Email marketing is the biggest marketing opportunity that most BJJ gym owners miss. Once you have someone’s email address, it’s essentially free to advertise to them forever.
But many BJJ gym owners either lack the skills to effectively use email to grow their gym, or are stuck in an self-defeating mindset of "feeling annoying" with too many sales emails.
In today’s ultra-competitive online world, the fight for attention is fierce, and if you’re not consistently producing content, you basically don’t exist. A single email or post will quickly be drowned out by the flood of endless content being posted daily.
The biggest brands send an email every single day to their active list, which keeps them relevant and top of mind to consumers.
BJJ schools don’t need to send daily emails, but weekly and certainly monthly emails are vital for business success.
Here is a simple strategy to make your emails more effective.
The Email Pyramid Strategy
Many gym owners are concerned with coming off too "salesy" by sending too many emails. And while email etiquette is important, there’s an easy way to maintain good deliverability and low unsubscribe rates.
I call it the email pyramid.
Once a month send your most important email to your entire prospect list. including current and lost leads.
Then, look at open and click rates from that email. Any good email service provider will allow you to see email open and click rates.
Your next email should only go to those people who opened the first email. This ensures you’re only sending emails to people who are interested in your messages, and likely won’t unsubscribe.
Do the same for the next email, only sending to opens of the second email you sent.
Only send your fourth and final email to anyone who clicked any of the previous three emails.
At the start of the next month, start the whole process over by emailing your entire list.
Why It Works
With this strategy you are only sending emails to people who are interested. Let’s say you sent an email about a new upcoming promotion at your gym.
Anyone who opened it has shown interest. Anyone who clicked a link within the email is very interested.
The very interested people are your hot prospects who need to be given extra attention to convert.
The bottom of the pyramid is your entire list, the top of the pyramid are your hot prospects.
It’s been proven that prospects need anywhere from 8 to 30 touch-points or interactions with your business before they buy.
Each email, phone call, text, and social media ad is a touch-point. Yet most gym owners receive a lead, call once or twice and give up.
The sales cycle is longer than many gym owners think, closer to a month or two, rather than a week.
Emails are valuable touch points that are free ways to push your prospect to buy your offer.
A Winning Strategy
This strategy only works if you are regularly sending emails. If you’re only sending once a month you can’t collect enough data to build the pyramid.
Which is why sending a weekly newsletter or creating valuable content each week, either video, audio, or written, should be part of your BJJ gym marketing strategy.
You can also combine email marketing with paid social ads for a winning marketing strategy.
Upload your email prospect list to Meta and target those leads with paid ads on social media.
The ads will act as extra touch-points and keep your gym top of mind while the lead is in a buying mindset.
Capitalize on their motivation to join a BJJ gym by being everywhere in their social ecosystem.
Final Thoughts
Email, content, and paid ads all work together to create an effective marketing system that brings new leads into your gym and gets them to convert.
You can also automate many of the follow up emails, automatically sending them to any engaged subscribers who opened and clicked your recent emails.
Creating the content will be the biggest lift in terms of work and time, but emails and ads are the tools to push that content to the hot prospects ready to convert.
If you need help with any of this, book a call.
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