How to Get Noticed in Inboxes During the Holidays.

Growing a health and fitness business in the middle of the holiday season can be difficult.  However, emails can be one of your greatest resources to expand and reinforce your membership this holiday season. Emails can also be a great way to promote your holiday fitness offer to new and existing clients. The more quality emails you can get out of a targeted audience, the better chance you have of capitalizing on revenue from emails.

Before we dive into the hot topics of how to get people to open and click through on your emails, let’s talk about the actual state of everyone’s holiday inbox. During one of the busiest advertising times of the year, your email offers will be competing with literally billions of other emails. Whether it’s receipts, promotions, or work emails, everyone’s inbox is stuffed. In 2020 SendGrid recorded 5.8 billion emails sent. That statistic is not for the year, it’s for one single day...Black Friday.  Needless to say, the inbox competition is high.

Our best advice at navigating the inbox, is to personalize the emails you send. Use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to help, and try sending emails targeted at a particular audience instead of your entire email list. For example, if part of your holiday offer is to offer a discount on a Barre class from now until the end of the year, use your CRM software to automate an email to Barre class attendees that allows the receiver direct access to the discount. Another example is you can use your CRM software to gather email addresses of past attendees of similar classes, like yoga and pilates, to encourage members to branch out and try a new class. There are lots of options, but the most important point is that the emails you are sending are personalized and targeted instead of vague.

How To Get People To Open

You built your incredible holiday offer and plan to use email to advertise, but how do you get your recipients to open the emails you’re sending them? Here are 4 key points to avoid getting unread or archived.

  1. Start Sending Now
    If grocery stores can start putting up Christmas decorations in September, fitness businesses can start sending holiday offers in October. With so many day-before shopping trips it may not seem like it, but over half of consumers start holiday shopping before Black Friday.  Start sending your email holiday offers now. By starting earlier, you are staying one step ahead of the competition and may even give people ideas for their holiday gifts.

  2. Schedule Your Sends
    Statistics have changed the way we look at advertising. There is an optimal time on almost every single day to send an email that will make it more likely to be opened. If your target audience is the average American adult, hit send in the AM when they are more likely to be opening their inbox.To give you a better landscape of best times, Experian calculates that you are more likely to receive revenue from your emails if you hit send at 12pm on Thanksgiving, between 4 and 8am on Black Friday, and 8 and 10am on Cyber Monday.

  3. Enticing Subject Lines
    Before you hit send on your amazing holiday offer, be sure to check of these 5 tips for your subject line:

Exclusive: create a sense of exclusiveness within the subject line.These types of subject lines often open with “early access” or “members only.” Any type of phrase that immediately let’s the reader know it is a targeted email, and not generic.

Name Call: you don’t have to wait for the body of the email message to call out your member’s name. Use your CRM software to put it right in the subject line!  Talk about personalization.

Short & Sweet: if your subject line is a paragraph in itself, don’t expect any of your members to open it up and read more. Most SEO software recommends keeping the subject line between 25 and 50 characters.

Know Your Audience: tailor your subject line to your audience. Adding emojis, or small digital icons in the subject line is a proven method to capture the attention of a younger audience. If your recipients are typically millennials or younger, this may be a great tool for you.

Try It Out: do your own research! Every audience is different, so try two different subject lines on half of your email list, and see which results generated better revenue. Record these tips, and use them in the future.

 

      4. Gmail Hacks

Did you know that almost 1 out of every 4 emails opened are Gmail? For these users, emails are separated into 3 tabs: primary, promotions, and social. Unfortunately, emails in the promotions tab are less likely to be opened. Follow these 4 tips to stay away from the “promotions” tab.

  1. Include an account of membership number to demonstrate personalization.
  2. Only insert one external link.
  3. Embed a deliberate and purposeful photo, but only one.
  4. Avoid prominent promotional terms.

How To Get People To Click Through

Now that your consumer has opened your email, how can you best present your offer to guarantee a click-through to generate revenue? Most emails are only scanned for 8 seconds or less, so your offer needs to be readily available and presented in a way that captures the attention of your audience. Here are 2 great tips to help get your consumers to click through on your holiday offer emails.

  1. Make It Move
    Although full 10-minute videos cannot be embedded into an email, a graphics interchange format, or GIFs, is a great alternative. These short animations can provide attractive movement for the consumer’s eye and give personal insight into your business. Consider including a moving panoramic view of your studio or a brief look into one of your group fitness instructors leading a class.
  2. Mobile Layout
    Recent polls in 2020 show mobile email users at nearly half of all email usage. With this in mind, make sure your email design is mobile-friendly. Otherwise, you may receive a lot of mobile users opening your enticing subject line only to find a very confusing layout that is scanned for less than 8 seconds and passed by. Keep images and fonts small, so users don't have to scroll, and consider limiting your presentation width to 600px for an easier transition from web to mobile.

Emails can be a great way for you to promote your holiday offers to your membership. If you go about email promotions with a good strategy, it can generate great revenue for you, help you avoid the holiday business lull, and even keep you ahead of the competition. Just remember these tips, and good luck this holiday season!

Click here to download the Xplor Studio Holiday Playbook!

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