This is all about how to grow your email list and why you should be using email marketing in your yoga business to build your community. One of the most effective ways to get people onto your email list is to offer what’s called an opt-in freebie or a lead magnet. It’s a piece of content that you would create and when people visit your website, they can sign up to receive it for free. Instead of saying, ‘sign up for my newsletter’, you would say, ‘sign up for my 30 minutes energizing morning flow that you can fit into your day’. You are offering your students a piece of content that has value and is relevant to them.
This content is something that they really want and in exchange, they will give you their email address. So you would have an opt-in box where your students would type their email address in. And once they’ve done that, they’ll receive an automated email that’s really easy to set up in MailChimp. And in that email, they will receive a link to your video or your piece of content.
This is a really effective way to get more people onto your email list. It could be a checklist, for example, something that is relevant if your ideal student is just coming into the practice for the first time. You could have something like ‘sign up for my checklist on what to expect at your first yoga class’. When they come onto your website, if they are beginners, they may get a little bit apprehensive. They’re going to have lots of questions such as what’s going to happen at the first class? What should I expect? What do I need to wear and what do I need to take with me? All of these different questions.
And what you’re doing is you’re joining that conversation that’s happening in their head. And that’s one of the best things you can do. Because if you can achieve that, then they’re going to stay on your website.
They’re going to stay on your website and to find out more. And they’re going to give you their email address because they want that checklist. So you need to spend some time to think about it. You need to really try to understand what’s happening in the mind of your ideal student. And the best way to understand that is by having a conversation with your students at the end of class and ask them two things:
Why are they coming to your class week after week? And what can you create to help them with their journey?
Is it a video? Is it an audio meditation? What is it?
It’s good to have it in your mindset as something that you could create further down the line. So you could start off by just having one thing, like a video or a checklist. Start off with that. It’s always best to get started. And then when you’ve got a bit more time, you could create an email challenge.
That is an email course or an email challenge. It’s something that you’re challenging your new subscriber to do over a period of time, usually no more than seven days. And it could be as simple as this. You could create five audio guided meditations and they are just five minutes long. So if meditation is something that you teach and that your ideal student really wants to get into, then this would be a perfect offer.
They go onto a website and see ‘sign up to my free five-day audio meditation course to help you get started with your home practice’. And then they sign up and on the first day, you send them a welcome email to prepare for their meditation. And then the following day they will receive their first meditation. This is all set up in MailChimp as an automated flow. It is really easy. Then for five days, they would receive their five-minute audio meditation, which is just an audio file and it’s also easy to create.
Email challenges or email courses are one of the most effective list-building tools because it’s a completely automated process.
It’s simple to create and they really build a connection with people on a deeper level. It also has a higher value perception. So think about it. When you go on to a website that says ‘sign up for my newsletter’, you are most likely not going to do that. But if it says ‘sign up for my free pdf downloads’, you might consider that. So there’s a higher perceived value for the potential subscriber, which means they’re more likely to sign up for it.
It might take a little bit of work to create your email challenge. But it is going to be worthwhile because you’re going to get more people on your list. And this is a great thing. Take a moment and think about where you want to be in the future. Maybe you want to be running yoga retreats throughout the year. Maybe you want to have an online program or an online course that will reach people all over the world. If you want to do these types of things, you need to have a community. Because the worst thing you can do is to launch higher-priced products and not have a community to launch to. So the best way to learn how to grow your email list is to start using some of these strategies.
How to grow your email list: create a connection
The other great thing about a free challenge is that by being in your new subscriber’s inbox every single day for a set number of days, you’re conditioning them to open your emails. There are lots of emails that landed in our inbox that we never open. But when you start to build a deeper relationship right from the beginning, and that person knows that when they open your email, they’re going to get their hands on something that’s really valuable, that is really going to help their yoga journey, then they’re going to look forward to your future emails. So after your challenge, if you go back to emailing them once a week, there’s a higher likelihood that they’re going to open your emails and your open rates are going to stay up. So when you establish that connection, your future email is less likely to go into the trash.
Come up with an outline of what you would teach in a free online email challenge or a free course. It might be a bed bedtime yoga series for example. It could be a 10 minute a Pranayama practise or a meditation. You can create a bedtime yoga five-days series because your ideal student suffers from insomnia. Because you’ve been talking to them after class and this is what you keep hearing. So again, it’s important to understand all of this. So think about what you know, the topic that you would focus, something that you’re already passionate about as well. Your niche, your ideal student is a combination of your passion with their struggle.
When you combine your passion and your ideal student’s struggle, that’s when you get your sweet spot.
So that’s why you really need to be speaking to your students on a regular basis and understanding them. And you’d need to spend some time tapping into your passions as well. If you are a new teacher and you really don’t have a clue, then just experiment with some of this content, things that you have some ideas around. Put it out there, the best thing you can do is let your yoga business evolve as you evolve. Don’t hold back because you feel like you’ve not quite refined something. Get it out there and get feedback from your community, from your ideal students and grow from there.
The best thing you can do is create an outline of what you could teach. And then you can start to think about how you would structure it. So what would be in each email that you send out? What words would you put in each of those emails?
Your emails should be all about educating and sharing value with your subscribers.
Another thing that’s really great is just to think a challenge or a free email course and that’s if you’re actually trying to launch or you’re actually launching an online course. You’d have an online program or maybe it’s a membership site where people can learn with you every month different things. Then creating a challenge or a course is a great way to feed people into your paid-for course. You could take 10% of the content from your paid course and teach that in your free seven-day course. So you’re actually priming your audience, you’re getting them into this whole idea of what your actual paid-for content gonna be. And you’re moving them through the sales funnel and when the seven-day freebie ends, you can offer your students to continue to learn with you through a paid course on your website. And you want your course to be closely related to what you’ve taught them in the free challenge.
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>>> Video training: Learn how to grow your email list with a free email challenge!
