Master Email Marketing for Yoga Studios: Strategies for a Profitable Yoga Business

“It’s not the only reason I quit Yoga.

I also quit because the downsides of doing it just became too great to keep going, and no amount of upside could overcome them. Not that there was much financial upside to speak of.”

Tanja Hester taught Yoga for more than a decade.

She loved it.

But she struggled to make money. Her students and partners took advantage. She was burned out, underpaid, and exhausted. Her career, like most yoga instructors, was a continuous struggle.

Could email marketing have prevented all of this?

What if email marketing could have brought a steady flow of excited students to her classes?

The Power of Email Marketing

According to a recent survey by Statista, more than half (52%) of respondents achieved a 2x ROI via their email marketing efforts.

Source: Statista.com

It may surprise you that email usage continues to grow, with 4.37 billion users worldwide.

Quick facts about email:

• $9.7 billion in annual revenue generated via email
• The number of email users continues to grow
• 57.8% of respondents had open rates between 20% and 50%
• 30% of respondents had open rates between 10% and 20%
• Constant Contact found that the average open rate for Yoga studios is 40.03%, with a 1.08% click through rate

A few naysayers in the past stated that email was dead. In reality, email continues to thrive.

What does this mean for you?

Whether you’re a freelance yogi or part of a team, email marketing is an important part of the equation. It’s especially important if you’re looking to avoid paid advertising and grow organically.

Build a Strong Foundation and Grow with Email Marketing

At first glance, it may seem like Yoga and marketing go together like oil and water. Many people have a distorted impression of marketing—it’s manipulation and pushy selling.

In reality, it’s the opposite.

Yoga and marketing go together like salt and pepper.

Let me explain.

There’s a saying—”education attracts, information converts.” The idea behind it is this:

• Educational content attracts like-minded people; it draws them into your orbit and pre-qualifies them. Your educational content creates legitimacy and establishes credibility, setting up a healthy teacher/student dynamic.
• Information content converts. Details about who you are—your beliefs, morals, culture, values, outcomes, etc.—these details tell people (a.) it’s safe to enter into a relationship with you and (b.) it’s a good idea to spend money with you.

This dynamic, education attracts, information converts, is the foundation of marketing. Samuel Scott states, “In the end, all marketing is ‘content marketing’ because all marketing uses content.”

What does this have to do with you promoting your Yoga studio?

Quite a lot.

If you’re going to master email marketing software for your yoga studio, you will need to accomplish a few goals.

1. Know who you want to talk to (target audience)

This is about building a profile of the types of people who are interested in and excited about Yoga. These details could involve demographics, psychographics, and ethnographics.

2. Figure out whether they’re willing and able to pay for your help (pre-qualification)

It doesn’t matter much if your students can’t afford to pay for their sessions with you. Your landlord, vendors, partners, and contractors won’t accept good intentions—you need to pay your bills. This works both ways; you can’t accept good intentions either.

3. Create a list of the student problems that your yoga studio can solve

Why are your prospective students interested in doing Yoga? What do they hope to get out of their sessions with you? Are they looking to improve their physical or mental health? Is it for spiritual growth? Are they using it for recovery? It’s important that you get an in-depth look at your prospective student’s desires, goals, fears, frustrations, and problems.

4. Determine what you want these people to do (e.g., book an online yoga class)

Knowing what you want makes it much easier to measure success. It keeps you focused on the right goal or outcome. Your wants tell you where to look; when it’s time to measure success, it gives prospective students clarity. They know what you want and why (whether they agree or not).
If you’re willing to work with a broad set of problems and interests, you’ll attract more people, but they’ll be less qualified. If you choose to focus on a narrow list of problems, you’ll attract fewer people, but they’ll be more qualified.

5. Set standards that define success

If you know what you want, it’s easy to identify the metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter. For example, if you want to book more online yoga sessions, focus on your clickthrough, bounce, and conversion rates. Looking for more in-person visits to your classes? Track conversion rates, footfalls, and promo offers.

Email marketing is simple and predictable if you get clear answers to these questions. It’s easy to be transparent and upfront with customers when you know what they want and how to provide it.

Choose the Right Email Marketing Platform

When you’re choosing email marketing software, the platform matters. It’s all about you.

When you’re choosing your email marketing platform, it’s important to consider specific details. These details ensure you’ll find the email platform that is best for you:

Let’s take a look.

1. Your technical ability. Are you comfortable with coding (e.g., HTML and CSS)? Are you interested in dealing with any technical issues that crop up? Can you create your own template, or will you need a provider that offers the templates, tools, and services you need?
2. What kind of messages are you sending? Are you sending simple messages that point to blog posts, dynamic content that leads to product pages, or autoresponder email campaigns?
3. Do you need hand-holding and support? Are you looking for a low-tech option that comes with on-demand customer support? Or do you prefer a self-service option that allows you to customize your email service?
4. What do you want your email marketing platform to do? Are you looking for a simple service you can use to get up and running quickly? Do you want an email service that’s made specifically for content creators? Or are you looking for an A to Z marketing automation platform? Will you need a transactional email service to sell digital products and services (e.g., online yoga classes)?

With this in mind, which options are great options for your yoga studio?

Common Email Service Providers (ESPs) for Marketing

#4 Kit

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) bills itself as an email-first operating system for content creators. With Kit, creators can build a website, create landing pages, sell and host digital products, process payments, set up recurring transactions, and even advertise.

Their tools are built around creators more so than a local business like a yoga studio.

#3 MailChimp

Mailchimp promises more opens, clicks, and sales— they’ve added email marketing, social media management, automations, generative AI, and now SMS to their platform. Their product is a marketing automations platform, and Intuit, a publicly traded company, offers support.

MailChimp is a mature, powerful, often hard-to-use product. For studio owners, it is probably too much.

#2 MailerLite

While other platforms work hard to be all things to all people, MailerLite focuses on simplifying. Email is their primary focus, with their other services coming in behind. What makes MailerLite different is its support. Their team offers 24/7 award-winning support via chat and email. Even their free plans come with 24/7 support for the first 30 days.

MailerLite isn’t integrated with studio management systems, so your email list will remain separate from all your business operations, making member management especially cumbersome.

#1 Gymdesk’s Yoga Studio Email Marketing System

Unlike popular email service providers, Gymdesk’s messaging system is fully integrated with our studio management software.

This streamlines your experience, cutting out buggy integration software, and puts everything you need to run your studio inside one application.

New leads can be added straight to email marketing flows, and members can be freely moved from one list segment to another by action triggers or by hand.

First, Gymdesk’s messaging system allows you to improve engagement with these features:

• Send bulk or targeted messages to your members or leads via email, text and push notifications.
• Segment gym members by status, membership type or program before sending a message to tailor your gym communications.
• Set up automatic notifications for members about bookings, payments, and membership status.

But the real power of Gymdesk shines in its marketing automation capabilities.

• Send messages and perform actions on contacts automatically. Engage with leads to encourage them to book classes, then verify their attendance.
• Automatically follow up with new members and support them on their journey to becoming loyal members. Re-engage with leads who didn’t didn’t become members the first time.

How to Grow Your Yoga Studio Email List

There are two ways to grow your list.

1. Build your list via paid media: You use paid advertising to drive people to a landing or offer page. On that page, you trade something of value with the promise of more value in the future. As the name implies, when you stop spending, your traffic immediately stops.
2. Build your list organically: Many people assume organic = free. That’s an incorrect assumption. When you build your list organically, you’re trading time for opt-ins. If you’re short on cash but you have lots of time, this is the avenue you’re most likely to take. Organic list building comes with an inherent downside. It typically takes more time to build your list.

Let’s start with organic growth.

Here are a few content ideas you can use to create lead magnets and build your email list organically.

• Quizzes, surveys, and polls
• Testimonials
• Reviews
• Yoga routines (video)
• Yoga practice trackers (pdf)
• Yoga challenges by theme (e.g., fitness, weight loss, challenges)
• Mindfulness journals
• Guided meditation
• Quick start guides
• Webinars, seminars, and workshops
• Books and ebooks
• In-studio email sign-ups
• Upcoming events, seminars, and retreats

Here’s the beautiful part about these content ideas. They tie in with each other; yoga challenges flow naturally into practice trackers, which leads to mindfulness journals and yoga routines. Put each item behind a sign-up form on your website and social media channels (to incentivize email sign-ups), and you’re ready to go.

Okay then.

What’s the fastest way to build trust with prospective students? You set expectations, then meet expectations. Successful email campaigns operate in phases, each with a specific goal or objective. Every email you send to your subscribers should fit into one of these five phases.

1. Indoctrination: You introduce yourself and your yoga studio. You set expectations for your subscribers and students, meet them, and make friends.
2. Engagement: You chat with prospective students about their desires, the goals they have for themselves, and their interests. In this phase, you make an appeal—book a session, come to a class, try it for free, etc.
3. Ascension: You welcome new students who’ve recently joined and invite them to purchase something else from you again. Does this sound greedy? It shouldn’t—some of your students expect you to give them more attention than everyone else, and they expect to pay for it. Your time is scarce; you can’t get it back once it’s spent.
4. Segmentation: In this phase, you determine what your students want to learn from you and what they want to sign up for next. Your messages allow students to self-identify. Some students want to soak up all of the knowledge you have to offer. Other students prefer the à la carte approach; they’ll reach out for whatever they need.
5. Re-engagement: This phase is all about reigniting and restoring a relationship that has gone cold. You invite subscribers and students to reconnect over a series of messages; they’re removed from your list if they’re no longer interested in engaging with you.

Every email you send, whether broadcast or autoresponder (AR) sequence, should fit into one of these five categories.

Here’s why.

The segmentation is built in automatically. There’s no need for you to be “pushy.” Students and subscribers who are interested will self-identify. Inactivity will weed the disinterested out of your list.

What if they stay?

Sales is the natural byproduct of relationships. These content ideas keep you focused on building strong relationships. Your students and subscribers expect you to provide value in every interaction. Every email you send your students and subscribers should be practical and valuable enough for them to save.

Craft Compelling Yoga Content

What’s the best way to create incredible, high-performing emails?

With testing.

When you’re starting out, you get lots of advice from people who already know what they’re doing.

1. Make your email copy and subject line engaging
2. Use attention-grabbing subject lines and relevant keywords (i.e., “New Yoga Class: Vinyasa Flow”)
3. Write clear and concise email copy
4. Add a single, clear call-to-action (CTA)
5. Use a conversational tone; include personal anecdotes and stories

This is amazing advice.

Just one problem. If you’re a beginner, you don’t know how to do that. You can download a course, watch a video, join webinars, etc. But nothing beats testing and learning firsthand about what works for your audience.

So, how do you test your emails?

You create a mix of broadcast and autoresponder (AR) emails.

• Broadcast emails are single, one-time messages that are only sent once.
• An AR sequence is a series of emails that go out automatically on a schedule.

Using Broadcast Emails to Create AR Sequences

An autoresponder (AR) sequence is incredibly effective for segmenting and attracting new students to your Yoga studio. You create a list of emails, and they’re automatically sent out on a schedule. If you can create emails your subscribers want to read, nurturing and attracting new yoga students is easy.

That’s a big if.

If you create an AR sequence that’s boring or useless, your subscribers will instantly smash your unsubscribe link. How do you create extremely helpful AR sequences?

It’s simple.

You create solutions for the list of problems you collected. You use broadcast emails to tell your students and subscribers about how you can help them. You can also use AR sequences to build and nurture relationships (e.g., automated email sequences for new subscribers, abandoned cart reminders, birthday greetings, etc.).

Here’s why this is huge.

Broadcast emails are single-use, one-time messages that are sent out, so there’s less risk. Even better, you can use broadcast emails to identify the message elements that will impact revenue most.

With broadcast emails, you can test the:

• Timing (e.g., once or twice a week, daily emails)
• Frequency (twice a day, as-it-happens)
• Subject lines
• Wording (formal vs. casual)
• Visual elements
• Landing page(s)
• Call-to-action (e.g., learn more, try it free)
• Personalization (e.g., first name)
• Offer (take our 60 flexibility challenge)
• Segments (rehabbers vs. athletes vs. spiritual practitioners, etc.)
• Sender names (personal vs. company)

With each of these criteria, you’re looking for the best message.

Found the message that resonates with your students? Turn your winning broadcast messages into AR sequences.

Why go to all of this trouble?

Testing (and optimization) increases revenue.

When you test your broadcast emails, you’re identifying the elements your customers respond to.

Optimize your email copy for mobile devices

Many students and subscribers will read your messages on their mobile devices. This device could be a smartphone, tablet, or chromebook. Each device has its own screen resolution, so your message must adapt to many different environments.

Here’s how you can optimize your email for mobile.

• Keep your layout simple. As you can see from our example, the simplest layout is a single-column layout with white background, black text, and blue links. When you add frames, borders, and design flourishes, your content may not display properly. Simple layouts = Better conversion rates. If you have the knowledge and skills to create your template, go for it. If not, find a template that’s well-known.
• Create a responsive design. According to the Interaction Design Foundation, “Responsive design is an approach to web design in which the interface adapts to the device’s layout to facilitate usability, navigation, and information seeking. Responsiveness is possible thanks to media queries, allowing the design to adjust automatically to the browser space to ensure content consistency across devices, and design elements being sized in relative units (%).”
• Write simply and concisely. Most people don’t want to deal with a wall of text. Not sure if you’re keeping things simple? Use the one formula to keep things simple for your readers. One theme, one call-to-action, one link. What does this mean? If you’re teaching your students about asanas, don’t bring up next month’s yoga retreat. Don’t share a large list of links in the body of your message (that’s what your footer is for). Keep it simple; use one.
• Optimize your images. Readers aren’t going to wait for your images to load. If your image isn’t loading, they’re much more likely to delete your email. A great all-around option would be to use linked image embedding. According to Mailchimp, “You can embed these images by simply linking to them in HTML… If you’re only going to have 100 readers or so, you can host your images with basic services like Google Drive or Dropbox, but you’re going to need a CDN (content delivery network) if you want to send an email to thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers.” Optimize your images, use image compression, and add the appropriate alt text so everything loads properly.

One more thing.

Send yourself a test email on different devices, ensuring that your email looks the way it’s supposed to look, loads quickly, and functions as expected.

Develop an Effective Email Marketing Strategy

What’s the most effective email marketing strategy, do you know?

The best email marketing strategy builds consistent relationships with students over time. There are three ways of approaching your content.

1. You create entertainment: As a yogi, you’re creating content that’s specifically designed to delight your audience. You’re sharing stories, sketches, and memes.
2. Focus on education: Systematic, step-by-step instruction that teaches prospective yoga students how to achieve a specific outcome (e.g., strength, weight loss, flexibility, injury recovery, etc.)
3. Edutainment: This is a combination of both educational and entertainment content.

Why not both?

The edutainment approach can work, but getting people to spend money on growth-oriented things can be challenging. Customers who value education want more education from you. People who value entertainment want more entertainment from you.

A better idea?

You choose the education/growth track from the start.

Building a plan around this style of content may seem limiting at first. In reality, it’s an approach that gives you a significant amount of freedom. You know which belongs in your content plans and editorial calendars.

Develop a Content Plan and Editorial Calendar

A content plan outlines the strategy and tactics you’ll use in your plan; as the name suggests, it’s a plan that tells you how your content will be implemented and how your plan will change over time.

Your editorial calendar acts as a blueprint or guide for your email marketing. It’s a roadmap that gives you a high-level view of listing the tone, style, and format of the content you’ll need to create over the next year. You’ll be able to see how everything fits together.

Measuring Success and Optimizing Your Campaigns

If you’re like most yoga studio owners, you have lots of questions. Which emails generate leads? Improve cash flow or profit margins? Which yoga teacher brings in the most students? Can we offer online yoga classes without sacrificing quality? Email analytics gives you the answers to these questions. You can measure performance, optimize your email campaigns, and generate better results with the right metrics.

Here’s a short list of the metrics you should track in your email marketing campaign.

• Click through rates
• Open rate
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• List Growth rate
• Email forwarding rate
• Campaign ROI
• Unsubscribe rate

All of the providers we’ve discussed track these metrics. When these details are overlaid with data from Google Analytics, there’s no reason you can’t measure and optimize your campaigns.

What happens next?

Once you have data coming in, you can use it to make meaningful changes to your emails and email marketing campaigns. Here are several things you can and should be doing.

1. Use A/B split testing to optimize your email campaigns
2. Create several content variations. Use the data to test and refine your subject lines, email copy, and CTAs
3. Use segmentation to create targeted email campaigns
4. Add winning broadcast emails to your autoresponder sequences

Your Yoga Studio Needs an Email Marketing Platform

A 2x ROI with the right email marketing strategy is completely doable.

It just requires consistent effort.

Many people believe Yoga and marketing go together like oil and water. They have a distorted impression of marketing—it’s manipulation and pushy selling.

As we’ve seen, it’s actually the opposite.

Yoga and marketing campaigns go together like salt and pepper.

If you’re going to master email marketing for your yoga studio, you’re going to need to accomplish a few goals. (1.) Know who you want to talk to, then figure out whether your students are willing and able to buy. (2.) Create a list of the student problems that your yoga studio can solve. (3.) Determine what you want these people to do, and (4.) Set standards that define success.

Master email marketing, and you’ll find that your yoga studio can grow on autopilot.