How to Master Email Marketing for Coaches — A Complete Guide

For a coaching business, telling a story is a competitive advantage.

Clientele and students need to know your qualifications as a coach — have you made it to the other side? What makes you a suitable coach for them?

After all, they’re trusting you with their lives, and their wallets.

That’s what email marketing enables you to do — tell your story to a large audience with relative ease.

In fact, it enables you to do more than that, you can send out personalized content for high-quality leads — all while using pretty much the same pitch.

It helps you create value and build trust with existing and potential clients — which makes email marketing for coaches a pure marketing goldmine.

When we say a goldmine, we mean it has a return on investment (ROI) of $38-$42 per $1 spent, definitely worth the effort for any marketing coach!

Besides the great ROI, here are some other benefits for you to take note of:

Did you know that every subscriber on your list has the potential to become a paying student?

If they subscribed to you, they’re already interested in what you’re offering.

So the bigger your email list is, the wider your reach for warm leads is.

Email marketing lets you constantly communicate, share relevant content, and offer multiple services to your paying clients.

It’s ideal for coaching people through extensive periods and adding another level of engagement rarely other methods can compete with.

For example, this is excellent for relationship coaches and life coaches as it gives insight into the healing process of clients over time.

Make every client feel special, and show that you truly care about their concerns and overall benefit from your course.

That’s the perfect recipe to create loyal customers!

For coaches, feedback is so valuable because it allows them to test different coaching methods in order to implement the best strategies.

Email marketing plays a big part in this as it allows you to:

In the online business side of things, having your own custom domain and emails are a nice quality assurance to your prospects.

As a coach, it’s your business’ online address, and ignoring this step will give you a hard time finding clients.

There are multiple options to choose from, like Gmail, Yahoo, Fastmail, and others — when choosing one, consider:

An autoresponder is software designed to send automated email responses.

For example, if you want to greet new subscribers with a welcome sequence, an autoresponder is the way to go, and it is key for your marketing emails.

An email sequence is a list of tailored emails sent to your audience with a specific goal in mind, like welcoming new subscribers as mentioned above.

You’ll be sending autoresponders to handle the volume when you become a growing business.

But which email marketing software should you choose?

There are plenty of good options out there, all with their pros and cons.

Here’s a list of the most popular platforms:

It’s worth mentioning that many of these platforms don’t offer tools for managing your coaching business.

If you’re looking for a platform that will manage your coaching business AND your email campaigns at the same time, then systeme.io is a no-brainer.

Regardless of which email marketing software you choose though, the main event is next.

To make the process of sending welcome emails even easier, build a welcome campaign using marketing automation so that you don’t have to manually send a welcome email to each new subscriber.

Welcome campaigns have an incredible 30.69% open rate, which means they will help with your overall conversions.

Keep your writing clear and simple. Don’t try to upsell your courses just yet — simply inform subscribers about what they can expect working with you.

The monthly or weekly newsletter requires a lot of your attention because it’s a centerpiece in your email marketing efforts.

Newsletter campaigns let you:

As a life coach, you can also use your newsletters to share new tools to help your audience better themselves.

This campaign’s goal should be to drive more engagement into your website.

So it’s important to craft the perfect subject lines and body content in each email, make sure to check out our "how to write newsletters" guide to maximize your conversions.

This is where your value truly shows for bringing results to clients — double-check sending schedules, timed offers, and send personalized content.

Make sure to look sharp in their inbox.

These campaigns capitalize on the large volume of traffic that certain times of the year create like holidays or super trendy topics.

Is Christmas coming up? Perfect time for you business coaches to upsell that “I made 7-figures last Christmas doing exactly this” course.

You should note that seasonal campaigns are also a bit tricky because not every holiday or trendy topic will match your audience, brand, or what you’re offering, so be strategic.

Be selective and make sure this campaign is aligned with your culture to successfully market services, courses, and products.

Re-engagement is a term widely known in marketing that means reaching out to those who once were warm leads — to make them interested again.

It’s crucial to master this strategy because it’s estimated that 25%-30% of customers become inactive in the first year.

To re-engage with cold leads successfully, make sure your campaign:

Knowing your audience is key here — you want to show a real understanding of why they were on board in the first place, and that they still have the chance to get what they wanted.

Yes, you will lose some previously warm leads, but using these effective email marketing campaigns will give your coaching business the best chance to succeed by converting and retaining ideal clients.

There’s a reason Black Friday works so well, people get insane discounts that encourage them to buy way more stuff than they actually need.

For your coaching business, it means more sign-ups, engagement, and overall conversion rates — a very effective lead magnet.

As a life coach, offering time-limited discount codes as a reward for signing up for your course is a no-brainer to attract new and inactive customers.

A short-term discount is fantastic, but offering gifts like free ebooks, a 1-to-1 discovery call, or free consultation are more effective ways of building relationships with clients.

Webinars are also a lead magnet that serves to show the right content to your respective audience.

Why? It takes a lot of effort to create, and yet, it’s still free.

That’s exactly what your students are looking for, so by hosting webinars you’re actually doing sales the right way.

Okay, how?

It’s easy, just choose a format like Q&A webinars, panel webinars with market partners, educational webinars that explain content you already put out, etc. — and share it with your subscribers.

Part of a coach's job is making people get up and do something, webinars are your outlet to express that part of your job — make them sign up for your course list!

If you’re looking for the perfect platform to help you, look no further than systeme.io.

Best part? No coding skills are required and you can sign up for free!

The Free plan is free forever and requires no credit card details to get started.

Our other plans also scale as your business grows, offering more features like evergreen webinars and access to more of our core features with each plan.

Coaches, today we’ve learned how powerful email can be as part of your marketing arsenal.

Other coaches (and other businesses) are already implementing what we’ve discussed, so you need to get up to pace quickly to compete.

Don’t let unnecessary integrations slow you down either, sign up for any plan at systeme.io and accelerate your business growth!

Cheers!