7 Ways to Grow Your Email List of Potential Personal Training Clients as a Gym

Getting new clients for your business is crucial for you to sustain your brand, grow it, and start to charge a higher rate for your services.

For most fitness clubs, personal training is a significant part of gym revenue. It therefore makes sense to put resources behind building that personal training clientele. It keeps trainers happy, and more importantly, it keeps them around. 

Your gym could offer the best personal training services in the area, but without the right messaging, nobody will know. That’s like throwing money into the trash.

What are the Benefits of a Large List of Potential Clients?

In truth, the benefits of a large list of potential clients are almost endless. Here are some of the main ones:

Greater income potential: A large list of potential clients expands the opportunities for securing more training sessions and, consequently, increases your potential income as a personal trainer. It also increases the competition for places, allowing you to set higher rates and be more selective with who you take on.

Diversity: A wide range of potential clients allows for working with individuals of different fitness levels, goals, and preferences, enabling you to enhance your expertise and adapt your approach. This range of clients also keeps your work engaging and entertaining as you think of new ways to engage with clients that have different goals, personalities, and approaches to working out.

Referral opportunities: Satisfied clients from a larger pool can lead to more word-of-mouth referrals, fostering a self-sustaining network of new clients, a concept we will touch on in more detail later in this article.

Cheaper marketing: every engaged email address signed up to your list is a client you can repeatedly message for $0. That cuts your marketing costs way down and alleviates the amount of spend you put into advertisements.

How to Grow Your List of Personal Training Clients

Fortunately, there are several ways to attract more potential clients to your brand, some of which you may have tried before or some you may never have even thought of!

But first, you need to use the right software.

Email Marketing Software

Most of the strategies in this article revolve around getting clients to sign up to an email list. From there, you can continue to send them email messages to prove the value of your personal trainers and warm them up to the idea.

It’s impossible to grow a business if you send those messages out individually. In fact, it’s impossible to even send out that many email messages.

That’s why your gym email software needs to have email marketing automation features. You can time certain emails to send when members perform certain actions, such as signing up to a particular web form or clicking a certain link within an email. 

This is a powerful tool to scale your business and automation lead development for your personal training services. 

Gymdesk has a state of the art email and SMS messaging automation feature for gyms. You can visualize the sequence of the messages, plan both email and SMS together, set up actions or timers to trigger on certain conditions, and more. 

Set up a free group workshop 

One of the most common ways to increase your list of potential clients is by offering a free group workshop for non-clients to get involved in.

This could be a seminar on the value of nutrition, a specific technical class like weightlifting or gymnastics, or it could simply be an exercise class where you get your visitors moving.

While it might seem counterproductive to provide a class for free at first, when you start to break down the several benefits this provides, you will quickly see why so many personal trainers offer this service to grow their potential client list.

First, put yourself in the shoes of your potential clients. If they know nothing about you, why would they choose your services over the services of another personal trainer? If they are unsure of whether your personalities will match or you have the right expertise to help them with their specific needs, you run the risk of losing their business to a rival personal trainer.

However, by performing a free workshop, your personality, and expertise will shine through, building a connection with potential clients and making them more likely to choose you over your competitors.

The “group” element is also key. Not only does it allow more nervous clients to hide within a crowd, but it also allows you to speak to more potential clients at once, making the process much more effective.

During this workshop, be sure to present a clear Call-to-Action – a prompt, with clearly communicated value to your attendees, that shows them why they should sign up to your email list. 

And hey, you might even get some of them to skip a few steps and buy a membership then and there!

Tap into your existing clients

Your potential clients will be constantly bombarded with marketing messages. Thanks to advancements in technology, it is now easier than ever to advertise a business, and as a result, many of us have become immune to marketing messages.

Depending on your gym, the vast majority of your members are not working with a personal trainer. And for the vast majority of gym goers, this means they are not getting everything they can get out of your gym’s facilities in terms of their goals and fitness potential.

It’s totally free to send periodic emails reminding your clients why they should hire a personal trainer in your gym. And if you’re clever with how you broach the subject, there’s almost no limit on how often you can send those emails. It’s money left on the table – why not grab it?

Also, client testimonials are one of the most powerful tools at any personal trainer’s disposal. If you are claiming to help clients with their weight loss journey, and you are able to showcase real-world examples of you doing just that, those images and quotes from clients will resonate much higher than any marketing message could ever hope to.

Leverage your email list to gain social proof while you’re at it.

Create value fitness content related to personal training

While doing in-person or online group workshops can be a fantastic way to show off your personality and expertise in the fitness industry, it can also be extremely time-consuming. Each one-hour group workshop you put on is an hour where you could’ve been earning from training or working on your brand, and while there are several benefits, this aspect can be unappealing to some.

Another way to show off your expertise and knowledge is to create high-value content, such as excellent workout programs or healthy recipe books.

While this type of content takes time to create at first, it can easily be handed out to attract potential clients in the future without sacrificing valuable time working on the gym floor.

If you choose to create valuable digital content, you also have the added benefit of growing your email list, which can be used to gain more clients or sales in the future.

The best way for gyms to consistently produce this caliber of content is for them to partner with the personal trainers that work inside them to create useful content.

Up your social media game

When it comes to marketing on social media, you will have heard many people say how influential it is, and many others say that it is a waste of time. But which is right?

Well, technically, they both are.

On the one hand, if you expect each social media post to generate new leads for your business, you’re in for a nasty surprise. Equally, the more followers your social media channels have also doesn’t necessarily mean you will get more clients, at least not directly.

However, social media marketing certainly does have its benefits. For starters, producing high-quality content consistently is excellent for making potential clients more confident in the services you offer. If you create content they see that resonates with the service they are looking for, you are much more likely to land them as a client.

Equally, social media also offers you an opportunity to champion your current clients, show off your results, and also highlight your personality. As we have already touched on in the article (and you are likely already well aware), the relationship between a client and their trainer is highly personal, and therefore it; ‘s imperative you get your personality and training style across, as this will help potential clients decide whether to work with you or not.

While it might seem disheartening if a potential client sees your training style and decides it’s not for them, remember that these are the clients that would quickly leave or give up early on anyway, and we are trying to lock down high-quality, long-term clients that you can help make a true difference to their lives.

Create a fitness blog

If you offer an online personal training service, starting a company blog is a fantastic way to get your content in front of more potential clients. By writing high-quality, search engine-friendly content, your blog can bring more potential clients to your website, allowing you to promote your services to them.

Creating blog content is also an excellent way to create more content that you can promote on your social media channels, and it allows you to show off your expertise, industry insight, and experiences as a gym through your personal trainers.

Partner With Other Health Professionals

As a business, you will know firsthand just how valuable it is to get referrals from other reputable professionals. Whether it be a physio recommending your training style, or even a client recommending you to a friend, referrals are the backbone of any successful fitness business, and without them, you will find yourself constantly scratching around, trying to find new leads.

To make this process even smoother, why not partner up with other health professionals that are relevant to your service?

Just like you, other health professionals also greatly benefit from having a constant flow of referrals, so the right partnership could easily become a win for each party.

As a gym, you could opt to partner with professional physios, nutritionists, chiropractors, and any other profession that relates to the services you provide.

By teaming up, you ensure that you promote their services to any interested clients, and in return, they reciprocate the gesture.

This style of referral is a fantastic way of expanding your network and growing the services related to your business without the stress or cost of hiring specialized staff.

Conclusion: Growing List of Personal Training Clients

As you can see, there are several ways you can grow your list of potential clients, but each one takes a fair amount of time and effort. The important thing with any of these options is to ensure that you don’t half-commit to any of them. 

It is critical that you fully invest in your lead generation efforts and trust that your consistent effort will start to yield results over time.

But consistency does take time and effort. Time you may not have available, given all the other elements of your business you have to take care of!

Gymdesk frees up your time by simplifying billing, enrollment, and member management whilst also helping you with your marketing efforts.

Try it out completely free for 30 days.

Frequently Asked Questions About Finding Potential Clients as a Personal Trainer

How do I get more clients for my PT?

To get more clients for your business, test out the advice above in this article, but above all else, be consistent with your efforts and always strive to provide excellent service.

How do you generate PT leads?

There are several ways you can generate more leads as a personal trainer, such as online advertising, local marketing, and content creation.