Email marketing for life coaches: Best tips to sign clients and grow your list
When I was a life coach focused on burnout, email marketing helped fill my 1:1 and group programs more than any other method. That’s why I’m talking about email marketing for life coaches — I personally think it’s the smartest, quickest path to signing new clients!
Table of contents:
Email marketing for life coaches: Why every life coach needs an email list
How to create an email opt-in that your ideal clients actually want
How email marketing works for life coaches
Why I love MailerLite for email marketing for life coaches
Where to share your email opt-in as a coach
The next step in your email marketing: Your welcome sequence
How to sign coaching clients from email marketing
Okay, but how can I get started with email marketing as a coach?
Email marketing for life coaches: Why every life coach needs an email list
There are several reasons life coaches should focus on email marketing as a pillar for marketing their businesses, but let’s focus on the top 3:
Email marketing has high conversion rates
I talked about this in my episode about SEO, but email marketing has one of the highest conversion rates out there. Email campaigns have an average conversion rate of 4.29%, which is higher than the averages for traffic from search, direct traffic and from social media, according to WordStream. I’ve personally found this to be true as the majority of my sales have come from email.
You “own” your email list
I believe there is nothing more powerful for marketing your business than your email list, and it’s not just the higher conversion rates. When it comes to social media, your followers can be taken from you at any moment – you could be blocked, hacked, or locked out of your account. And poof – your followers mean nothing.
But when you grow your email list, you in a sense “own” that list. And while you can of course suffer consequences if you’re spammy or don’t follow the laws of email, your list is a much safer foundation for marketing your business. Which by the way, the one email law you never want to break, which I’ve personally seen broken: Never, ever, ever add someone to your email list that didn’t actively sign up for it or agree to being added.
Email marketing helps you leave the hustle behind
Another reason I love email marketing for life coaches: Your subscribers aren’t hoping for an email from you every, single dang day like on social media. You’re not penalized for not being active every day. Now, you do want to maintain some sort of regular schedule, but even if that’s once a month, your email provider isn’t going to dock points and not send out your email to your list, unlike some social media platforms that get mad at you if you’re not spending hours a day on their apps.
How to create an email opt-in that your ideal clients actually want
Okay, but how do life coaches get folks onto their email lists!? You need a juicy and compelling freebie!
Do Market Research
You absolutely must know your client better inside and out. What do your ideal clients most need to know? What do they need to do first? What emotions are they currently feeling? What is happening in their everyday lives that they want to fix ASAP?
When you know your clients better than your own BFF, you can create a freebie that they actually want and are willing to give away their email to get.
Part of this process is doing market research. Ask your ideal clients what they want most. Read your own clients’ intake forms. Read your former clients’ testimonials. Figure out what they want most. Don’t try to be a mind reader, as most of the time, coaches (myself included here!) tend to think we know. But because we are experts in the topics we coach on, we’re disconnected from where our clients currently are before working with us. We’re too far down our path to clearly see what they most need.
Use Keyword Research
Another approach to this research is using SEO keyword tools. When I was still doing life coaching, I created a private podcast episode called “What do I really want?” and I did that because 390 people a month are searching for that. So clearly there are people out there that want help answering that question.
Use your own niche to research what people are searching for help for, and use that to help you create your freebie. If you have no idea how to do this, you’re in luck, because I teach you how in my SEO Cheat Sheet and video tutorials over at staciemitchell.com/seo for free.
Focus On Quick Wins
I used to believe that it was better to offer an opt-in that was super intense, like an hour-long workshop or a mini-course. But sometimes that can be too much of a commitment for people.
Bigger or longer isn’t always better. And while I know coaches can struggle with this a bit, the more tangible you can get with your freebie, the more your ideal clients will sign up.
Remember that while you may know they need to get to the root cause of the issue, your client may still be thinking that they need something more surface-level like to stop eating so much sugar or to be more productive and efficient. Meet your clients where they’re at – maybe they just want to know how to leave work at 5 pm every day, but they’re not quite ready to face the deeper stuff lurking underneath their need to be valued and needed at work.
Email Opt-ins That Perform Well for Coaches
I’ve seen all kinds of email opt-ins or freebies grow email lists, but personally, these are the ones that tend to grow your email the fastest:
Hosting a live challenge: My Burned Out to Biz Boss Challenge was a 5 day challenge I hosted in January of 2021 and grew my list by 31 people. I also booked at least 5 clients from that challenge, so it was a big success! Remember that you don’t need to have a huge list to sign clients!
Hosting a private community: I grew my Facebook community for burnout to over 600 members, and this community was by far the thing that grew my email list the most at about ~200 subscribers. Now, I know we’re not about that social media life here, but I do think there’s a way to have a community – whether on Facebook, Slack, or similar – that can do the same for you, if it feels good. I ended up closing my community because it just didn’t feel aligned anymore, but it might work great for you. And remember, you don’t need to keep Facebook on your phone in order to have a community there! You could just as easily check it once a day at a scheduled time from your laptop!
Quick tutorials and/or templates: Let’s say you're the master of meal prep and you’re a health coach. You could share your spreadsheet of meals and your shopping lists so your ideal clients can begin meal prepping much, much faster, and save them hours of work. My SEO Cheat Sheet has been one of my most popular email opt-ins and it’s by far my most used as well! Because it’s quick, it’s tangible, and it’s proven – I’ve shown that using SEO works as it’s helped my podcast grow 58% in 5 months! But think about little “secrets” you use in your own life that relate back to your coaching: Are you the master of getting things done and have your own system? Do you have a journaling practice you use every day that’s helped you feel less anxious? Have you manifested the coolest opportunities ever? A lot of times we overlook what’s most natural, so it might be helpful to think about your routines and what you do without thinking to see if there’s a new approach you can share with your clients!
As for PDF files and such, it’s not that they don’t work at all, but typically they just aren’t compelling enough. If your client can easily Google and find exactly what you offer without giving away their email, it’s unlikely that they’ll sign up. It’s okay to use a little mystery in what they’re getting as well, so long as you’re not overpromising on their results.
For example, let’s go back to the meal prepping example. Compelling copy for that might be: “Sign up for my meal prep cheat sheet and shopping list and save up to 5 hours each week!” and/or “Get the meal prep cheat sheet and shopping list that helped my family save $200 every month!” Quantify if you can, and use your own results if you can!
There’s also a great podcast episode by Julie Stoian on the Create Your Laptop Life podcast called 13 List Building Ideas that I recommend listening to for more inspiration.
How email marketing works for life coaches
Why I love MailerLite for email marketing for life coaches
I’m going to keep this pretty simple and straightforward:
MailerLite is free for up to 1,000 subscribers. Now, you will get all kinds of business coaches telling you that you need to pay for Flodesk or ConvertKit but if you don’t have a complex business or large email list, you just don’t need to do that, and I hate to see people wasting their money on tools that don’t actually need yet.
In MailerLite, you have the ability to set up all the automations you need to create your email opt-in and welcome sequence, and to see your analytics, without it being overly complicated and confusing. I’m all about keeping it simple and focusing on user-friendly tools, which is why I recommend MailerLite for coaches who want to add email marketing to their businesses.
Where to share your email opt-in as a coach
The short answer: EVERYWHERE.
But let me give you the common, but also potentially overlooked, places to share your freebie:
Every single time you speak anywhere: On a podcast, summit, workshop, every time you speak, you share your email opt-in as THE place to stay connected. While sharing your social media handles is okay, there’s nothing more valuable than getting ideal clients onto your email list. This is also why I recommend keeping your url for your email landing page simple. That’s why it’s staciemitchell.com/seo – not staciemitchell.com/seo-cheat-sheet – because you need to be able to say it and have folks find it easily.
Your email signature: This might seem silly, but I’m not talking about your email newsletter signature, just your normal email. So that every time you email a business connection or a friend, they have the opportunity to see and sign up for your newsletter.
Your social media profiles: I recommend having your opt-in as your only link OR the first link you have available in a list. And don’t forget to share with a feed or story post too if that feels good to you!
Facebook groups in promo threads or in comments if appropriate: Always pay close attention to the rules of the Facebook groups you’re in and follow them, but if you’re in a Facebook group that’s likely to have your ideal clients too, you can post your email opt-in in promotion threads (if they have them) or in the comments of posts where your opt-in could help. This is one of the few high ROI activities I still do in my business on social media!
Talk about it in your content – including your blog posts, podcast episodes, social media posts, and more!
The next step in your email marketing: Your welcome sequence
When someone signs up for your email freebie, you of course want to have an automation set up that emails them their “goodie.” But if you want to create the strongest impression and dramatically increase your chances of signing a new client, you’ll want to create a series of emails – usually anywhere from 4-6 emails – that helps grow their trust in you as an expert coach.
Each of these emails has a goal, and by the end of the sequence of emails, you can talk more about how the new subscriber can work with you.
How to sign coaching clients from email marketing
Now you might be thinking, all of this is good, but how do you get coaching clients from email marketing???🤔
My favorite approach to writing emails is fairly simple: Just tell a story.
I like to keep a running list of funny stories from my real life to use in my emails, and then find a way to relate that story to my business and the services I offer.
For example, I sold my first SEO content marketing intensive with an email about my struggles with adult acne. I’m serious. That email had an open rate of 55% which is really good, and a click rate of about 3%. You’re probably wondering to yourself, “But how did your story about acne relate to SEO?” And that’s where it gets fun!
My subject line was “I can't believe I did this for FIVE whole years😫” which of course, made my subscribers curious enough to open and figure out what I was talking about, which was about how I used Curology for five whole years even though it never worked for me. I told the story of how I switched to Paula’s Choice Clear Skin kit and voila! My skin was clear in 3 weeks! Compelling, right?
But I didn’t just tell the story to tell the story. I related it back to social media. We can spend years telling ourselves it’s worth the side effects because everyone else says it works. And then I went on to talk about a better approach to marketing your business with SEO. And ta-da! I booked a client!
These storytelling emails tend to get the highest open rates, the highest click rates, AND I get far fewer unsubscribes than my emails that are super sales focused. Now to be clear: I think it’s important to occasionally send sales emails; if you lose subscribers, they were never going to work with you anyway!
But because I can hear you mumbling to yourselves out there, “But I bet this doesn’t work for coaching…” I’m going to share a different example of successful email marketing from my coaching business.
Now I went WAY back to when I was doing burnout coaching so you can’t throw the “But you were a business coach!” excuse at me. This email was sent out in August of 2020 for my group coaching program on burnout.
The subject line was “When you really, really want to quit” and while the open rate was lower at just over 20%, I had an almost 2% click rate for my group program, and I received an application from that email who signed up for the program which was just under a $900 investment.
The email was about how much I have wanted to quit jobs in the past – not because the jobs were awful, but because I’d burned myself out and just wanted to get out ASAP. I used my own example to show the client that I understood where they currently were, that I had a solution to help, and I shared that solution. You can read the full email here.
The bottom line is that email works really, really well for signing clients. Use the power of storytelling and paint a super clear picture of why they need your coaching to get from where they are now to where they want to be.
Okay, but how can I get started with email marketing as a coach?
If you’re still feeling a bit confused about how all of this works, have no fear! I help coaches with this in a couple of ways:
The first: You can buy my brand new Sign Clients Without Social Media mini-course bundle, which includes a copywriting template for your opt-in landing page, a copywriting template for all of your welcome sequence emails, more examples of my emails that converted to clients, video tutorials for how to set up the automations in MailerLite, and more!
This bundle also includes an SEO mini-course and a guest podcasting mini-course with loads more tutorials and templates so you can sign clients without social media. You can buy the bundle over here – and use code SUMMER25 to get $25 off for a limited time, making it just $50!!
And anyone who buys the course before midnight on June 1st (2022) also gets a private invite to a 1 hour long group coaching call where you can ask me questions and get feedback, scheduled for Sunday, June 26th from 4-5 pm EST.
The second way: Sign up for my SEO content marketing intensive and get access to everything I just mentioned in the mini-course bundle PLUS custom ideas for your opt-in, custom SEO keyword research, custom podcasts topics and podcasts to pitch, and more! Learn more and apply here to snag your spot!
I hope you see that email marketing can be a really great way to sign clients in as a life coach (or any other kind of coach!), and that it deserves the time and strategy to make it work well for you!
If you loved this post, check out SEO for Coaches: A quick-start guide to attract your ideal clients