Steal this High-Performing Email Marketing Campaign with Ben Pickard

Hello, my friend on today’s episode, I am back with fellow Business for Unicorns, coach Ben, and we are talking about a recent email marketing campaign that Ben ran at his gym with great success. So if you’re looking for your next high performing email campaign to generate leads and bring you more revenue, look no further, my friend, we’re going to give you every step that Ben took in writing this campaign on today’s episode.

So keep on listening.

Welcome to the Business for Unicorns podcast where we help gym owners unleash the full potential of their business. I’m your host, Michael Kehler. Join me each week for actionable advice, expert insights, and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym. Get ready to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.

Let’s begin.

Hello, fitness, business nerds. What’s up. Welcome to another episode of the Business for Unicorns podcast. Before we jump into today’s episode, I want to let you know that Mark recently wrote a new book. It’s a little book of gym marketing secrets. And honestly, it’s the book you’re going to wish you had when you started marketing your gym.

Early on when you first started. So if you haven’t gotten it yet, click the link below in the show notes and get a completely free digital copy. Also, it’s a quick read too. It’s maybe like an hour of material. The description of the book, it’s really less, less like comprehensive, no fluff guide, right? It’s really everything you need and nothing you don’t.

So right away within an hour, you’re going to have tactical things you can do to better market your gym. So go grab it, link in the show notes. It’s free. Which brings me to today’s episode with Mr. Ben Pickard. How are you my friend? I’m doing great. How are you? Good We’re recording this like right in the thick of the holiday season.

We just got past US Thanksgiving or your Thanksgiving is already a month behind you up in Canada So, how are you feeling this holiday season so far? I’m feeling great. I’m Pretty committed to taking some time off during the holidays, which was a thing I did not do first few years of gym ownership. And yeah, I’m like, I don’t know.

I, I like the work that I do and it fulfills me. Um, and I’m excited to just like spend some. Fuck my computer time and hanging out with my family. That’s it. How about you? Yeah, that really resonates with me so hard because I think we’re both in the same place. We really love the work we’re doing. Not a, I don’t not look forward to work.

I do look forward to work and the thing I don’t look forward to is sitting in this chair staring at a screen for many hours of the day. So that’s the thing I really want to break from. Like I, I wish we could do this work some other way. And maybe someday if Mark Zuckerberg gets his way, we’ll all be wearing goggles, walking around and interacting with each other in virtual space.

I don’t think so, but who knows? Maybe, but yeah, I’m also going to take a little time off. I’m doing a little road trip. My in laws are down in Tennessee, so we’re going to drive down there and I’m really excited. It’s going to be a nice little road trip. That’s all Christmas road trip is always fun.

Christmas road trip. Why not? I’m also going to go to Dollywood, which if anyone listens to this podcast for a while, you probably know I’m a fan of Dolly Parton. So get to go to the Dolly Parton temple as it were, which is in amusement park. Let’s dive into today’s topic. You had an amazing email marketing win recently.

It was specifically for Black Friday, but I want to walk, I want you to walk our listeners through what exactly was this email campaign that generated so many sales for you so that they can do it. And seal it doesn’t seem to be for black Friday. I think this email campaign that Ben’s going to explain to all of you, you can use it anytime when it’d be another holiday.

I know for in Canada, you all have what coming up boxing day or something like that. Yeah. We don’t do, we don’t do Boxing Day. No, I think because our Thanksgiving is so late, there would be some people who are not from the U S who celebrate Boxing Day, but it’s not really a thing for us. But either way, whether you have a holiday coming up or you listen to this podcast at some other time, this email marketing play can get you sales.

And Ben’s going to walk you through exactly how to do it. Then take us from big picture down. So what’s the big picture of this campaign? Who’s it for? What’s the offer? Yeah. So the, the big picture of this campaign. Well, it’s Black Friday, but you, as Michael said, you could use this for, you can use this for January.

You could use this for literally whatever. And the broad strokes are previously I had been like, I don’t want to push sales, sell too hard on my email list or sell too hard with my clients. And I was nervous about that piece. And we were like, screw it. We’re going to market hard, but we’re only going to do it for five days.

You could do this as like a Wednesday till Tuesday or Friday. Thursday to Monday kind of thing we decided to do a Monday through Thursday because we didn’t want to be answering messages over the weekend Was our main motivator. So the broad strokes were are that we segment our list. We have it as current members former members Prospects which is the like never been members kind of things We don’t segment people who did a trial didn’t continue and did or didn’t continue it did continue But you could Either way, the main three segments with the goal of the goal here and each segment got dedicated messaging with a dedicated offer.

So we essentially ran three offers. One to each segment all at the same time, which sounds complicated when you say they’re loud, but it’s actually not that much because the email copy is almost the same. It’s just a different offer. Yeah, I think, I think people can also, and this, I think it’s just a good takeaway for people in general, people get afraid of sending too many emails, but the reality is you can get away with sending a lot more emails when you divide up your list.

This way, you can send a bunch of emails to specific people about a specific offer that other people are just not seeing at all. And so I think in this way, you can get more bang for your buck. So I think it’s really smart. Thank you. So the three offers were for current members where you’re doing for 3, you can upgrade your membership for three weeks.

So that means if you’re currently once a week, you get twice a week for a dollar a week, twice a week gets 3. A dollar a week, it’s three times a week. Super simple, not meant to be a moneymaker. The moneymaker is on the tail end of this, that almost across the board, most of our clients are twice a week across the board when they come three times a week, they’re like, man, I feel awesome.

We’re like, yeah, you should keep doing this. So it’s meant to be an upsell. And we also just introduced an unlimited package that we’re framing as three plus. So for us, this was getting people to come more. And our unlimited is only like 15 or 20 bucks a week, more than our twice a week. If you listen to the podcast from a few months ago that Pete and I did, it was inspired by that.

And I ran Pete’s play the offer to previous members was three weeks of training for 3. Now 3 is a very low bar. I have never run an offer that low. So part of, there was two goals for this. One was let’s get some signups obviously. But the second one is test the market to see like how that would work. Our trial is three weeks for 200.

So 3 is a very low barrier. And obviously the risk is that you’re going to get a lot of tire kickers, but we’re okay sending this to former members. Cause we already have some degree of no interest. So I’m like, this is a relatively low risk segment to try this out with. And if it blows up in our face, we just don’t do this again.

And that’s a worthwhile experiment to run. And then for the new leads, it was a little bit of a higher barrier. It was three weeks free. Okay. On a three month membership and we did run this email campaign in conjunction with paid ads for it as well So that boosted those numbers a little bit, but I am aware that even though the price is pretty good It’s still a commitment barrier But we have been burned before by having too cheap of a trial And then a bunch of people come to the trial in our conversion Yeah, that makes sense.

You want to recap those again? Yeah. Go ahead. Upgrade. Previous members, basically the same thing, but it’s three weeks for 3. New leads, three weeks free on a three month membership. Yeah. I love it. And then talk a little bit about, you said the emails are often pretty similar, but obviously the difference here is what the actual offer is.

So you just talk a little bit. How did you tailor your message for each of those three audiences aside from just making a different offer to them? Yeah, Yeah, of course. So we did each, I’m just looking at my notes here to make sure I get it right. Each segment got three to four emails over five days or maybe six days.

I think we sent the first ones out on Sunday evening and then we did Tuesday, Thursday and the last call. So the way it was set up was. Like, Hey, we want to give you a heads up about the black Friday promotion. So it was still salesy, but not like you have to buy this now, or bad things are going to happen to you and build the problem a little bit.

Here’s the offer of what you can do. And all we’re asking, we’re not trying to sell over email. This is a really important point. It’s not like buy this on email. Oh, the call to action is reply. Interested. If you’re interested in doing this. So it’s simple. It’s like a sell by chat play where we’re only trying to sell them on the next step.

Cause I don’t think I’m a good enough copywriter to actually sell. So I really want to sell us 12 months of training. I don’t think I’m a good enough copywriter to sell 12 months of training at 500 a month for So I’m trying to play to my strengths a little bit here. I think Ben, regardless of whether or not you’re the world’s greatest copywriter, I think it’s just the, it’s a smart move, right?

That’s what we’re trying to do in sales is move people just to a next step. And if you can just get someone to reply, if you can get someone to click a link, if you can get someone to, in the case of sell by chat, just answer you back. Then that is a next step. That is a kind of engagement that says I’m still here.

Let’s keep talking. And so I think, I think it’s a great lesson for all of us that if you come right out the gate asking for the moon, you might just get leave empty handed. But if you come out the gate asking for, Hey, is this interesting? You don’t hit reply, right? Like maybe I will. It’s such a lower ask.

So I think it’s a smart move. Thank you got that from the BFU playbooks. No surprise. Yeah, the second email was really simple sent a couple days later And it was just like hey name just wanted to make sure you saw the offer below You don’t have to commit to anything right now Replying let me know and it’s set up as a forward.

So the subject is fwd colon and then the same subject line We’ve got the hyphens after that So from a copywriting perspective, it’s really easy because I just copy and pasted it and added a few words at the top. And this is important because we track our open rates and it’s usually between, I can’t remember, I think it’s like 30 to 50%.

It’s pretty good. But that still means, even if it’s 50 percent and that’s amazing, that means one out of two people didn’t see that email. So sending another one isn’t really going to hurt. Yes, it’s probably mostly the same people who are opening the second email. But no one’s going to be like, Hey, I’ve got this awesome thing for you.

Just want to make sure you didn’t miss it. It’s a great way to be salesy without being salesy. Yeah, it’s a little bit, it’s right on the borderline of black magic, right? It’s like just on the edge of being a little black magic y where I think it’s totally reasonable to be like, Hey, I want to make sure you saw this thing.

I think is a reasonable way to use like a forward. I think that it makes sense. It’s logical. Yeah. And it’s fair. If somebody had a really great offer for something I was interested in, we can assume previous members are interested in this because they were at one point at clients, it’s not like I’m cold calling people here and doing sleazy stuff.

I’d be happy if someone was like, Hey, did you see that thing? I’m like, Oh shit. Thank you. I missed that. So it’s not, I don’t see it as like out of integrity by any stretch. I agree. I agree. The 30 male is a 24 hour notice. And it’s like, here’s 24 hour notice. And as a reminder, here’s the benefits you get.

So a benefit driven email. And then the last one is just straight up a last call. It’s four sentences. This is last call. You’ve got three hours to do it. Reply to this email before that time if you want to take advantage of this. Love it. I love it. So that was the structure. Yeah. I think it’s such a great structure because I think that structure in of itself can apply to almost any email marketing campaign.

You do with a few tweaks, right? Just the, that idea of how those emails were structured, I think is a great framework for all of our listeners to use. So sorry, keep on going. What were you going to add to that? Just at plus one and yes. And what you said, like we use the same structure for all the campaigns.

The member one, I tweaked a little bit, made it a little more informal and casual because they’re people who I’ve known for years in a lot of cases, but it was that Here’s the thing in case you missed the thing, last call about the thing for 24 hours. Notice last call about the thing. But the goal is we pushed it hard.

Obviously they got an email every second day and they got one Thursday morning and then Friday morning. And it all happened really condensed. I didn’t actually look at our subscribes. I’m sure we, I’m sure we got a few, but we got a good amount of traction on this and I’m happy to share the numbers, but keep in mind we’re a relatively small gym, so this is good numbers for our size.

Yeah. Yeah. Well remind people, like remind people about the size of your gym and then let’s talk about the results. Yeah. We’re the equivalent of two full time employees. It’s three part time coaches and a full time GM. We’ve got 125 active members. We’re in a city of 120, 130, 000 people with a very large wealth disparity, which is good and bad.

Yeah. So it’s not like we’re a nine figure gym that added 500, 000 in revenue. So numbers wise, and this is as of today, cause we’re still getting some stragglers in, we didn’t say you have to give us money by Friday at noon. And again, we chose Friday at noon because that gives us the afternoon to do shit and not stress about it on the weekend.

Sure. We had 13 members interested in the upgrade and 100 percent of them upgraded. Again, it’s 3, not a big ask. Previous members. We had seven people interested. Four so far who have signed up new leads, again, paid ad and email marketing, five consults, four signups so far out of that. So 80%. And then in addition to that, Alicia told me today when we met that we’ve got either four or five more consults booked for previous members and new leads.

So that would put us at a total of 13 upgrades. Let’s say four of those five sign up. That means we have 10 signups for the whole thing. And it’s a nice perk. A husband and wife came in and they. Paid in full for the whole three months for the three weeks, three thing. So it also gave us a nice little cash injection, which.

I’m not like crazy about pageant fools. I like recurring revenue, but never heard from someone to give you a bunch of money. Yeah. Good for you, my friend. And that doesn’t even count the fact that some of the folks who have upgraded now are going to continue that upgrade and pay real cash dollars for it in a few weeks and spend, and all those folks who are just on the returning folks who are on that trial are going to hopefully stick around and convert in a few weeks.

Right. So you have even more upside coming around the corner, which is so fantastic. And all that came from a series of just like. Four or five emails to three different groups of people, right? So this is not the, it’s a lift, right? The writing those emails takes a little bit of time, but once you write a series of emails like that, and just repurpose them and repurpose them, it doesn’t take that much time and obviously you are going to do more follow up once they’re there in person.

So maybe just. Maybe let’s, let’s close out this just by talking about that for a little bit. So when those current folks are coming and upgrading to coming more, and when those past members are coming and trying you back out again, during this three week period, what do you all typically do in person to try and fan the flames of that conversion?

Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah. We’re very on top of that. Like the followup is really the gold here. So for members, it’s pretty straightforward. We’re framing it as no strings attached. Obviously they don’t have to upgrade and we’re not going to lock them into anything. And it’s not the Netflix flows with them, but it is making sure that there’s a touch point, like their end of week two or beginning of week three, that has actual coach feedback about specific positive things that have been going well since they’ve been coming more.

Hey, Michael, you seem to really love coming more. Justin mentioned that you had benefit. Just curious. Would you be interested in continuing on three days a week? And it’s again, we’re only selling the next step to say, yes, I am interested in that hopefully. And then not totally sure yet, but we’re either going to offer them a discount on the upgrade that’s not as ridiculous as 3 for the whole thing, or just move them into the upgrade.

Sure. We’re aware that. I don’t want to get too into the weeds, but our jump from one to two is a big jump, but our jump from two to three is small. So if there are once a week or who wants to come twice, we’ll probably discount it. If there are twice a week or who wants to come three times, we just probably need to tell them like, Just so you know, it’s only like 15 bucks a week to come 50 or that’s a pretty good deal.

Yeah. I think that’s amazing. That’s amazing. I think the thing that I hope our listeners take away from this, right. Is that email marketing in this case is just gets people closer to you. Right in these cases, right? You’re getting existing members to come a little bit more and spend more time with you, getting four members to come back and try you back out again.

If they’ve been gone for a little while or a long while, and both of those people, when they come back in those doors, they start coming in those doors more, you need to wrap your arms around them. They need to. Feel different about that experience. If they’re going to stick around and, and continue coming more or coming back, I think it’s really critical.

That’s which has nothing of the fact that you have some new brand new leads who’ve never been in the door before. And those folks we always know need lots of love and attention during their first few weeks. So Ben illustrated here for all of you listeners, when you get people in the door, make sure you have a plan for keeping them in the door.

Which means scheduling some conversations with them in the first two, three weeks, depending on how long they’re in for to make sure you’re highlighting all their wins, making them feel like they really belong and really indoctrinating them into your community, making them make friends, like all that stuff really matters to making your gym stickier and getting them to stay around longer.

Anything else you would say about this campaign for folks who might give it a try? I will say it’s an experiment. Like there’s some things about it that didn’t work perfectly for us. We were hoping to get the three weeks for 3 people into just a regular membership with an even more compelling offer and zero of them took us up on that.

So I think we made our offer a little good in that regard. Yeah. Um, but like the real takeaways for me are like, as I think we’ve said before, many times on this podcast, like segment your list. And when I think about marketing, I think about what are each of those segments getting at any time? It’s not just, what am I putting out as an email?

They don’t always have to overlap, obviously, for something like Black Friday or January or other major holidays. It makes sense to hit them all in the same week. But, like, we’re running different offers at different times, because we want to make sure that at any given point we’ve got some sort of offer out or about to be out in the next couple weeks, so we don’t have a huge influx on week one of the quarter and then nothing for the other 12 weeks.

I think the second lesson here is, when you’re going to sell, Most of our emails are content and their value. It’s the jab of Gary V’s jab, jab, jab hook. But when you’re going to sell, sell, I don’t think we had any complaints. In fact, 13 members took us up on an upgrade. It’s like great, not a massive percentage.

It’s 10%, but it’s still only a few of those people need to continue for it to be measurable benefit to them and us. And the third point here is be willing to experiment with different offers. I don’t know if 3 for three weeks is the right offer for you. It might not even be the right offer for us, but like marketing is a big experiment to see what sticks and what doesn’t based on your avatar and your service offerings and all the other variables.

And our motivation for this was like, we haven’t done this. Let’s try it. If our conversion sucks, I’ll get back on the podcast and talk about what we could do differently. But even this is, I expect at least 50 percent of these people to continue. And the coolest part is they got some people out of the woodwork.

It was a client, Josh, who hasn’t been with us for two years. They, she gave me a whole bunch of names. They were people we do reactivation campaigns on a regular basis, like three times a year. Some of these people have been in my head for years. So having a really compelling offer to just get them back in conversation is huge.

And we’ve even got some former members who like responded, but didn’t, weren’t even interested in the offer. They’re like, can I just get back on what I was doing before? Yeah, that’s amazing. Before you do that, actually, although they get 99 percent off. So segment your list when you’re going to sell and when you’re like, be willing to experiment, there is no magic sauce for this.

That’s just. Just see what sticks and what doesn’t and keep track of your results. Yeah. I love those takeaways. I think that’s such a great overview and you’re right. The next best offer someone should try is probably one you haven’t tried yet. There’s no like magical offer you’re going to use over and over and over again forever and it’s going to keep working, right?

You got to change it up. People like new people like something fresh and so good for you, Ben. I’m glad you all experimented. I’m glad it paid off. And, um, maybe we’ll do a little update in a few, few weeks, once all these people have gone through and give a little update on how your numbers have gone. But thank you for sharing.

I think it’s a great example of a really solid email marketing campaign that gets people in your funnel, in the middle of your funnel or your current members back engaged to buying more, staying longer and it’s bravo to you and your team. That’s amazing. One last reminder, Mark put out a book. You should go get it.

It’s free link is down in the show notes. And it talks about things like email marketing, which we covered on today’s podcasts, so go get it and I’ll see you on the next one. Bye Ben. Bye.