If you want your business to grow, it’s a good idea to start using email marketing; for yoga studios, mindfulness instructors, and spiritual entrepreneurs, email marketing is imperative.
Email marketing is one of the longest standing forms of online marketing and should be a core component of your online marketing strategy.
Email marketing is the process of sending emails to your subscribers in order to nurture prospects that lead to sales and subscriptions for your spiritual, meditation, or yoga lessons. No effective digital marketing campaign is complete without email marketing campaigns. It is every bit as important as your social media marketing.
Email marketing is arguably the most direct way of reaching customers online and of nurturing leads. Effective email marketing will help your meditation studio and yoga lessons to grow online so you get more members.
In this guide I will show you how to make email marketing a valuable part of your marketing sales funnel.
How To Do Email Marketing For Yoga Studios, Mindfulness Instructors, & Spiritual Entrepreneurs
Let’s take a look at how to start email marketing for yoga businesses and spiritual businesses. The process breaks down like this:
1: Start making a list: A list is essentially your list of subscribers. When I was starting my own yoga and mediation site, TheDailyMeditation.com, almost a decade ago, I made the mistake of not creating my mailing list right at the beginning. You want to start building a subscriber list as early as possible. I recommend using a WordPress plugin like Mailchimp For WP to integrate a sign-up form in your WordPress yoga site.
2: Sign up for an email service provider (ESP): To maintain your subscriber list you will need to sign-up for an email service provider that handles your campaigns and sends your emails to your audience. I use and recommend MailChimp. Other options include Constant Contact, SendInBlue, and Drip.
3: Start creating content for newsletters
4: Grow your list
Create a lead magnet to get people to sign up for your mailing list
If you’re hoping that people will magically sign-up for your mailing list without any enticement, you’re going to be disappointed. That’s why you need a lead magnet.
Investopedia defines a lead magnet as a “free item or service that is given away for the purpose of gathering contact details.” In other words, you give your readers something free as an incentive for subscribing to your mailing list.
For my meditation and yoga site The Daily Meditation, I create a free guide that explains 31 different types of meditation. That’s my lead magnet. That’s the incentive I give to get people to sign up for my mailing list.
Your lead magnet also represents your brand. So it needs to be good. I personally used Canva, a graphics design service, to create a short PDF book for my lead magnet.
Some idea of lead magnets for yoga include:
- A beginners video tutorial to your style of yoga.
- An ebook
- A great list of tips on yoga
- White papers
- Coupons to use towards your yoga lessons
To make a good lead magnet for yoga, make sure it meets the following points:
1: Easy to use. Make sure your lead magnet is not too complicated, which will put off some subscribers.
2: Useful: There should be a purpose to your lead magnet, a way in which it actually helps your subscribers.
3: It’s better than the rest: Your lead magnet represents your brand, so you want it to standout among the pack. It should also be better than your regular content (such as your blog posts)
4: Makes them want to take the next step. You want your lead magnet to make people subscribe, but you also want to entice your subscribers with your main service. For instance, giving a short free video yoga lesson at the end of which you suggest they sign-up for a full lesson.
5: Well-written: Your lead magnet is both a product and marketing. You need it to be professionally written so it a) communicates your brands value, and b) makes subscribers want to take the next step.
Writing compelling meditation, spiritual and yoga emails
Naturally when it comes to your email marketing strategy, you will need to write compelling content for your newsletters. Read my guide to writing compelling content.
Follow these tips to write good newsletters.
1: Write an enticing headline: The single most important part of writing good emails is writing a compelling title. This is the first thing your subscribers will see when they read your email. It needs to be good to generate good open rates.
2: Write a good description: The second part of your email newsletter that subscribers will see is the description. Write a clear description that promises a benefit of reading the newsletter and summarises the contents of the newsletter.
3: Use visuals: When it comes to email marketing for yoga, meditation, and spiritual businesses, subscribers tend to enjoy images. You can use a service like Canva to generate these.
4: Include a forward button: One of the goals for yoga email marketing is to get subscribers to forward your emails to their contacts so that you grow your list. So make sure you include a forward button and a reason for them to press it.
5: Match the content of the email to your brand: Your email newsletters represent your brand, so make sure they match your brand personality. If you’re running a fun yoga studio, make your emails fun. If you run a serious yoga brand for passionate yogis, include references to things like the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and other serious aspects of yoga to communicate your brand personality.
Where to get email subscribers
Naturally your emails won’t achieve much if you don’t have a good list of subscribers. Here are some way for yoga studios to grow email lists:
- Use opt-in forms on your blog
- Put a “sign-up” button on your Facebook page
- Use a floating toolbar
- Discuss your newsletter inside your blog posts
- Use a timed pop-up
- Put a sign up form in your blog’s sidebar
Only put your sign-up form in one or two places. Pick the best place based on your web design. Otherwise it will affect the loading page of your site, which is an important part of SEO for yoga sites.
Manage and segment your list
As your list grows it is normal to get new subscribers, for other subscribers to become inactive, and for some to unsubscribe. The average unsubscribe rate of email lists is around 0.1% according to CampaignMonitor.
It is important to manage your email list so you don’t end up with thousands of inactive subscribers (bearing in mind that most email service providers charge based on your number of subscribers). If you have subscribers who haven’t responded to any of your emails for several months you will need to choose whether to a) running a re-engagement campaign to get them back, or b) remove them from your list
Another great way to manage your email subscriber list is to use segments. Segments are basically lists within your primary list. So, for instance, you might have a segment for new subscribers, a segment for active subscribers, and a segment for customers who have actually purchased a product. You can use these email segments to send different content to different segments. This gives you more control of your list and can help you to move subscribers through your sales funnel.
With these tips you can start to run successful email marketing for yoga studios, meditation instructors, and spiritual entrepreneur. If you would like to know more, if you would like help, contact me today.
