reminders are a nice touch when you’re working with clients who are super busy, and may forget about their appointments. By reminding them, you’re showing them that you care.
Announcing Discounts and Promotions
According to Adobe, your customers are 10x more likely to redeem the coupons you text them. So if you have a great offer that’s relevant to your customers, don’t be shy and send them a message. If your customers purchase your training and coaching services online, you might consider including a link to checkout in the message.
Text messages work especially great for time-limited promotions. For example, if you’re offering online nutrition consultations at 50% off, that’s a great reason to text your customers. Then, maximize their value by cross-selling or up-selling to them.
Remembering Important Dates
Customers love personalization, and there’s nothing more personal than remembering important dates like birthdays and anniversaries. If you can also add a special offer, for these occasions, that will increase the value of your communication even more. Additionally, if you’ve been working with your customers for a while, you have training and coaching anniversaries, too. Remind them how much you value them with a text message.
Stimulating Referrals
Text messages make it really easy to stimulate referrals. For example, you can easily start a “coach with a friend” campaign. Offer your customers and their friends a discount for every friend that they refer.
Announce new content
When a publish a new e-book, blog post or video, use text messages to drive traffic and engagement to your content. If you have your customer’s email addresses and have an email marketing strategy, you can overlap these communications for added impact.
How to Generate Leads with Text Messaging
Since text messaging remains a rather new marketing method, it’s still interesting to potential leads. So far, they’ve gotten used to businesses inviting them to download their lead magnet, send them an email, or start chatting with their bot.
However, seeing “Interested? Text me at #” is still quite curious.
If you’re a solopreneur or running a small business related to the fitness and health niche, it’s important to be innovative. Big gyms can’t easily and quickly adapt to new methods like text message marketing. But your size is an advantage. You can be agile, and use texts to show that you honestly care about your customers. If you’re the face of your own brand, this is incredibly important.
Make “Text Me” Your CTA
When you’ve convinced potential leads that your offer is great, it’s time to seal the deal with your CTA. Normally, health consultants and fitness entrepreneurs go for CTAs such as: “Schedule a consultation.” However, that’s practically a given at this point. Everyone is using it.
If you use “Text Me,” it will certainly arouse curiosity and seem far more inviting and personal.
The leads who are ready to make a decision will be more driven to take action immediately. And since it’s simple to get in touch with you, you’ll be removing friction from the lead generation process. Normally, your leads have to spend time filling out forms or writing emails. But with texts, they can simply shoot you a message, and feel convinced that you’re the perfect fit.
Try using the TextMe app or Google Voice.
Answer Questions
Your potential customers have questions that are stopping them from contracting your services immediately. For example, a customer may be wondering how much time your fitness regimen will take. They might have a specific dietary requirement. Texts are the perfect medium for sending quick answers to your leads’ questions. Consequently, they’ll be more likely to schedule an appointment when they’re sure you’re the right fit.
Additionally, when your leads text you, you can understand their typical “objections.” Then, you can adapt your content in the future, and make sure you’ve resolved their objections.
Build Your List
Leads need time to commit. But instead of losing them because they don’t want to become your customers immediately, you can text them. Text message marketing helps you onboard and nurture leads just as easily as you’d onboard them to a mailing list. Normally, text messaging services give you a keyword that your customers can use to sign up for your texting list. Then, you can follow up with questions, offers, and more. Be sure to craft your marketing messages so they’re resonating with what your customers actually need.
Follow-Up to Website Opt-Ins
Once your leads have opted in to receive your texts, follow up with them. For example, you can remind them what they’ve signed up for. Will you send them promotions, notifications about new services? Make sure your follow-up message is relevant to the offer your leads accepted. If you offered a link to free training videos, follow through and send them that link. You can easily send them other offers later on.
Add “Text Me” to Your Digital Signature
Gary Vaynerchuk, an online marketing guru, has recently doubled-down on his text message marketing strategy. In addition to using micro content (something we’ll discuss in the next section), Gary Vee also adds “Text me” and his number to his email signatures, social media, and emails.
As a nutrition and wellness consultant, personal trainer or nutritionist, you can do the same. It will help you spread the word and get even more people to sign up for your texting list.
How to Grow Your Business with Text Message Marketing
Finally, text messaging can help you convert leads into customers. Just like you would “nurture” leads through email marketing to convince them that your service is the right fit for their needs, you can nurture them through text messages. With texts, you’ll have to keep it brief, which is one reason text messaging is so effective.
Inspire Your Leads with Micro-Content
Inspirational and relevant micro-content works perfectly for coaches, nutritionists, and personal trainers. Think about sending short, inspirational or informative videos to your text list subscribers.
But first, it’s important to understand your audience:
- What motivates them?
- Why are they looking for your services?
- What questions do they have?
When you understand your customers, you can easily personalize your micro-content.
Leverage Social Proof
Distribute a satisfied customer’s testimonial to leads like them. If you’re a personal trainer, maybe they successfully lost weight. If you’re a nutritionist, the testimonial can reflect how a change of your customer’s diet resulted in more energy. However, it’s important to emphasize the benefits that particular customers are looking for.
For example, if you often use #MondayMotivation on social networks, you can share that content on Mondays. This is a great opportunity to invite your leads to engage with you, and offer their contributions, through text, social media, or other channels.
Integrate With Other Marketing Channels
Text messaging is the perfect addition to your integrated marketing strategy. Integrated marketing is an approach that offers seamless and consistent experiences to your customers, regardless of the channel. Your branding and your content purpose stay the same across channels.
Consumers love omnichannel experiences. So if you use different channels, stay consistent. For example, you could offer content teasers of your content elsewhere through text messages.
If you want to educate your leads to successfully convert them, you can send them teasers for more extensive content pieces such as your recipes, blog posts, videos, and e-books. Similarly, you can invite your customers to talk to you on social media.
How Text Message Marketing Helps You Grow Your Fitness, Health, and Nutrition Business
There’s no doubt about it: texts are still one of the rare unexplored marketing channels among health, wellness, nutrition and fitness professionals. Your customers know they’re personal, which is why text message marketing helps you come across as friendly and approachable, both vital qualities that personal trainers, coaches, and nutritionists should have. Texts don’t only help you convert customers. They help you turn your customers into friends.
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