You got into the coaching business because you understand the value of an expert showing you the ropes. Now it’s time for us to help you the same way you help your clients. Whether you’re an executive coach, career coach, health coach, personal development coach, or life coach looking to level up your business with the power of email marketing, we’re here to show you how it’s done.
This guide will take you from start to finish, outlining everything you need to create a world-class email marketing strategy for your coaching business that generates leads, so you can grow your business. Let’s dive in.
First thing’s first—why the heck does email marketing matter for your business? The specific benefits will vary based on your niche as a business coach, leadership coach, life coach, etc, but every coaching business can leverage email marketing to:
Build a roster of clients: Your business thrives when you have a full roster of coaching clients. Email marketing makes it easy to stay connected with potential clients. You can use email marketing to build a steady pipeline of coaching clients. It’s the “work smarter, not harder” of small business marketing.
Market an online course: Have you distilled all your essential knowledge into an online course so that you can scale your coaching business and maybe even generate some passive income? Email is going to be an essential tool to help you do that. The right campaign can help you nurture potential clients and communicate discounts, sales, or other exclusive offers.
Deliver more value for clients: Once a client has signed up for coaching or an online course, you can use specially designed email campaigns to give them the information they need exactly when they need it. Use email automation to present your clients with the right message at the right time, and you will increase the chances that they do the work, follow your guidance, and see big results.
Help you build a sense of community with coaching clients: Your email marketing efforts can be used to connect clients to each other (whether it’s a Facebook group, online forum, or other digital gathering space) and share challenges, strategies, and success stories.
For your email marketing strategy to work, you need people to email. Start by building your email list. While it might be tempting to buy a list, this is an instance where slow and steady wins the race. You want to target your ideal client and build a list full of engaged email subscribers. When more people interact with your emails (opening, clicking through, signing up for coaching or a course), it improves your sender reputation, decreasing the chances that an internet service provider (ISP) will send your email marketing to Spam.
Here are some effective ways to build your email list:
Use content marketing: If you publish blog posts or other web content, include a CTA in the web page or blog post that encourages people to sign up to receive emails.
Offer webinars: Webinars can be a fantastic conversion tool for coaching clients. A webinar allows you to get in front of your target audience and give a taste of what they can expect from your life coaching or business coaching services. To RSVP for a webinar, users provide their email address, which also makes a webinar a great way to build an email subscriber list. (For a real pro move, make sure to send targeted emails before and after the event.)
Run a social media contest: Create an enticing offer, like a free month of coaching, and raffle it off. Allow people to enter by signing up to receive emails, and promote the contest on all your social media channels. Contests are a tried-and-true, effective way to boost subscribers and generate warm leads for your business.
Create an exclusive offer for email subscribers: Who doesn’t love the promise of something exclusive? Whether you’re offering free tips to your monthly newsletter subscribers or an exclusive offer on coaching packages for email subscribers, it’s worth spending some time to figure out what valuable content you could use to drive email sign-ups.
Segmentation is the secret sauce to many successful email marketing programs. Segmentation allows you to ensure the right people see the right emails. Not only does this boost engagement, it also helps with important things like sender reputation (which is how internet service providers (ISP) decide whether to send your emails to inbox or spam).
The basics of email segmentation:
Demographics: Split your email list based on email recipient demographics like where they live, what time they interact with your emails, their gender and age, or occupation and industry.
Customer information / insight: Create segments by user type—new coaching client, frequent/existing client, free trial subscriber, webinar attendee, nonconverters, or average customer value—to deliver targeted messages based on the audience type.
Email type: Another way to segment lists is by the types of emails you send and segment based on engagement level for each email type.
Your email marketing is only as dynamic as the software you use to make it. You want software that allows you to maximize results and customize your workflow so that you can be efficient as possible. Look for email software that:
Provides a library of responsive templates, allows you to quickly design with drag-and-drop tools, flex your HTML chops, or both.
Makes email automation approachable and easy to execute with simple triggers and a centralized view of email messages and timing.
Deliverability support to help your emails reach your audience’s inbox.
You’ve gone through all the work of segmenting your audiences, now it’s time to put a little legwork into personalizing those messages so that your audience feels the specificity and intention of each email. Personalized emails can generate up to $20 for every $1 spent, so it’s well worth the time and effort.
You can use automation to create a “set it and forget it” email approach with perfect timing. The term “automated email” refers to a specific email marketing strategy where you send a real-time, one-to-one message when a recipient takes a specific action—like signing up for a webinar or purchasing an online course. For a step-by-step guide, check out Email Automation: How to Send Automated Email Campaigns.
The last step is to track what happens and review email performance. You can schedule metric reviews monthly, quarterly, or at the end of a specific marketing campaign. Ideally, you’ll use all three. You want to look at everything from deliverability to engagement and conversion. Look at what worked and what didn’t and make changes based on what you’re seeing. Email marketing is a process of experimentation. Try different strategies and eventually, you’ll find what works.
Want to make a change? Take action. (You’re a coach. We don’t have to explain that to you.) Start creating better emails today to see the full impact this marketing channel can have on your business.
