Permission Marketing

A gold mail slot in a dark wooden door with a sign that reads "no junk mail."

Email marketing works. Spam doesn’t.
Good emails are part of a conversation. Good emails include things your readers care about (I call mine “love letters”). Good emails actually help your audience.
Bad emails are sales pitches. Bad emails includes lots of “!!!” and “?!?!”. Bad emails are noise. Bad emails are spam.
But the real difference between a great email and spam?
Permission.
 

“I’m Listening”

When people give you permission to email them, they’re not necessarily giving you money. They’re giving you something far more valuable: their attention.
We spend almost $20,000 every month building amazing tools. We build them so people in our audience will know they can trust us to be valuable and relevant. Here’s a list of tools we’ve published recently, and here’s the result of all that work:

7,500 people open our emails every. single. day. Because we’re not spamming them. Because we earned their permission to send them a love letter.
 

No One Likes Spam

Now, I get spammed a lot.
I own a gym. That gym is on a list of CrossFit affiliates. That list gets scraped by hackers and sold to marketers who don’t care about permission. Then those marketers spam my gym. Here’s one from last night:
Title: “New Member”
Body: “Hey Catalyst Fitness, I know cold emails are about as much fun as doing burpees… .”
That’s spam. I didn’t ask for help with whatever they’re selling.
I also still have my chris@crossfit.com email account. That account gets spammed daily.
Here are two from yesterday:
“Chris, does your gym qualify for our free habits course?” (Spoiler: it doesn’t.)
“Ready to teach Pilates?” (I’m not.)
I built a $7 million company on the back of great content. We publish every day. We don’t spam anyone.
 

How to Use Email to Build Trust With Your Audience

1. Know what they actually care about. I write about gym owners because I am one.
2. Make your emails directive. Rants, attacks and “don’t make this simple mistake!” are noise. Tell people exactly what to do to improve.
3. Give people valuable stuff for free. Here’s our most recent set of tools, again.
4. Ask permission first. And keep earning it every single day.
I learned about Permission Marketing from Seth Godin back in 2009.
If you’re thinking about spamming gym owners, I’ll make you a deal: Don’t send that email.
Let me send you Seth’s book instead. Email me (once) with your address and watch your mail slot. Then take me off your list.
Need more advice on common problems? Click here to book a free call with a certified Two-Brain Business mentor.

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One more thing!

Did you know gym owners can earn $100,000 a year with no more than 150 clients? We wrote a guide showing you exactly how.