Last updated on July 10th, 2025 at 12:39 am
4.26 billion (yes, with a B) — this is the latest reported total number of email users in 2022. And it’s predicted that it will grow at 3% each year.
Compare that with Instagram or YouTube, which have 2 billion and 2.5 billion active users. That’s half of the email users.
So if you are putting efforts into email marketing and making it profitable, you are on the right path… even though it’s a tough one.
But trust me; long-term benefits are worth it.
Why is Email Marketing Important for Gyms?
Email marketing is a respite from social media, where keeping up with trends is like trying to catch a greased pig – exhausting, frustrating, and kind of pointless.
One day you’re creating carousels. The next day you’re dancing to reels, and the day after that, who knows? And you are always at the risk of losing your followers with no way of re-engaging them.
With email, you OWN your audience. You have a direct connection with them without any third-party controller in between. You know their preferences and behavior, which helps you send them relevant messages.
In his book Traffic Secrets, Russell Brunson stresses the importance of building your own email list. He makes a clear distinction between different types of traffic –
- The traffic you control (such as ads and sponsorships),
- The traffic you don’t control (such as SEO and affiliates), and
- The traffic you own, which is your email list
But the problem happens when email marketing is approached with the wrong mindset — bombarding people with promo emails for short-term gain.
Then it becomes a pit of money-sucking, time-consuming frustration that brands push aside in favor of other channels.
However, neglecting email marketing would be a big mistake.
With the right approach and a focus on building relationships with your subscribers, email marketing can be one of the most effective channels for driving engagement, boosting sales, and growing your business.
In this blog, I’ll share 6 email marketing tips to help you build a powerful email list, engage your subscribers, and boost your business growth.
1. Grow Your Email List
Building your email list can initially seem like a slow climb, especially when you only have a few subscribers.
But there is a method to the madness instead of just hoping someone will sign up for your list.
Let’s look at some of the ideas.
Facebook Ads
A quick way to grow your email list if you have the budget is to run Facebook ads.
What most people get wrong is they run Facebook ads on the website where visitors get lost or try to sell them full-time gym memberships or personal training packages.
The right way to capture the email of a cold audience is to promote your free trial, an ebook, or free consultation with a trainer and get people to a dedicated landing page that does nothing but promote that one offer.
Check out this example of the opt-in page by Virgin Active’s website to get visitor details:
Walk-ins
If you have many walk-ins inquiring about your gym, offer them a 10% discount on their pass or membership whenever (and if) they decide to join in exchange for their email address. This is a great way to get people on your email list while incentivizing them to join your gym.
Only Highly-Qualified Leads
If you want highly-qualified leads (leads that are highly likely to convert into regular customers), you can add a small price to your free trial.
For example, F45 offers 14 days for $14. This low barrier to entry is often enough to attract people who are serious about getting fit and are more likely to convert into regular customers. And it also helps weed out those who may not be motivated enough to commit to your gym in the long run.
Fitness Events
Consider hosting a fitness event and collecting email addresses from attendees. This can be a great way to engage with your local community and showcase your gym as well.
Newsletter
If you need more time to set up Facebook ads or host an event, the simplest thing you can do in the coming weeks is add a pop-up for newsletter signup on your website. This can effectively capture emails from people who are already visiting your website via organic search or referrals.
To learn more about growing your email list, check out our full guide here.
Not everyone who signs up for these free trials or lead magnets will visit your gym, but now that you have their email, it’s an opportunity to nurture them further.
How do you do that?
That’s the topic of our next section, which talks about what emails to send to your email list.
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2. Send a Mix of Promotional and Educational Content
Promotional content is focused on selling a product or service, while educational content is designed to provide information or teach something new.
Examples of promotional emails that don’t sound too pushy and convert subscribers to paying customers:
- Limited-time discount offer
- New membership plans
- Seasonal deals or promotions
- Special event invites
- Referral program incentives
- Case study or client success stories
- Trainer credentials
Here’s a promotional email by Virgin Active offering membership at half price…
Here are some types of educational content you can send to your list…
- Workout and training tips
- Nutritional advice and meal plans
- Exercise science and physiology explanations
- Video tutorials for home workouts
Here’s an example of what this can look like:
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3. Analyze Your Metrics
Tracking email metrics is important to understand the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns. It helps you see what’s working and what’s not, so you can make adjustments and improve your strategy.
You don’t have to track every single metric under the sun. Start with the basics, such as — Open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and unsubscribe rate.
Let’s explore them in detail and what to do if you see them skew.
Open Rate
The open rate in email marketing is defined as the percentage of email recipients who opened a particular email from the number of people who received it.
If you notice your open rates starting to decline, try these tips:
- Test creative and catchy subject lines to capture your audience’s attention.
- Experiment with sending frequency to avoid email fatigue and low open rates.
- Give your email a second chance by resending it with a new subject line to those who didn’t open it the first time.
- Use a recognizable sender name, like the CEO or personal trainer, to gain trust and increase the likelihood of your email being opened.
Do you want to create great subject lines (like headlines) without much hard work? Check out Funnel Scripts. It’s a tool that helps you easily create different email subject lines if you input your audience, topic, offer details, etc.
It’s important to note that With iOS15 changes such as the Mail Privacy Protection feature, open rates may appear higher than expected. So open rate is not always an accurate representation of how many people actually opened your email.
While open rates can be a useful metric, it’s important to also look at other data points, like click-to-open rates, to get a better picture of the success of your email campaigns.
Click-to-Open Rate
Click-to-open rate (CTOR) is the percentage of people who clicked on a link within an email compared to the number of people who opened the email. CTOR measures the effectiveness of the email content in persuading subscribers to click on the links.
Here are some things you can try if your click-to-open rate is lower than expected:
- Review your email content and ensure it’s relevant and valuable to your subscribers.
- Optimize your email design and use clear and prominent CTAs to encourage clicks.
- Experiment with link placement and consider using buttons or images to make links more prominent.
- Personalize your emails with subscriber data to make them more relevant and engaging.
- Segment your email list and send tailored messages to each group based on their interests or behaviors.
List Growth Rate
List growth rate refers to the rate at which your email list is growing over a specific period of time. It is calculated by subtracting the number of unsubscribes and bounces from the number of new subscribers and then dividing that number by the total number of subscribers.
For example, if you had 1000 subscribers at the beginning of the month, gained 200 new subscribers, and lost 50 subscribers due to bounces and unsubscribes, your list growth rate would be 15% for that month.
Tracking your email list growth rate is crucial because it tells you how effective your lead-generation efforts are.
If your list growth rate is low, it could mean you’re losing more subscribers than you’re gaining or not enough new people are signing up. So, to maintain a steady list growth rate, make sure you’re keeping those two numbers in balance.
This is not an exhaustive list. For more metrics and tips to improve them, check out this post here.
4. Automate Your Email Workflows
Imagine you have a list of 5000 subscribers. You want to send out emails as soon as people sign up, reminders for upcoming classes, promotions for membership renewals, and thank you notes after purchases.
But, with only 24 hours in a day, it’s impossible to do it all manually. This is where email marketing automation comes in.
Email marketing automation is the process of using software to automate repetitive tasks involved in email marketing based on certain triggers or actions. It allows you to focus on the big picture and run your business while the software takes care of the little details.
Automating saves you time and money and also helps you send targeted, relevant messages at the right time.
Here are some examples of emails you can automate:
- Welcome email series for new subscribers
- Abandoned cart follow-up emails
- Reminders for upcoming classes or events
- Promotions for membership renewals
- Thank you notes after purchases
- Feedback surveys
When deciding what to automate, think about the customer journey, and what types of messages would be most helpful at each stage. Then, map out the workflow and set up the automation in your email marketing software.
Here are two examples of email marketing automation:
- Trigger: Subscriber abandons their shopping cart on your gym’s website.
- Action: Automated email is sent to remind the subscriber to complete their purchase.
- Stop: When the subscriber completes the purchase or doesn’t engage with the reminder email.
And…
- Trigger: Subscriber signs up for a free gym trial.
- Action: Automated email series is sent to provide workout tips, introduce trainers, and highlight the benefits of the gym membership.
- Stop: When the subscriber converts to a paid membership or doesn’t engage with the email series.
5. Regularly Clean Your List
Let’s talk about email list hygiene.
This is important if you already have an email list of a couple of thousand people or want to get there without facing the issue of emails landing in the spam folder.
Email list hygiene is about removing uninterested or inactive subscribers, as well as avoiding shady tactics such as purchasing or borrowing email lists and only adding opted-in subscribers to your list.
Maintaining good email list hygiene matters for a number of reasons.
Removing uninterested or inactive subscribers can save you time and resources by allowing you to focus on those who are actually interested in your content or services and who are more likely to engage with your emails.
Most importantly, sending emails to invalid or inactive email addresses can damage your sender’s reputation and increase the likelihood of your emails getting sent to spam. And nobody wants that.
Let’s see some tips to keep a list of only highly engaged audiences.
Remove Inactive Subscribers
Regularly review your email list and remove subscribers who have been inactive or unengaged for a certain period of time (for example, 6 months or more).
Before you cut ties with your inactive subscribers, send them a farewell email to let them know they’re about to be unsubscribed.
This email could say something like this —
“Hey, we noticed you haven’t been engaging with our emails lately. If you’re no longer interested in hearing from us, we’re about to remove you from our list. If you want to stick around, reply to this email and let us know!”
For example, The Hustle sends a “last goodbye” email with the subject line “my last email to you.”
Easy Unsubscription or Setting Preferences
Include an easy-to-find unsubscribe link in your emails so that recipients who no longer want to receive your content can easily opt-out.
Give the recipient the ability to update their preferences for receiving email. Maybe they don’t want to receive all of your messages or want to get them only on certain days. This can improve engagement and reduce unsubscribes too.
Here’s how I give subscribers the ability to update their preference for my newsletter, The Tonic if they don’t want to receive daily emails:
Remove Bounced Emails
Use data to your advantage. Keep an eye on your email bounce rate and remove any email addresses that are consistently bouncing.
6. Choose the Right Email Marketing Software
Are you still using Gmail to send your business emails? That’s like trying to build a house with a spoon. Sure, it might work for small tasks, but it’s not a scalable solution for gyms that want to grow beyond 50 email subscribers and plain-looking emails.
You need a tool that can implement your email marketing strategy, analyze data, and scale with you even if you change your tactics later on. And we know that the ultimate goal is not to build email marketing but to grow your gym business – and that’s why ClickFunnels is the right choice.
We’ve compared it with the other popular options available and here are the results:
With ClickFunnels, you get a comprehensive platform that can help you build a website, craft sales funnels, A/B test various components, write blog posts, and manage leads in a CRM – all under a single subscription.
Why pay for three apps and learn to use different tools when you can do everything with just one?
If you want to take your gym business to the next level, don’t settle for Gmail. Upgrade to ClickFunnels and see the difference for yourself. With the right tools, you can achieve anything.
And the best part? ClickFunnels has a free trial, so you can test it out without spending a dime.
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Final Thoughts
Now that you’ve got all the insider tips on email marketing for gyms, it’s time to put them into action and watch your business thrive.
Remember that email marketing is just one part of your overall marketing strategy. Be sure to combine it with other tactics like social media marketing, SEO, and Facebook ads to get the most bang for your buck. You can even integrate emails into your sales funnel so that they contribute directly to revenue instead of just for “engagement” purposes.
Remember, the key to success is consistently creating quality content your subscribers are excited to receive. By providing value, building relationships, and staying true to your brand, you’ll be well on your way to building a loyal following and growing your business.