Email Marketing Basics for Tennis Coaches and Clubs
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to episode number 22 of the Tennis Business Academy Podcast.
Today’s episode will centre around the topic of email marketing.
And the reason for that is that I’ve been getting lots of questions about email marketing over the past few weeks. Which is awesome, by the way.
I love it that many of you are starting to think about email marketing seriously, as it’s a great tool to help build quality customer journeys and help you sell more of what you do.
But back to the questions.
Some of the questions that I’ve been getting are: what platform to use, how to set the platform up, how to keep the email list up to date automatically, how to link the email marketing tool with the website and the booking system and perhaps most importantly of all, how and when to send emails and what types of emails to send.
So, I thought I’d try to address at least some of these questions in this episode.
And I feel like the best way to do that is to actually talk about a customer journey example, and how email marketing can form part of that customer journey and help make it better.
So, let’s do this.
And I’d like you to picture a potential new customer who just found your website and after reading for a bit decided to fill in a contact us or a trial application form.
Any form really.
Now, ideally, as soon as they fill in that form you want their contact details to be automatically passed onto your email marketing tool.
And by contact details I mean at the very least their first name and email address.
Usually the last name also gets passed, but to make email marketing work you really only need the email address and first name.
The email address because without an email address you can’t email them, of course!
And the first name because email marketing tools are very clever in the way that they allow you to personalise every email you send by adding the first name when you greet people.
Again, you can pass any information you want from the website form onto the email marketing tool, like the last name, the level of ability, the age group, the venue where they want to play, etc. but you don’t have to.
First name and email address are definitely enough to get you started.
The other thing that I should probably mention at this point is that I recommend Mailerlite as the email marketing tool. That’s spelled M-A-I-L-E-R-L-I-T-E.
I recommend Mailerlite, simply because their free plan allows you to do all the basics while also allowing you to run automations, which are important. (If you have no idea what I mean by automations, don’t worry, we’re gonna talk about them in a little while!)
But just to be clear, you can use any other email marketing tool you wish, like Mailchimp, Convertkit or ActiveCampaign, to name a few examples.
Any decent email marketing tool will allow you to do everything that I discuss in this episode.
Ok, after that rather long side note, let’s get back to the customer journey.
So, a potential customer has gone to your website and filled out the contact us form or the free trial application form or even just immediately signed-up for something like a coaching course, or a club membership.
And as soon as they did this, their contact details were automatically passed onto your email marketing tool.
Meaning that you can now send them emails through the email marketing tool whenever you want.
But the other thing that you can also do is send them automated emails. These are emails that get sent automatically at specific times in the customer journey that you’ve pre-defined.
So, for example, as soon as the customer fills in the trial application form on the website, we can send him an automated email to thank him for his enquiry and letting them know that you’ll reach out to them as soon as possible.
So, the customer journey has gone from someone filling in the website form and just waiting for you to get back to them, to a customer journey where as soon as the customer fills in the website form they get a thank you email.
A little personal touch via email.
I’d argue this simple step has already made the journey for the customer better.
And bear in mind that all of this has happened automatically. You have not had to get involved up until this point, other than to set up the process in the first place.
But we don’t have to stop there.
Let’s say that after you spoke with them on the phone and recommended the right membership or the right lesson for them they decided to actually go ahead and sign-up.
So, they go onto your booking system and make the booking or make the purchase.
And as soon as they do, your booking system ‘talks’ to your email marketing tool and says ‘Hey, this person is a new customer. Send them the automated welcome sequence’. Or player onboarding sequence as I sometimes call it.
This is basically a series of welcome emails that you’ve pre-written that your email marketing tool will send to all new players at predetermined intervals.
So, as an example, let’s say that you want to send 8 emails over the course of the first 6 weeks of a customer (or their child) joining your club or coaching programme.
The first email goes out as soon as they sign-up to thank them for signing up and welcome them to the ‘family’ so to speak.
That email might also have some important information about their course and/or membership or anything else that you really want to communicate to them straight away.
And on that first email you can also mention that they’ll receive X emails, in our example 8, over the next few weeks to introduce them to your club/programme and its activities. This is just so they know what to expect going forward.
So, after that first immediate welcome email, you could then send an email 3 days later, for example, introducing yourself and giving a bit of background about your coaching business or club so they start to understand the roots of the organisation they’ve just joined.
The third email could then go out 4 days later and give an overview of why tennis is such a great sport. You could even put links on the email to studies that show this.
The idea here is that you’re reinforcing their decision to play tennis or to get their kids playing tennis and basically saying: tennis is indeed just as awesome as you thought!
After the third you’ll wait a few days and send the fourth and so on.
I I think you get the idea. And you can make this welcome sequence as short or as long as you want.
Other topics that you could cover are your coaching philosophy, what you have planned for the future of the club or the coaching programme, the activities that you organise and that they could be taking part in, coaching tips or even equipment tips, etc.
The topics that you can cover are pretty much endless.
But the main idea with having this welcome sequence in place is that you’re providing something extra to bring them closer to you, your community, the business and the club.
And the best part is that you only need to write these emails once! Once they’re written and you’ve set up the email marketing tool to deliver them, they’ll just go out automatically when someone new joins.
Do the work once, benefit from it pretty much forever!
So, that’s the welcome sequence. Which you can build using automations.
But the customer journey doesn’t end there, right.
Someone has just joined, they’ve received the welcome sequence, and then what?
Well, then they can start receiving your regular newsletter emails. You can send these every week, every 2 weeks, every month, or whatever you think is appropriate.
These don’t need to be automated. You will type them up with content that is relevant at the time and either send them right there and then or schedule them to be sent soon.
And because your email list or contact list is being updated automatically every time someone new signs-up or fills out your contact us form you don’t need to worry about updating it yourself manually.
You can just type up the email and be confident that everyone that matters will receive it and then just click send or schedule when you’re ready.
Pretty simple stuff.
And then there’s the other type of email that you should use in a customers’ journey, which are the sales emails.
The newsletter is more about keeping people updated with what is going on at the club or the coaching programme whereas the sales emails are about, well, selling something.
And by selling something I obviously mean literally selling something, as in people will pay something for service or a product, but I also mean selling something that is free.
Or in other words, advertising something that you’d like people to take part in even if they don’t have to pay - that’s also selling.
Your newsletter emails can also do some of the selling, but if you really want people to take notice of something specific, you need to make sure that you send at least one or two emails whose sole purpose is to sell that thing.
Whether that’s a social tournament or an official tournament or the holiday camps, or the new coaching course that’s around the corner, a tennis clinic, or even rackets or restringing.
Whatever it is, the point here is that sales emails should be part of your customer’s journey every so often.
Remember that it’s much easier to sell to existing customers than it is to find new customers. 5 times easier, they say.
And email is a great way to sell to existing customers.
Now, let’s just be clear here. I’m in now way advocating that you should start spamming people with sales email after sales email.
That’s a terrible strategy and a surefire way to get people to start ignoring your emails going forward.
But if you never encourage them to show up, sign-up or purchase the things that matter to the club or coaching programme, then you can’t expect that people will notice or care about them that much.
It’s about finding the right balance between offering value and keeping them updated with what’s going on, while also finding the right times and opportunities to sell what you do.
Ok, let’s summarise the customer journey we’ve just discussed.
A potential customer visits your website and decides to fill in a form. As soon as they do, an email goes out to thank them and to let them know that you’ll get in touch as soon as possible.
Then, if they do decide to sign-up to the coaching course or purchase the membership, they will receive the welcome sequence.
This sequence can be long or short, entirely up to you, but the goal is that it really paints the picture of what you and your organisation do, where you’ve come from and where you want to go.
Then, once the welcome sequence is over you have 2 other types of emails that you should send to all your customers, and potentially even past customers. These are:
Newsletter emails - the goal with newsletters is to keep people updated on what is happening and to provide value. In newsletters you mostly give.
Sales emails - the goal of these is to let people know about everything that you want them to attend, participate in, sign-up to or purchase. In sales emails you mostly ask.
In newsletters you mostly give, in sales emails you mostly ask. That’s a good way to think about these 2 types of emails.
Alright, we’re coming to the end of this episode.
But before we go I just have one more important idea to share.
Getting someone to commit to coming to tennis once or twice a week is great. But it isn’t necessarily enough to create a sense of community, belonging and loyalty towards your club or coaching business.
Making sure that you email them regularly adds another layer of contact. Now, instead of them thinking about tennis for only one hour or two a week, you’re getting them to think about it more often.
And not just that, but you’re also sharing important information and news about the club or the coaching programme with them, which will make it that much more likely that they will indeed develop that sense of belonging and loyalty towards you and what you do.
After all, the more you get to know an organisation and the people in it, the more likely it is that you’ll develop positive feelings towards it, as long as the organisation stands for something good, which we definitely do!
And that’s the ultimate goal. To bring them closer to you because you know that that will improve their tennis experience, while at the same time helping your business and club by ensuring that players will be more likely to stay for longer and purchase more while they’re your customer.
And that’s what it’s all about!
Alright that’s it for today’s episode. I hope it was useful and as always I’ll be back next week with another instalment of the Tennis Business Academy podcast.
Until then and thanks for tuning in.