With an always-larger audience of fitness-lovers that are turning to online stores to purchase health products, you have a unique opportunity as a personal trainer. Your clients come to you with questions about exercises, dieting, and supplementation advice. Now that you have a online fitness storefront, you have a place to direct them where they can get informed about supplements and purchase them directly from you. Gymbag helps you provide a valuable service to your existing clients – so you have a place to write personalized recommendations to them, tailor your store towards your clients, and provide an interface between your in-person relationship and your online relationship with them.
This guide will give you a boost in getting your store ready for your clients and marketing it to them at its maximum potential. Marketing here means making sure your clients know about your store at every opportunity possible, educating your clients about supplements, and recommending products to them online and offline. It’ll help you to incorporate your store into your overall activities as a personal trainer and create content that educates and demonstrates your value to your clients so they want to use your storefront as a place to learn.
Prep your store for launch
The first thing we want to do is make sure that your store is in tip top shape for your clients. A great looking store will give an air of professionally and help reinforce your personal brand. A store loaded with valuable information and resources will keep your clients coming back to look for information and keep shopping.
Have you customized your banner?
The big graphical space at the top of your store is the first thing your clients will see when they log onto your store. Use it to tell your story, show off your favourite products, link to important blog posts, or wherever else you want to draw attention to. We provide some more suggestions and tools for designing your banner in our Design Resource Guide.
Uploaded your logo?
Starting with a plain text logo is fine, but if you want to show your clients right away that they’ve come to the right place to shop, why not upload your own PT brand logo? If you’re looking to create a new logo, check out the Logo Resource section of our Design Resource Guide.
Completed your “about” page?
Similar to your logo, your “About” page lets your clients rest easy that they’re in the right place and that they are shopping on a store that you’ve put time and energy into making it the best experience possible for them.
Added an introductory blog post?
We give suggestions in this guide for blog posts that will educate and excite your clients, but most of all that will stimulate purchasing. You could also reuse some older blog posts from your current blog (if you have one) that your clients responded well to. Having at least one blog post will give a sense of completeness to your store, but consistently creating informative and useful content is the best way to get your clients to visit your store often.
Customized your catalogue?
This is a big one. We’re going to assume here that you do have some products or brands that you prefer over others, and that you have a certain type of client that you cater to more frequently who will find certain supplements more useful than others. Make your store reflect that. Some people find it useful to remove all of the products from their store first, and then add back in the products they want to sell to their clients. If you find it easier to organize your store that way, go to the Catalog page of your dashboard and under “Bulk actions” at the bottom, choose “Select all”, then “Disable selection”. This will disable all products on that page from your store. Go through all the product pages until you’ve disabled everything, then search for the products you want to enable.
Added products to your favourites?
Once you’ve chosen which products you want to sell, start adding some of them to your favourites category so your clients can easily find them. Click “edit” beside a product and select “Favourite category”.
We recommend adding your own descriptions to your favourite products in order to give extra information and advice to your clients. Why you like the product, your experience with it, what it should be used for and how are all great pieces of information that your clients will want to know.
10 smart ideas to to drive targeted traffic to your supplement store
It would be nice to think that “If you build it, they will come”. But just like the training part of your business, you’ll need to work to market yourself to potential customers. Luckily, the majority of the time, your potential customers will be your personal training clients. You already have an excellent potential customer base who look to you for advice and information, and who you are already to contact with, both in person and online. Now it’s just a matter of letting them know about your store in the right ways. Let’s look at some of the ways you can get the word out to them.
1. Make a strong call to action on your primary website
Both new leads for your personal training business and your current clients will often be visiting your primary website for info, pricing, availability, to read your blog, etc. Why not update your homepage and direct these people to your store? Find a great image and place a strong call to action such as “Shop my store” with a link to your store.
2. Add links to your store from your regular emails to clients
Using email marketing systems like Mailchimp, Aweber, or FitPro Newsletter, many personal trainers are creating excellent useful content for leads and customers while keeping themselves top of mind. Why not use these emails as a chance to get your clients excited about your store while sending them personalized recommendations? Insert images and products with links and your own short descriptions. You could use something along the lines of “this week we’re focusing on slimming down. Shop slim down supplements on my store now!”. You could also highlight specific products or groups of products with an explanation about why you love it.
3. Introduce your store to clients in person
If you ever bring your tablet to a training session, bring up your store on the tablet at the end of the session or when the subject of nutrition or supplementation comes up. Explain to them how the store works, show them the product you’re talking about, and tell them you’ll email it to them. Then use the “share with a friend” link on the product page to send it to them right then.
4. Connect your social media to your store.
Post highlighted products or product bundles on your personal training Facebook page with images and links. Post a new bundle every week and ask your Facebook fans for their questions about the products. Interacting with your clients by answering questions about why they should use certain products and in which way educates everyone else as well.
5. Write a blog post about your most frequently asked questions about supplements
Your clients have probably come to you with questions in the past like “Do I need to take protein powder to get muscles?” “Are supplements bad for you?” “What’s the difference between whey concentrate and isolate?”. How about gathering all of those questions together and writing a comprehensive blog post about it? This blog post can be a great way to start the conversation with your clients about supplements and you can link to specific products from it. Promote this post on the front page of your website, from the homepage of the store, your social media, and marketing emails.
6. Remind your clients when their products have run out
Make a reminder for yourself when a customer purchases something, to remind them to repurchase when you think it’s time. When you send them a reminder email try to cross-sell as well, recommending complementary or similar products.
7. Write compelling, rich descriptions for your favourite products.
You have the opportunity to add as much detail and information about products as you want, so why not use your product pages to share knowledge and experience with your clients? Link to sections on your blog where you show your or your clients transformations and describe which supplements were helpful to them during their training.
8. Get in touch with abandoned shopping carts
When a customer creates an account on your store but doesn’t purchase anything, you’ll get a notification on your dashboard on the top under “Client registrations”. You’ll be able to see the email addresses of your clients who never ended up purchasing. Now that you know this, go ahead and send them a little nudge – a simple email that says something like “Hey Karen, I saw you got a chance to visit my store. Last week you mentioned you wanted to check out some products that will help you tone up – here’s a link to one of my favourite BCAAs I was telling you about”.
9. Discover your clients’ goals with a quick supplementation questionnaire
Send your clients and prospects a quick 5-10 question survey about their fitness goals through email or share it with them through social media. Use it to help in recommending products to them that could help them reach these goals. You can create surveys for free using SurveyMonkey or Google Forms. This is also a great way to gauge your clients interest and general knowledge level in nutrition and supplement products.
10. Create customized product stacks for your clients
Once you’ve understood your clients’ goals and had a chance to talk to them in person about supplementation advice, you can send them personalized stacks of products to help them reach their goals. You can link to products through email, send them product recommendations through the “Share with a friend” button on each product page, or even create a small blog post for each of your clients linking to relevant products.
Conclusion
Promoting your store to your clients does take a bit of work, but consider the fact that you already have a group of interested, passionate people looking to you for advice, and you’ll see that half of the work has already been done. Now you just need to get them active and interested in your store. Try using some of these methods and let us know in the comments if you have any other suggestions for promoting your store to your clients!