Personal Fitness Professional - January/February 2009 - (Page 15)

many, many times. Beyond that, they allow the prospect to have some level of interaction with you now. They allow clients to get to know you through that report and start building the relationship. They also allow clients to research you and your services even after they leave your website. Maybe most importantly, when done correctly, they let you capture their email address. Follow Up! This is huge. It seems so simple, but it’s absolutely tremendously important. You want their email address because you want to — you need to — follow up. You want to send them their free report, some other tips and maybe another report, then ask if they want training, purchase a product or a million other things. But this cannot be done if you don’t know who they are. When clients get back into work the following morning, what should be waiting in their inbox? A little hello from you. The next day, maybe an article or tip. And when they’re ﬁnally ready to start training, they’re not going to need to research all over again and hope to ﬁnd you because you’ll be the obvious choice. You built a relationship with them. You gave them great free material, and they may feel that they owe you. All from one email address! 4 Activating Your Own Auto-Responder 1. Sign up on a website for service (try www.aweber.com or www.getresponse.com). 2. Set up a name for the list, who the message is going to come from, whether you want to be notiﬁed when someone is added and some other basic information. 3. Create a form you can use on your website that asks your visitors to enter their name and email address. Both Aweber and Getresponse have simple wizards to do this for you. 4. Then you create your messages. Whenever someone joins your list, they’ll automatically be sent emails. Make It Easy with Auto-responders I think it goes without saying that you don’t do all this manually. I sure don’t want you getting calluses on your thumb from hitting “send” thousands of times. You manage this using what’s called an auto-responder, which generates emails for you on a set schedule. For instance, when clients sign up to my ﬁtness marketing list, my auto-responder automatically sends them a free email seminar for the ﬁrst day, an extra bonus the second day, and so on and so forth. I type the messages once and use it thousands of times. I leverage myself. It’s kind of like cloning, without the nasty side eﬀects. The beauty of auto-responders is that they allow you to build relationships with your prospects and clients and still stay relatively hands-oﬀ to focus on other marketing activities we’ll be talking about. It’s not a bad idea to have separate lists for prospects and clients too, so you can send diﬀerent, more tailored messages to particular audiences. Make sure to read next month’s article, where I discuss ways to cut the costs of your services to make it more aﬀordable in our tough economic times while increasing your revenue using strategic marketing. Rich Butkevic, CFT, a.k.a. “Coach Rich, is a per” sonal trainer and consultant to ﬁtness professionals who are serious about optimizing and growing their business. He was responsible for marketing and Internet projects for companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo!, AT&T and others. He’s also the author of the Trainer Traﬃc System, a step-by-step marketing system for ﬁtness professionals (www.trainertraﬃc.com). ● JAN-FEB2009 · WWW.FIT-PRO.COM 15 http://www.aweber.com http://www.getresponse.com http://www.trainertraffic.com http://WWW.FIT-PRO.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Personal Fitness Professional - January/February 2009

Personal Fitness Professional - January/February 2009 Contents Letter from the Editor, Writers Ready to Rock the Podium What It Takes to Change Fitness Marketing Makeover Be Better Top Club Building a Base of Special Populations The Balancing Act Take Action! Nutrition Solutions Datebook Journey to Success New on the Market The Four P's Exercising Your Influence No More Pain in the Back!

Personal Fitness Professional - January/February 2009

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