How To Write The Ideal Personal Training Welcome Email (With Free Template)

Whether you’re trying to get new clients or retain existing ones, there is no better way to create a business to client relationship than sending a personal training welcome email.

That’s why we have tips on how to create one that is going to help your business grow, as well as a free template to use.

Before we get straight to it, if you are looking to get further qualified, why not browse through the range of personal training courses that we offer here at OriGym? Or, you can find plenty of other health and fitness courses here in our downloadable course prospectus.

9 Simple Tips For Creating An Effective Personal Trainer Welcome Email

#1 Grab Attention with a Good Subject Line in Your Personal Training Welcome Email

A personal training welcome email simply isn’t going to get opened if you don’t focus on creating a good subject line.

A subject line is the first thing your recipient is going to see, so you need to think about what exactly you’re going to write before filling in the box highlighted below:

You should avoid creating a click-bait-like subject line, as these could appear like spam. 

One common subject line hack that many businesses use is to begin with ‘RE:’. 

This is because ‘RE:’ is the automatic start of a subject line for an email which is a reply to one that you have personally sent. This makes the chances of your recipients opening the email much higher since it stands out from the rest of the promotional mail box.

Your subject line needs to be captivating, while also being short and succinct. It should be relative to what the email entails, for example, if you’re advertising an offer, then let it be known in the subject line.

If something is free, having the word ‘FREE’ is certainly going to attract attention and increase the chances of opening rate. 

Another tip to make your personal training welcome email more attractive is to use the end user's name within the subject line. 

Take a look below at what this can look like:

Though this is autogenerated, the name being in the email subject makes it much more personal. Another thing to notice is the way that the subject line is quick and snappy, grabbing the reader's attention.

One thing that you should definitely take from the example above, is the way that the full subject fits on the subject line. 

This looks a lot more professional and thought through than subject lines which trail off with ‘...’ because the writer has run out of space. 

The subject line is all about sparking curiosity, so if you can do that in a couple of words while keeping it relevant to the email contents, you’ll have a gym welcome email that is going to bring in results.

#2 Only Use High Quality Images in Your Personal Training Welcome Email

When you’re sending a personal trainer email to a client, you’re going to want to boast professionalism and one way to do this is by including high quality images on your email.

It is so important that when creating an email, you have access to high quality images that are either your own or, you have licensed them for use.

You coud:

• Use the likes of Adobe stock, which you do have to pay for 
• Take your own professional pictures, or
• Hire a photographer to take images of you/ your gym (which will make the images more relevant to your business and reduce the risk of looking spammy).

For example, as a personal trainer, you’re the face of your brand and along with this you’ll need your fitness logo and branding. All of this can be encapsulated in one high quality banner image that is uniform to promotional emails. 

Take a look at this example below from a fitness coaching company: 

As you can see, this example includes a high quality image of the personal trainer herself and the colours used are relevant and all on brand. This is typical of a header on an email and if you’re using a software to help you, it is actually very easy to implement. 

Sites like MailChimp have email builders making it easy for small and large scale companies to create professional emails. 

You can select templates as you can see below:

These are highly popular and you probably recognise them from promotional emails you have received yourself. You can see below how you can insert your desired banner image and the software does the hard work for you. 

Don’t underestimate the power of high quality images, it can make or break the reputation you’re putting across to readers. 

#3 Avoid Using Too Much Text in Your Personal Training Welcome Email

One thing to avoid when creating your personal training welcome email is using too much text. 

Text-heavy emails can look unattractive on the page and can make the chances of the reader clicking back out of your email higher.

We have spoken about the importance of the imagery and you can embed some text into the imagery to make it more aesthetically pleasing than a long body of text. However, it is very important that you find the right balance.

This is because sending an email that is too image heavy without text can be detected as spam and trigger as such, meaning your email lands straight in the spam folder and gets deleted within 30 days.

This is the last thing you want or need, as it would mean all the hard work you put into creating your personal training welcome email would go to waste!

So how do you avoid this?

Finding the middle ground has been tried and tested by many, but a reliable source like Campaign monitor can help to find the answer. 

They say that readers don’t read an email in the same way we would an article perhaps, it is more of a scan, take a look below at an overview of the stats they shared:

With this in mind, you should also be thinking about where you’re distributing your text, ensure that you’re not putting anything too important in the introductory sentences because they may be missed!

As you can see above, Campaign Monitor found that your emails that were 50-125 words long had the best response rates.

This is something you need to think about your welcoming email, it doesn’t need to be lengthy so keep it succinct while also being readable and deliverable. You should trial and error some minor changes or like Campaign Monitor suggests, take the approach of A/B testing.

Read over your emails and cut down fluff or relevant phrases and sentences - it can make all the difference in what important sections are picked out by the reader giving it a skim over.

#4 Keep the Colours Uniform to Your Brand in Your Personal Training Welcome Email

Having a brand identity made up of tone of voice, colours, and overall theme is incredibly important when it comes to building a reputation for and marketing your business. 

Advertising and marketing are most effective when repeated, so it only makes sense for your emails to have the same branding, colour scheme, and tone of voice as your other communications. 

For example, if you’re using header images like we have just discussed, these should be branded images that wouldn’t look out of place on your website or your Instagram feed. 

This goes for fonts too, you want to instil your branding into your consumers mind so that you become a recognisable PT.

This is how we associate branding with the company itself in any industry and though you may think being a sole trader this doesn’t apply to you, it definitely does.

It isn't just big name companies that have branding, no matter the scale of your PT business you should be using your branding colours throughout any communicative material.

For example, JD Gyms are known for their grey and green branding, the green contrasts the grey extremely well and it is used from the decor of their gym to their emails they send out - take a look below at the correlation between their emails and their in-house decor.

This is especially important with a gym welcome email as this is your first communication to the client, so you want to make them remember your branding. That way, the next time they see your brand they’ll recognise it, ultimately building brand awareness and the B2C relationship.

#5 Ensure You Include CTA’s on Your Welcome Email

Since you have their email address, the individual has clearly taken some amount of interest in training with you, so what next?

Call to actions (CTA’s) are one of the most crucial parts of your personal training welcome email, without them, there is simply no reason to send the email in the first place, it is a button that allows the end user to take action and pursue your services.

Research has shown that 74% of users expect a welcome email almost immediately after they have subscribed and that of these welcome emails, have a 50% more open rate and compared to a standard newsletter were 86% more effective. 

So, with all of those valuable stats in mind, why would you not include a CTA? 

It is clear that welcome emails have more than enough potential to be effective if their open rate is so positive, so what CTA’s should you include?

It should be relevant to the welcome email itself, so nothing too specific. You’re a personal trainer, so of course the end goal is to get them onboard as a client but there are some other steps that come before them training in the gym with you.

This includes a personal training consultation, so it would make sense for your CTA to be related to getting to this first step. After the initial welcome, you could have your CTA be leading to scheduling a consultation. 

However, you should make it clear that this is a non-obligatory consultation. Hopefully by now you have your personal trainer website set up and if you have a booking system on there it would be as streamline and stress free as possible for the potential client to schedule a meeting with you.

Take a look at this personal training business that have this approach in their emails:

We would suggest making yours look somewhat more inviting, you can make your CTA button clickable by using your branding colour and maybe creating some urgency in the way you write it out.

For example, you could say ‘book your FREE consultation today’. Nonetheless, this is a good CTA example since as you can see, they’ve highlighted the word ‘free’ making the non-obligatory nature clear.

If you don’t have the means to set up this feature, another good way to make contact is by scheduling a call back. 

Since your contact details such as your email address, phone number and social media links should already be in the email and easily accessible somewhere they already have the opportunity to take that route if they want to. 

Yet, a call to action should be a little more proactive, scheduling a call back can be just that. 

The button should be clearly visible as a clickable button, it shouldn’t be overrun with text, remember to keep on brand and have a button that is as actionable as possible for your desired end result.

#6 Sign Off Your Personal Training Welcome Email Politely

This may seem self explanatory, but it is something that is particularly important in a welcome email since creating a good first impression is crucial at this stage.

You may even want to create a uniform sign off that is used across all of your emails, one that is unique to your brand, maybe even a tag line that is attached to your business.

It is a small gesture but it goes a long way, it is also a portion of your email that can reinforce your personality. For example, instead of just saying Thank You and signing off with your business name, you could go a little further.

An example could be:

Thank you for subscribing and keep an eye out for our name in your inbox for more special offers and exclusive fitness content!

This not only thanks the end reader for being a subscriber, but it gives them incentive to keep opening your further emails and stay subscribed.

You want to minimise the risk of anybody unsubscribing and to do this, you should be giving them a hint as to why they should stay on your list and continue opening your emails. 

So by showing gratitude and sending quality emails, they will be sure to stick around on your mailing list.

For more useful resources on promoting your personal training business, head over to our articles below:

• Personal Trainer Icons: Examples and Ideas 
• 9 Gym Marketing Ideas & Examples 
• How to Get Your Fitness Business in the Media 

#7 Create Value in Your Personal Training Welcome Email

Another thing that you need to consider is the contents, though it is of course a welcome to our gym email, are you actually providing some level of value in there too?

It is crucial that you do everything to keep the recipients engaged and for them to actually value your email when it lands in their inbox and the only way to do this is by providing them with something relevant and useful.

Nonetheless, it is all about striking the right balance as since your end goal is to sell sessions you don’t want to simply become a free tool for valuable resources, you also want to try to sell at the right moment. 

This has got everything to do with email cadence, this is exactly what it sounds like, it is the frequency of sending your emails. Though we’ve already spoken about when you should send your first email, what about the ones following that?

These make up the welcome email series and it is important that you use what is known as value-based selling to benefit the potential customer during every step (in this instance, every email).

So how do you do this? It can be really simple actually, you can provide useful information. 

Since you have this person on your mail list, the hard work is done for you, meaning you know in some capacity that they’re interested in personal training or at least fitness in general.

Since you know this, you’re able to share valuable information that they would genuinely want to know. For example, you could provide downloadable workouts or private listed YouTube videos to workouts that only email subscribers have access to. 

This is always adding value, relevant value at that and it keeps your recipients and if the value you’re providing is top quality, your email open rates are going to be higher. 

This means that when it comes to the time to sell, the likelihood of the recipient opening the email and reading your sales pitch is much higher.

#8 Tell Your Subscribers to Whitelist You in Your Personal Training Welcome Email

Something else that will take your welcome email to the next level is learning some more about whitelisting. 

Doing this in your welcome email can be the best start since thereon after you won’t be distributed into their spam box. 

Whitelisting is simply moving a specific email address (yours in this case) into a sender approved list. This is a quick and easy process from the users end and simply ensures that they will always see your email.

This is why you need to be providing value because you have to give a reason for your recipient to go through the effort of actually doing this for you. Though your email may land in their inbox anyway so long as you haven’t done anything that would trigger spam, this is a way to be 100% certain.

It is pretty easy to pop this into your email, you’ve probably seen it done before without even realising. Take a look below at an email from Xercise4Less, this is often how small and easy it can be:

As you can see, it is a small link and it can often go unnoticed. However, this is the typical format of a regular promotional email. When it comes to welcome emails you may want to restructure.

You could put it just before the end of your email or make it a little more clear with larger text or a button. Plus, you could add some text, for example you could say:

“If you don’t want to miss out on our FREE and exclusive workouts for our subscribers,make sure you add us to your address book!”

It is a simple way to add incentive to a task that they would otherwise probably skip!

#9 Work on Improving Your Deliverability for Your Personal Training Welcome Email

Finally, we have another technicality, email deliverability. 

Email deliverability is made up of many different aspects that can make or break your relationship with the end user. With that in mind, we have listed the top things that you should try to improve on to improve your email deliverability.

Improve Your Sender Score

A sender score is a bit like a credit score. It is an encapsulation of your email reputation that takes things like:

• How email providers rate your IP address
• How many spam complaints you have
• Inactive subscribers on your recipient list

If you try to improve in these areas, for example, reducing spam complaints by avoiding spammy content, you will improve the health of your score and in turn, your deliverability.

Improve Your Bounce Rate

Sometimes somebody may type in their email address incorrectly, meaning your email will bounce back which in turn, negatively affects your deliverability so sometimes it can't be helped. Nonetheless, you can do your best to reduce this as much as possible. 

You could improve your bounce rate by getting subscribers to confirm their email address twice when they’re entering it to reduce the risk of incorrect emails or a ‘verify your email address’ button. 

If your email bounces it can send the message that you’re sending without consent which is going to act very negatively on your deliverability. 

Make your Content Valuable and Actionable

When somebody takes action on our email, it sends out a positive signal, it shows that the end user is interacting with this content and you’re not spamming or sending unwanted or irrelevant emails. 

This is a good sign and will increase deliverability, whereas if your emails are going unopened or even marked as spam, this isn’t good for your deliverability so you would need to work on avoiding these at all costs.

Complete Personal Trainer Welcome Email Template

Hopefully by now you have the tools you need to create the perfect welcome, but for some extra help and guidance we have a personal trainer welcome email template below for you to use.

This template incorporates all of the top aspects that we have spoken about, so you can rest assured that you’re sending the perfect welcome email.

As you can see, the elements we have spoken about fit into your email smoothly. You can put your own tagline in there which could be related to your subject line too. 

Remember to adjust your branding colours and if you have your own professional images, put them in! As we mentioned earlier, the services and softwares you may use when sending out promotional emails are extremely useful. 

They will give you a place to put your contact details and the likes of socials. This is also where an unsubscribe button would be too. All of these important parts of the email would be uniform with all promotional emails - at the bottom.

Before You Go…

We hope you feel confident in sending out your first communication with our help and our personal trainer email template. 

Before you get started on any of this, you’re going to need to get qualified! You can do just that by kick starting your career in the best way with a personal trainer course with OriGym. You can also find a plethora of accredited health and fitness courses here in our downloadable course prospectus.