Do you have a mailing list? If so how many people are on it and when did you last contact them?

Contact Management is essential for fitness marketing!

As a follow up to my last post this is the next big step for you and likely also your website. You see as fitness professionals we’re pretty limited to the dollars we can spend on advertising and various fitness marketing strategies. For us relationship marketing is where it’s at, but as the world continues to move faster and faster we are all governed further by technology; traditional networking is becoming increasingly difficult.

As will be a major topic of discussion this weekend at the Business Ignition Workshop it’s critical you learn as many ways as possible to build a ‘list’ of customers and prospects. It’s quite common that when people start building a list they forget to nurture it only to become frustrated as they now possess a dead list.

You nurture you list by frequent contact, an example is the words you are reading at this very moment. I try every week to make sure I contact you on Monday and Thursday so we might engage for just a few moments and continue to build our relationship. As you will learn from my good friend Mr. X these relationships are extremely valuable and never just from the standpoint of making a sale.

This website and my attempt to gain regular contact with numerous fitness professionals has already brought me new colleagues and ideas that have allowed my training studio and other businesses to make huge strides forward. This is why of all the fitness marketing strategies you might learn; the idea of content, list building and continuity are the foundation principles that will determine your total success as a whole.

Anyways…back on topic, a key element for list building is automation through some form of contact management. If you can provide an easy way to provide regular contact with your list without spending a lot of time; you are free to keep performing the technical work that many of you are trying to grow beyond. (I mean let’s face it, if you’re a solo trainer you still have to train people, and yet you need to develop the systems so you don’t always have to train people, get it?)

By using a contact management product you save a lot of time, by using a website blog and publishing regular content that you then also distribute to your list you leverage further; you maintain regular contact and also attract new prospects with all the posted content. The icing on the cake is now you can put the two of those together to help build your list also, this is the opt-in. An example of an opt-in is the offer for Factor 3 up in the top right corner of this website. I have offered you some very valuable information in exchange for the trust of contacting you next week, my goal each week is to continue to offer you value in hopes that eventually we’ll find a way to help each other and grow our respective businesses.

Makes sense right? Now the question for those not super techno savvy is there an easy solution to handle this problem? Well, in my opinion yes, as a fitness professional you absolutely should have some form of contact management as part of your fitness marketing strategy, and an electronic product is by far the cheapest and these days most successful. Though you can use simple products like iContact, Constant Contact, or Aweber I hands down recommend FitPro Newsletter, you see as I have mentioned previously FitPro is the only product designed for fitness professionals, it’s completely customizable but the beauty is it’s also done for you. Their professional writers add great new articles to every issue so you don’t have to worry about it like the others. Come times like now where you are super busy training people you don’t even need to think about sending content to your list as they will all receive great new content every two weeks on your behalf. Now when you need to contact your list for other reasons they’ll even still remember who you are. J

The list is king! Grow it, nurture it, it is the key to your success.