Bodybuilding is still a predominantly male industry, but we wanted to take a look at some of the champions of women’s bodybuilding and how the sport has evolved over the years.

From Rachel McLish to Iris Kyle, the women who pioneered aesthetic sports have taken on stereotypes and controversies in order to push the limits of the female physique.

The Quest for Aesthetic Dominance

Women have been involved in bodybuilding since its inception, though you might not know it, since the sport has historically been dominated by men. But in recent decades, women have gained a significant presence and recognition in bodybuilding, even as the sport continues to evolve.

The different competition categories — fitness, figure, wellness, bikini, physique — have lead to a branching out of styles for women who want to show their symmetry, impressive skills and hard work.

Let’s explore the history of women in bodybuilding, starting from its origins to the present day, highlighting the major milestones and accomplishments of female bodybuilders over the years.

The Early Days: 1930s to 1950s

Bodybuilding, as we know it today, began in the 1930s with the advent of the Mr. America contest. Women didn’t really get involved in the sport until around the 1950s with the rise of female bodybuilding pioneers like Abbye “Pudgy” Stockton, often considered the first female bodybuilder.

Pudgy Stockton was a performer at the famous Muscle Beach in Santa Monica, California, and is known for her muscular physique and impressive strength. Her athletic presence helped to pave the way for women in bodybuilding.

1960s & 1970s

In the 1960s and ‘70s, women’s bodybuilding began to gain more mainstream recognition — 1977 saw the first Ms. Olympia contest. The following year, the National Physique Committee (NPC) began holding national-level competitions for women.

As the subculture of women lifting weights grew, it helped to raise the profile of female bodybuilding and encouraged more women to get involved in the sport.

The Golden Era: 1980s & 1990s

The ‘80s and ‘90s were the golden era of women’s bodybuilding, with the rise of some of the most iconic female bodybuilders of all time. The most famous of these was probably Rachel McLish, who won the first two Ms. Olympia titles in 1980 and 1982.

Other notable athletes from this era include Cory Everson, Lenda Murray, and Bev Francis. During this decade, women’s bodybuilding became more competitive and saw significant growth in the number of competitors and the levels of athleticism on display.

2000s to 2010s

In the early 2000s, female bodybuilding faced criticism for promoting an unrealistic and overly muscular physique. As a result, some competitions began to introduce categories for women with different criteria than standard bodybuilding.

One category was the Women’s Fitness division, which focused on athletic ability, dance and choreography. Another category was the Women’s Figure division, which was a toned-down version of bodybuilding that emphasized shape and symmetry rather than mass and bulk.

Despite this shift towards a more “feminine” aesthetic, some female bodybuilders continued to compete in the traditional bodybuilding category. In 2000, Valentina Chepiga became the first woman from Russia to win the Ms. Olympia title. She went on to win the title again in 2002 and 2003, cementing her status as one of the top female bodybuilders of the early 2000s.

Another standout athlete during this time was Iris Kyle, who won her first Ms. Olympia title in 2004 and went on to win an unprecedented ten titles in a row, from 2006 to 2015. Kyle’s dominance in the sport inspired many other women to pursue bodybuilding as a career, and she remains one of the most influential figures in the history of women’s bodybuilding.

In 2003, the International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness (IFBB) launched the Women’s Bodybuilding Pro Division, which provided more opportunities for female bodybuilders to compete professionally. This division also introduced new weight classes, which allowed women to compete at more appropriate weights for their size and frame.

Despite these positive changes, women’s bodybuilding continued to face challenges in the form of limited exposure and sponsorship opportunities. Many competitions were held in small venues and received little media coverage, which made it difficult for female bodybuilders to gain mainstream recognition.

2010 to Present Day

These days, female bodybuilders have continued to push the boundaries of what is possible in terms of physical strength and aesthetics, while also working to address the ongoing challenges and controversies facing the sport.

One of the biggest changes in women’s bodybuilding during this time has been the re-introduction of the Ms. Olympia competition. After the competition was discontinued in 2014, many female bodybuilders felt that their opportunities to compete had all but vanished. In 2020, the Ms. Olympia was revived, providing a much-needed platform for female bodybuilders to showcase their skills and talent.

The popularity of social media and online platforms has been pivotal for female bodybuilders. Instagram is now a key platform for female bodybuilders to connect with fans, promote their training and diet regimens, and build their personal brands. This has increased visibility and exposure for many female bodybuilders, and has given rise to a new generation of social media influencers and fitness personalities.

New Physique Categories & Old Controversies

Women’s bodybuilding has continued to evolve and adapt to changing expectations and standards. The focus on size and bulk has shifted somewhat in favor of a more balanced physique, with greater emphasis on symmetry, definition, and proportion. New categories, such as Wellness and Bikini, have been introduced to cater to women with different body types and aesthetic goals.

Despite these positive changes, women’s bodybuilding still faces challenges and controversies. The sport remains relatively niche, with limited exposure and sponsorship opportunities. Some critics argue that the focus on extreme muscularity and definition is unhealthy and sends negative messages to young women. Others contend that the sport perpetuates gender stereotypes and reinforces narrow ideas of beauty and femininity.

This popular opinion piece on T-Nation, The Death of Women’s Bodybuilding, takes a deeper dive into the gradual decline of standard bodybuilding for women, addressing the use of steroids/hormones and their effects on the body.

In response to these criticisms, many female bodybuilders have spoken out about the positive impact that the sport has had on their lives and self-confidence. They argue that bodybuilding allows them to push themselves to their physical limits, and provides a sense of community and empowerment that is hard to find.

The history of women in bodybuilding reflects a sport that is constantly evolving and adapting to changing norms and expectations. Sports don’t happen in a vacuum — the rest of society has an influence on sports for better or worse.

While women’s bodybuilding still faces challenges and controversies, the dedication and talent of female bodybuilders continue to inspire and motivate a new generation of women to be strong and confident in their bodies.

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No, you’re not going to lose all of your hard-earned progress in the gym if you take a week or two off to travel, see family, and eat holiday treats. But for many people, slipping out of their fitness routine for a while makes it easier to do it again and again. This can become a downward spiral of your good health habits.

On the flip side, staying too strict and forfeiting holiday fun can feel lonely. How do you strike a balance between nurturing your social ties and wanting to workout on Christmas?

So what do athletes do? How do the people who make fitness a part of their identity handle the holiday chaos? Keep these tips in mind when the season starts to creep in on your routine.

Holiday Burnout is Real

Living in modern society comes with the pains and pleasures of the holiday season. There’s such a huge variety of life experiences that come along with the end-of-the-year chaos.

Juggling company parties, traveling between families, disagreements at the dinner table, interrogations about your private life from that one grandma, overspending on gifts, enduring old traditions, making new ones, missing family members…

The pressure to *enjoy everything* is enough to make anyone want to stress-eat an entire pie.

And what about the awesome progress you’ve been making in the gym recently? You’ve stuck to your training, you’re feeling decently strong — chances are you’re in one of two camp:

1. 1. 1. You’re ready to justify over-indulging as a reward for your hard work, consequences be damned.
      2. You struggle to enjoy those holiday treats without feeling guilty, so you reject as much seasonal fun as possible in favor of your gym habits.

“Falling off the wagon” or “obsessed is how the lazy describe the dedicated.”

So, how can you still enjoy life with the least amount of disruption to your training? If you’ve currently got a solid routine, what easy strategies will net minimal impact to your gains?

If you need a few tidbits of advice to balance your holiday life with your fitness routine, the TrainHeroic blog team is here for you.

First: What Are Your Goals?

It helps to identify your “why” for training. Are you aiming to compete relatively soon? Have you struggled with self control in the past and need to lose weight? Are your goals more about longevity and feeling good in your body?

It also helps to be honest with yourself when it comes to your default lifestyle habits. Which do you struggle with more: being flexible with your friends/family or sticking to your routine?

These ideas really come into play for #7 in our curated list below.

The Athlete’s Top Tips for Balancing Fitness & Fun

1. Program a Deload

The simplest way to maximize your schedule is to actually fit your training around your life instead of your life around your training. If you’re writing your own programming, make the last couple of weeks of the year (or whenever you’re likely to be in the thick of traveling) deload weeks. Scheduling your down time at this point in your training cycle can make it easier for you to enjoy the time off.

2. Watch Your Stress

Protecting your mental health around family can be tricky, but stress is the number one factor that detracts from the lighthearted fun of the holidays. Don’t be afraid to say “no” when it makes sense. If you’ve seen or are seeing a therapist, use the methods they give you for handling stressful conversations with family members. Prioritize your wellbeing while maintaining your compassion for the rest of your tribe. Get good sleep. Hydrate. Spend some time outside. Take your meds.

3. Mobilize Anywhere (Stretch in the Airport)

Bring at least one mobility tool with you when you travel. Lacrosse balls are a good choice since they’re small. But if you have a mini massage gun, floss bands, or other portable tools available, shove them in your carryon and use them! Set a timer for two minutes while waiting to board and do couch stretches on the seats by your gate. Who cares what other airport goers think? You’ll never see them again. Best case, you’ll inspire some of them to stretch too.

PS. Check out our huge mobility guide for ideas on staying pain-free and mobile for life.

4. Do Fitness For Fun

Never underestimate a low-commitment/low-expectation active recovery workout. In the spirit of “something is better than nothing,” hit the hotel gym and see what you can make up based on the random equipment they have. Do a session with ONLY your favorite lifts or play around on a machine you never try. Use that “me time” to take a break from the craziness. Remember: a spirited snowball fight totally counts for active cardio.

5. Use Bodyweight Workouts

Being able to adapt to the environment you find yourself in is incredibly useful and important for your training (and life in general). If COVID shut downs taught us anything, it’s that you don’t actually need any equipment to get a workout in. Keep a rotating list of bodyweight movements and mix them up when you need something quick. When in doubt, try something like this:

2 rounds
50 air squats
40 lunges
30 push ups
20 sit ups
10 burpees

Or even simpler: 300 push ups for time (holy chest pump)

6. Exercise Portion Control

Christmas cookies and special chocolates might be the best part of the holidays. The variety of holiday treats only comes around once a year, so it’s easy to get excited and over-indulge especially if you have “food-pushers” in your family. It’s ok to politely decline treats; you’re an adult and no one can guilt you into eating something you don’t want. If on the other hand, you have trouble controlling yourself around the treats, practice portion control. When in doubt, use the palm of your hand to determine portion sizes.

Check out this awesome blog for more nutrition tips centered around seasonal eating:
Basic Blood Sugar Management for Those Hefty Holiday Meals

7. Check Your Perspective

This one is for the highly-motivated, training-obsessed gym rats who are most likely to be the only ones working out on Christmas Eve-Eve. The gym is basically empty and the staff are counting down the hours until they can leave. We admire your commitment, but we’ve also been in that lonely place. Consider checking in on the “social” bucket of your life. Are you missing out on some important bonding moments with your family by shunning the indulgent holiday traditions? Those important people won’t be around forever.

We’ll leave you with an inspiring quote from Alex Maclin, nutrition coach for Paragon Training Methods:

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Attribution tracking: your key to business gainz

If you are like the thousands of trainers and gym owners we serve, you’ve got a coaching business selling remote training service online. You’re marketing your services and training packages, perhaps using the TrainHeroic Marketplace. You’ve got more work to do than hours in the day. 

From programming to communicating, providing coaching services to your clients takes up most of your day. 

You know finding the time to be active on social media, create blogs, send email campaigns and other marketing efforts is vital to growing your business. But, let’s be honest, chances are you aren’t a trained marketer. If that’s the case, you’ve probably found yourself wondering: 

• Just how much marketing do I need to do to grow my online business to meet my income goals?
• Should I lean harder into any specific area?
• How do I maximize the return on the time I’m spending trying to market my remote training business?

Our newest tools allow sellers to answer all of these questions, and this guide is going to give you some insider insight to using data to make marketing decisions. 

Channel Attribution

Our attribution solution allows you to look at traffic and conversions coming from different sources and marketing efforts. This is done by appending a special tracking code to a URL you’ll use as a link for specific marketing efforts. 

We include custom links for:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Linktree
• Your website
• Email
• Twitter
• Tiktok
• Podcast
• YouTube

We also allow for very simple creation of new links that you can customize to run affiliate marketing campaigns like never before. 

Setting this up is simple and easy

Using the report, putting it into action:

Before diving into the report and making changes to your marketing efforts, it’s important to contextualize this tool in the broader scheme of your marketing funnel.

For illustrative purposes, we’ll use a very simple 3 stage funnel analogy to help envision your marketing efforts.

The stages of this basic funnel are:

Awareness (or top of funnel): we can think of this stage in a simple interaction. A potential buyer goes from never having heard of your brand and product, to being aware of your offering. Think of this as your first introduction at a huge digital party that is the internet.

Things like blog content, YouTube videos, podcasts, social media posts, advertisements and white papers are all considered “push” efforts at the top of the funnel. You, the seller, create content and messaging with the goal of pushing the message in front of potential customers and creating an awareness of your brand and the products you offer.

Consideration (or mid-funnel): The potential buyer in the consideration phase is actively looking for a solution to solve a problem or desire in their life. For example: I want to bulk up for summer. At this stage, they begin searching for a solution to the problem. As a seller, you want to pull them into your offering, stand out amongst the crowd, and ensure they see the connection between their desire and your product. Show them you are the guide to help them on their training journey to become their ideal version of themselves.

Organic search and even paid search advertising are considered “pull” efforts at the mid funnel. As a seller, we’re trying to pull some mental Judo here capitalizing on the buyer’s demand by serving great content that simply communicates why your product is the best solution to their problem or desire.

Your TrainHeroic Marketplace pages are a great tool at this stage of the funnel. A targeted offering (niche), great imagery, and compelling copy on your sales listing page are your best tools to convert lookers into buyers. It’s important to remember that modern buyers are considering multiple solutions, comparing and contrasting their options all the time.

Blogs, long form articles about your programming, etc. hosted on your own website are also great tools for the consideration stage of the funnel.

Decision (or low funnel): Potential buyers at this stage are convinced they are going to pay for a solution. They’ve done their research and likely narrowed down their options to just a handful at most. They are ready to make a purchase.
We’ve designed the TrainHeroic Marketplace product listing pages to pull potential buyers from the consideration stage down through the decision stage. Things like a sample week of training and athlete testimonials are valuable tools at this stage of the marketing funnel. This is also where retargeting campaigns and offers can come into play should you choose to leverage them.

Like a great training program, marketing is a combo of primary efforts and accessories

In many ways marketing is a lot like a great training program. Just like you don’t improve your 1 rep bench max by only benching, you don’t get business gains from pushing your message through a single channel. 

You don’t know down to the gnat’s ass exactly how much each accessory exercise contributes to the goal, but you do all of them because they all have a place and purpose.

In other words, if you take one thing from this article let it be that you should not try to use this powerful new tool to find marketing that “doesn’t work” or things to trim out completely from your efforts.

Marketing is like a machine. You cannot remove one of the basic cogs and expect the machine to work. The best marketing funnels are multi-touch and multi-channel. 

If you’re interested in the nerd-speak behind this concept, read on. 

*Puts on his glasses and points to a white board.

It’s important to understand that the TrainHeroic Marketplace Attribution tool is working off of a last-click attribution model. That means that a user’s visit or purchase is attributed to the last link they clicked on before visiting your site. This is a reliable and basic form of attribution modeling. 

Advanced attribution modeling would assign some value of a single conversion to each of the 7 (often more) touchpoints a consumer has with your message. But, this is extremely complex and more of an art than pure science. 

For instance: you might give 2x more weight to a video view than a blog read because research suggests the combination of visual and auditory cues has a larger impact than the written word on buyer psychology. 

But, what if you’re a great writer and not great at making video? Your video probably doesn’t have quite the impact. 

You might be asking, “well isn’t that important for me to know?” Or, “how do I optimize my marketing efforts without perfect attribution detail?”

While it’s tempting, chasing the perfect attribution model as a small to medium sized business is a quick path to spending a lot of time, energy, and money on something that isn’t going to give you a return – kind of defeats the purpose of maximizing the return on your efforts, right? 

If you are spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per month on different marketing efforts, attribution modeling could be a useful tool. Simple changes in budget allocation at this volume could lead you to massive changes in ROI. 

In reality, this probably isn’t you. 

More than likely, you’re running email campaigns, producing blog and video content regularly, and running a social media presence that is actively posting at least once per day. 

All of those things are foundational to any digital selling success. 

While it may be tempting, this tool should not be used to answer questions like: is social media working? Should I stop doing (insert marketing effort here)? Can we get rid of our email marketing?

Instead, use this report to understand the digital highways and byways by which people are getting to your product listing pages (traffic) and coming back to make a purchase. Optimize for what is working. 

Each brand’s funnel and audience is unique. For instance: you may find that your email campaigns are driving huge numbers of conversions. Rather than looking to cut other efforts like social media for instance, aim to look for ways to get more email addresses from your social efforts. 

Look first to bolster your efforts by finding easy wins. One of the biggest mistakes we often make as marketers is not including direct calls to action in our efforts. Use this information as a guide to ensure you are putting enough marketing messages with strong calls to action into the market on a weekly basis across multiple channels. If you aren’t actively keeping the roadway open, people will not come to your site. 

Armed with these tools and a better understanding of optimizing your marketing efforts, go forth and conquer, friends!

// Sending the perfect conversion email

Picture this: you’re selling a training program in the TrainHeroic Marketplace. You’ve created a killer sales page using these guides and your sales are increasing as more and more athletes want to train using your programming. 

You typically send a personalized email to your new clients to thank them for their business and let them know how to get started. 

But with the recent influx of program sales, you haven’t been able to send your welcome emails promptly, or even at all. You’re afraid you’re not going to get future business from your new clients (upsell) because they aren’t hearing from you when they need you the most. 

You’ve been working hard to grow your client base and sell more programs. But now that it’s happening, you don’t think you can keep up with the workload because this is only one of many revenue streams for you.

Has this happened to you?

If so, let us be the first to congratulate you on growing your business! 

Whether this resonates with you or this sounds like a problem you’d like to have, we have a solution for you. 

With the help of Zapier and Mailchimp, we will show you exactly how to automate welcome emails so the right information goes to the right person at the right time. 

Whether it’s 2 AM or you’re on vacation, never again will you have to scramble to manually send a welcome email when a new client purchases your training program.

// Email copy and creative: building a welcome email that deepens the connection between your brand and your customer

Before we show you how to build this automation, what exactly should go in this email? What makes a great conversion email?

Think about the purpose of this email: to welcome your new client and make sure they have the necessary information to get to training. 

Here are some ideas of what to include: 

• What makes your program different from others? 
• Is there anything they need to know about your specific program? Tips, advice, inspiration you want to share?
• Do you sell t-shirts or merch? Include information on how to purchase.
• Insert your Instagram handle or link to your blog to stay connected with you 
• Let them know about any other programs you coach in the chance that the program they purchased isn’t the right fit for them.
• Want to upsell? Programs have an end date. Training communities are ongoing and include direct access to you, their coach. If you coach training communities in the TrainHeroic Marketplace include information about them in case that’s more of what they are looking for.

This guide will walk you through sending one email when an athlete makes a purchase. If you have additional info that’s important to share, feel free to add more emails to the sequence and send them on the following days. If you need help automating those additional emails, reference this Zapier guide.

Now that we’ve talked strategy, let’s build the automation using Zapier & Mailchimp. 

Build and design your email

Below, we’re going to lay out recommended email topics & suggested copy. As you read through, begin building your email template in MailChimp. If you’re starting from scratch and need help getting started with templates, follow this MailChimp guide.

Use our template as a starting point with this link. 

You’ll need a Mailchimp account to access the template. Don’t forget to edit all links including the social buttons in the footer.

// creating email automation with TrainHeroic, Zapier, and MailChimp

After your email template is built, you’ll need to create a tag that ensures the email is sent to the right people. 

If you sell multiple programs in the TrainHeroic Marketplace, it’s important to identify which program was purchased in Mailchimp so you can send a customized email and message. Even if you only sell one program currently, following this first step will have you set up to sell additional programs in the future. To do this, we need to create a custom field in Mailchimp so we can send in the program name.

1. Click Audience from the left-hand menu then Signup forms

2. Locate Form builder and hit Select

3. On the right-hand side, locate Add a field then select Text

4. Name the field label. We’re going to use Program Name.

Using a Field tag allows you to pull an athlete’s program name into the email copy for additional personalization. We used PROGNAME (be aware of a character limit) which we can be easily referenced in emails.

Once you’ve filled in both of those fields, select Save Field.

5. Now, select All Contacts from the left-hand menu. When viewing all contacts, you will notice a new column labeled Program Name.

Once you’ve filled in both of those fields, select Save Field.

Later in this guide, we will show you how to send Program Name into Mailchimp from Zapier.

Create Tags

1. To get started, select Audience in the left navigation then Tags.

3. Give your tag a name. We are going to name ours Program Purchase. Then select Create.

Creating your automated campaign

Now that you created your Program Purchase tag, you’re ready to set up the automated email campaign.

6. Next, select Edit next to Please select a tag.

7. Edit the following settings:

1. Change the delay to Immediately so the email sends promptly after a purchase
2. Under Settings, select the tag you just created: Program Purchase. This will ensure that only athletes who have that tag receive this email campaign

Select Update Trigger when done

8. Remember in the beginning when we created the Program Name field in Mailchimp? Here is where we add a filter to reference the program name. For Doug’s Gym, this guarantees that the email in this workflow will only be sent to athletes who purchase the Intro to Powerlifting program. 

Select Add next to Filter by segment or tag.

Check the box then select Contacts match the following conditions

9. Select the dropdown and locate the custom field you previously created: Program Name. Then type in the name of your program. Make sure spelling and capitalization are correct or else the filter may not work properly.

When finished, select Save Segment in the top right corner.

Adding email templates to your campaign

1. Next, you are ready to select your email template. Select Design Email.

2.Give this email a name and fill in your desired email subject, preview text, from name, and from email address. Then hit Next.

3. Click on the Saved Templates tab, find your desired template, then hit Next.

4. Review your template, make any necessary changes, then select Save and Continue when done.

5. Now we have set the timing, identified the program purchase tag, added a program name filter, and selected our email template.

Since this campaign consists of one email, we’re done with the setup. If you would like to send additional emails in this series, select Add Another Email and follow the same steps.

Go ahead and select Send a Test Email in the top right corner so you can see what it looks like in your inbox. Test emails can sometimes end up in spam so if you don’t see it right away, check your spam filter.

6. When you’re happy with your email and ready to launch, select Next.

7. You’ll see an overview of the campaign you just built. Give it a once over and when you’re ready to launch, select Start Sending.

8. When you view your campaigns in the Campaigns tab, you will see that this campaign is now labeled as Sending.

Now, anytime a Program Purchase tag is added to a user, this email campaign will trigger. Only athletes that have the Program Name “Intro to Powerlifting” will complete the workflow.

// connecting zapier, trainheroic, and mailchimp

Now that your campaign is actively sending in Mailchimp, let’s automate it through Zapier. 

Head to the TrainHeroic Integration page in Zapier.

Scroll down on the page and locate the section labeled Connect TrainHeroic to 3,000+ Apps. This is where you will find our pre-built templates to help you connect supported apps even faster. 

Select Try it next to the template named “Send Mailchimp welcome emails for new program sales in TrainHeroic”

Only use this template if you are using Mailchimp as your email provider. If you’re using a different email service provider, you’ll have to make a new zap and start from scratch.

2. Next, in the bottom left corner, select Go to Advanced Mode. This step is important so we can configure an additional setting for Mailchimp.

3. Begin by hovering over the trigger and selecting Edit. 

4. Under the Choose app & event dropdown, you’ll notice that the app (TrainHeroic) and the trigger (Marketplace – New Program Sale) have already been selected because we started with a template. Simply select Continue.

5. Next, select your TrainHeroic account. Then hit Continue.

If you haven’t previously connected your TrainHeroic account, you will be prompted to log in. 

6. Next, select Test trigger.

7. Next, Zapier will search for an athlete on your team to be used for testing. We recommend choosing yourself. That way, you will be on the receiving end of emails during testing and one of your actual athletes will not receive an email out of context. Once identified select Continue.

7. Now that your TrainHeroic trigger is set, let’s set up Mailchimp.

Since we started with a template, the app and action have already been selected for you. Select Continue.

8. Next, connect to your Mailchimp account. Then hit Continue.

10. To set up your action, fill in the following fields:

• Audience: Select your Mailchimp audience
• Subscriber Email: Grab your test athlete’s email from the dropdown
• Update Existing: Make sure this says Yes
• Tag(s): Select your Program Purchase tag from the dropdown. (This is how the tag is assigned to the athlete)
• First Name: Select your test athlete’s first name from the dropdown
• Last Name: Select your test athlete’s last name from the dropdown
• Program Name: Select your test athlete’s program name from the dropdown. (This is how you identify who is training on what program)
• Select Continue when done

11. Now you’re ready to test the action you set up. Hit Test & Review.

You should receive a green banner indicating a subscriber was successfully sent to Mailchimp.

12. Before turning on the zap, let’s look at what was just happened in Mailchimp.

In Mailchimp, click on Audience then All Contacts. You should see the user and their associated data that Zapier just sent in, including the Program Purchased tag.

13. Now, head over to this campaign in the Campaigns tab. Since this email is set up to send immediately after a program purchase, you’ll see that this campaign has already been sent to one subscriber. If you were the test user, you’ll see the email in your inbox.

If you’re not seeing that the email sent, remember the filters we added when setting up the campaign. The tag AND program name in your campaign settings need to exactly match the subscriber’s profile that was used in testing.

14. Now that we confirmed the automation is properly working, head back to Zapier and select Turn on Zap to launch.

15. You’ll receive a confirmation message letting you know that the zap is turned on

// unlocking the power of event-triggered email communications

Sending communication that feels personalized and timely to your customers can be a real business game-changer. Well crafted email communication can help you convert more athletes, reduce churn, upsell and cross-sell, and keep your athlete engaged for longer. It’s a powerful business tool. But, it’s not always simple.

We wanted to change that.

We wanted to unlock the power of email automation for our sellers.

Bringing you the power to automate like the pros

We’ve now integrated TrainHeroic with Zapier, meaning signals or events from the TrainHeroic platform can now be sent into Zapier and connected for use with thousands of other apps. 

Zapier is known for “handling your busy work.” It connects more than 3,000 apps to easily automate your tasks and workflows. Our guides focus on automating emails but that just scratches the surface of what else Zapier can help you automate. 

Zapier offers a free 14-day trial to get started. Once you take advantage of this, they have multiple pricing plans to choose from.

The Free plan is a good option if you’re just getting started with email automation. This plan is “free forever” and allows you to set up 5 different Zap triggers and run 100 tasks/month. A Task is counted every time a Zap successfully moves data or takes action for you. 

Once you outgrow the free plan, the Started plan is $19.99 billed annually or $29.99 month-to-month. This allows you to set up 20 Zap triggers and run 750 tasks/month.

Think about how many clients you currently have, what your growth goals are, and how many Zaps you would like to automate to help you decide which plan is right for you.

In our eyes, $20/month is worth it if it means you no longer have to do manual, repetitive busywork. Plus, it’s more cost-effective than hiring someone to manually do the same work.

Picking the right email service provider

When we set out to develop an integration with Zapier, one of the most exciting use cases in our eyes was bringing the potential of true email automation to our power sellers in the TrainHeroic Marketplace.

In order to do this, we needed to pick a single Email Service Provider (ESP) to base our guides on. Our email automation expert spent hours comparing multiple ESPs so you don’t have to. If you’re not already using an ESP, MailChimp is a great tool for email marketing for small businesses in particular. It’s user-friendly and integrates with many apps that help you to automate tasks. They have a simple, yet effective email design tool that allows you to add the flavor packet to your emails, which helps bring your brand to life in your customer’s eyes.  A big bonus is tracking the performance and engagement of your emails, a feature you don’t get when using Gmail, for example.

If you already have an ESP of choice, don’t fret. The strategy and basic connections you’ll read in these guides translate to other ESPs with just a bit of work and research required on your end.

We recommend purchasing the Standard MailChimp plan because it’s the most affordable plan that allows you to create a series of automated emails.

// understanding the customer lifecycle

Before you begin working on your email automations, it’s worth spending a few minutes reviewing or learning the basic customer lifecycle. Understanding the basic principle of a customer lifecycle as well as the behaviors and motivations of your customers at each stage will help put the content covered in each guide into the proper context. 

// save failed trials and churned customers with trainheroic and zapier

It’s an unfortunate truth, running a recurring subscription online training business means your customers (athletes) can churn at any time, and without warning. 

When it comes to your training communities in the TrainHeroic Marketplace, one of two scenarios can happen:

• An athlete completes their free 7-day trial and decides not to move forward (does not convert)
• An athlete who was a member of a training community decides to leave (cancels subscription)

No matter which scenario it is, both can occur for similar reasons. It could be that they have an injury preventing them from training, the timing wasn’t right, or the programming wasn’t the right fit for their goals. 

The good news is that just because the athlete canceled or didn’t convert, doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in training with you – this is a case where “it’s not you, it’s me” might actually be true.

We all know how crazy life can get. Sometimes people have every intention to get the most out of a product or service throughout their trial or subscription, but life gets in the way. 

Maybe they felt like the training program was too easy or too advanced for their current level. This would indicate that it wasn’t you as a coach, but the specific programming wasn’t right for them. 

It can be difficult to understand exactly why an athlete chooses to cancel. In a future guide, we’ll teach you how to automate an exit survey that will give you quality insights into the reasons you’re experiencing athlete churn. In the meantime, when reaching out it’s important to take into account the different reasons someone may have for canceling.

Being aware of those reasons allows you to address them and overcome them in your messaging. 

This will increase your chances of winning them back.

Here’s what we recommend when an athlete cancels or doesn’t convert: set up a series of automated emails that include the following:

• Let them know about other training communities you coach that are focused on different skills or levels of ability. Or, let them know about stand alone programs you offer for sale that allow for a more self-paced start and end date.
• Encourage them to follow you on social or subscribe to your blog to keep them engaged with you and top of mind
• Add delays to your emails so you can continue to follow up with them and catch them at a time when they are ready to train again

// Email copy and creative: creating win-back campaigns that work

Our recommended email sequence consists of five emails sent over 60 days. Here are the themes of each email that we’re going to build for our fictional gym, Doug’s Gym.

Triggering Event: Athlete cancels or doesn’t convert

Day 1: send a “we’re sorry to see you go” email and include ways to stay in touch
Tip: Ask them to subscribe to your blog or follow your social media accounts

Day 3: send email with your other available teams/programs
Tip: Let them know the difference between training communities & programs

Day 30: send check-in email and include reviews from your clients
Tip: Put a comment box on your Instagram story to get quick and authentic feedback

Day 45: feature conversations in TH Chat to highlight the community
Tip: Browse your TH Chat feed and screenshot great conversations to highlight what potential clients are missing out on

Day 60: send email with your other available teams/programs
Tip: Last chance effort, drive the sale home by talking about what makes you unique from your competition

To let you in on a little secret, here at TrainHeroic we have an automated email sequence that sends to coaches who don’t convert after their free 14-day trial. Our series consists of 6 emails and sends up to 75 days after the free trial ends. Here are some of the topics we include:

• Subscribe to our blog to stay in touch
• Recommend popular blog articles
• Touch on pain points 
• Address price concerns 
• Highlight app features 
• Feature customer reviews 

Automating this sequence has allowed us to successfully win-back coaches because we remained engaged with them while they weren’t actively using the app, let them know how we will make their life easier, and reached them at a more convenient time.

The moral of the story, don’t give up! Just because someone doesn’t convert the first time doesn’t mean that they can’t be a loyal customer in the future.

Now that we’ve talked strategy, let’s build the automation using Zapier & Mailchimp. 

Build and design your emails

Below, we’re going to lay out recommended email topics & suggested copy. As you read through, begin building all five of your email templates in MailChimp. If you’re starting from scratch and need help getting started with templates, follow this MailChimp guide.

Day 1

Use our template (including product images) as a starting point with this link.  Note: you’ll need a MailChimp account to access this. Don’t forget to edit all links including social.

Day 3

Use our template as a starting point with this link.  Note: you’ll need a MailChimp account to access this. Don’t forget to edit all links including social.

Day 30

Use our template (including product images) as a starting point with this link.  Note: you’ll need a MailChimp account to access this. Don’t forget to edit all links including social.

Day 45

Use our template (including product images) as a starting point with this link.  Note: you’ll need a MailChimp account to access this. Don’t forget to edit all links including social.

Day 60

Use our template (including product images) as a starting point with this link.  Note: you’ll need a MailChimp account to access this. Don’t forget to edit all links including social.

// creating email automation with TrainHeroic, Zapier, and MailChimp

Now that you have your templates built, you’re ready to set up the automated campaign.

It’s important to note that there are two events happening here, Athlete Cancels Subscription & Trial Didn’t Convert. These are two separate Zapier triggering actions. For simplicity, we are going to send the same email sequence to athletes who trigger either event. 

In the next steps, we will show you how to do that. 

Set up a tag in MailChimp

As with all of our guides, the email automation is triggered when tags are added to a specific user. So let’s create a new tag to label athletes who cancel & don’t convert from a trial.

1. To get started, select Audience in the left navigation then Tags.

3. Give your tag a name. Since we are triggering one email sequence off two events, we are going to name ours Athlete Cancels/Trial Doesn’t Convert. Then select Create.

If you decide that you’d like to trigger a different email sequence for each triggering event, you can create two separate tags: one for athlete cancels and one for trial doesn’t convert.

Creating your automated campaign

Once your tag is created you’re ready to build your automated campaign. 

Build your workflow

Now we’re going to set up the first of five emails in the sequence. 

2. Edit the following settings:

• We recommend sending the first email one hour after the event triggers. Change the delay to Wait 1 hour.
• Under Settings, select the tag you just created: Athlete Cancels/Trial Doesn’t Convert. This will ensure that only athletes who have that tag receive this email campaign.
• Select Update Trigger when done

Adding your emails to the workflow

2. Give this email a name and fill in your desired email subject, preview text, from name, and from email address. Then hit Next. 

6. To adjust when this email will send, select Edit next to Trigger.

7. Referencing back to the recommended schedule we provided earlier, we’re going to add a 2-day delay to the second email. Then select Update Trigger.

8. Select Design Email to select your email template.

9. Give the email a name and fill in your desired email subject, preview text, from name, and from email address. Then hit Next. 

10. Click on the Saved Templates tab, find your desired template, then hit Next.

11. Review your template, make any necessary changes, then select Save and Continue when done.

Your second email setup is done. Next, let’s set up the third email in your sequence by selecting Add Another Email.

12. To adjust when this email will send, select Edit next to Trigger.

13. Since we want this third email to send 30 days after the initial event trigger, we’re going to add a 27-day delay. (3 days were accounted for with the first two emails.) 

Then select Update Trigger.

14. Select Design Email to select your email template. 

15. Same as before, give the email a name and fill in your desired email subject, preview text, from name, and from email address. Then hit Next. 

16. Click on the Saved Templates tab, find your desired template, then hit Next.

17. Review your template, make any necessary changes, then select Save and Continue when done.

Your third email setup is done. Next, let’s set up the fourth email in your sequence by selecting Add Another Email.

18. To adjust when this email will send, select Edit next to Trigger. 

19. We’re now going to add a 15-day delay so that the email sends 45 days after the initial triggering event.

Then select Update Trigger.

20. Select Design Email to select your email template. 

21. Same as before, give the email a name and fill in your desired email subject, preview text, from name, and from email address. Then hit Next. 

22. Click on the Saved Templates tab, find your desired template, then hit Next.

23. Review your template, make any necessary changes, then select Save and Continue when done.

Your fourth email setup is done. Now let’s set up the fifth and final email in your sequence by selecting Add Another Email.

24. To adjust when this email will send, select Edit next to Trigger. 

25. Add a 15-day delay so that the email sends 60 days after the initial triggering event.

Then select Update Trigger.

26. Select Design Email to select your email template. 

27. Same as before, give the email a name and fill in your desired email subject, preview text, from name, and from email address. Then hit Next. 

28. Click on the Saved Templates tab, find your desired template, then hit Next.

29. Review your template, make any necessary changes, then select Save and Continue when done.

You now have all 5 emails set up in your workflow.

Before going live, you should always send test emails so you can review them and see what they look like in a recipient’s inbox.

Select Send a Test Email in the top right corner. 

30. Select Test all 5 emails and decide who should receive the test emails. Then hit Send Test.

31. You will instantly receive all emails in the campaign regardless of the delays we set. Head over to your inbox to review all 5 emails. Make sure the subject line, design, & layout meets your expectations. Sometimes test emails can end up in spam, so check your spam folder if you’re not seeing them.

If you’d like to make any adjustments, select Design Email to edit any template. 

Once you’re ready to move forward, hit Next in the bottom right corner. 

32. You’ll see a recap of the workflow you just built. Here you can review the audience, tracking, and emails that will send in this workflow. Make sure everything looks correct. If not, select Edit next to the section that needs to be adjusted. 

Once you’re ready to launch, select Start Sending in the bottom right corner. 

33. You’ll notice that this campaign is labeled as Sending, which indicates that it’s running. Now, anytime a user is tagged with “Athlete Cancels/Trial Doesn’t Convert,” this workflow will trigger!

// Setting up your zap: connecting zapier, trainheroic, and mailchimp

Now that your campaign is actively sending in Mailchimp, let’s automate it through Zapier.

As mentioned before, we’re working with two separate triggers. This means that we have to set up two different zaps, however, they will both trigger the same campaign in Mailchimp. 

Building the “athlete cancels team subscription” Zap

1. Log into Zapier and select Make A Zap.

2. Give your zap a name. We’re naming ours Send Mailchimp Campaign When Athlete Cancels Subscription. Then search for and select TrainHeroic as your starting trigger.

3. Our triggering event is a cancelation, so select Athlete Cancels Team Subscription. Then select Continue.

4. Next, select your TrainHeroic account. If you haven’t previously connected to your TrainHeroic account then you will be prompted to log in. Hit Continue.

5. Select Test trigger.

6. Next, Zapier will search for an athlete on your team to be used for testing. We recommend choosing yourself. That way, you will be on the receiving end of emails during testing and one of your actual athletes will not receive an email out of context. Once identified select Continue.

7. Since we are sending this trigger to Mailchimp, search for and select Mailchimp.

9. Next, connect to your Mailchimp account. Then hit Continue.

10. To set up your action, fill in the following fields:

• Audience: Select your Mailchimp audience
• Subscriber Email: Grab your test athlete’s email from the dropdown
• Update Existing: Make sure this says Yes
• Tag(s): Select your Athlete Cancels/Trial Doesn’t Convert tag from the dropdown. (This is how the tag is assigned to the athlete)
• First Name: Select your test athlete’s first name from the dropdown
• Last Name: Select your test athlete’s last name from the dropdown
• Team Name (optional): If you have multiple teams and already created a Team Name custom field in Mailchimp, select your test athlete’s team name from the dropdown
• Select Continue when done

11. Now you’re ready to test the action you set up. Hit Test & Review.

You should receive a green banner indicating a subscriber was successfully sent to Mailchimp.

12. Before turning on the zap, let’s look at what was just happened in Mailchimp.

In Mailchimp, click on Audience then All Contacts. You should see the tag Athlete Cancels/Trial Doesn’t Convert attached to the athlete used in testing.

13. Now, head over to your Email Athletes When They Cancel Or Don’t Convert campaign in the Campaigns tab and View subscribers in queue. You should see your email waiting to be sent. It’s in the queue because we added a 1-hour delay when setting up this campaign.

14. Now that we confirmed the automation is properly working, head back to Zapier and select Turn on Zap to launch.

15. You’ll receive a confirmation message letting you know that the zap is turned on

Building the “trial did not convert” Zap

1. Log into Zapier and select Make A Zap.

2. Give the zap a name. We’re naming ours Send Mailchimp Campaign When Athlete Trial Doesn’t Convert. Then search for and select TrainHeroic as your starting trigger.

3. Our triggering event is a trial that didn’t convert, so select Marketplace – Trial Did Not Convert. Then select Continue.

4. Next, select your TrainHeroic account then hit Continue.

5. Select Test trigger.

6. Select your test athlete. Zapier will default to the athlete you used in the previous zap we made. Then hit Continue.

7. Since we are sending this trigger to Mailchimp, search for and select Mailchimp.

9. Under Action Event, select Add/Update Subscriber. Then hit Continue.

10. Next, connect to your Mailchimp account. Then hit Continue.

11. To set up your action, fill in the following fields:

• Audience: Select your Mailchimp audience
• Subscriber Email: Grab your test athlete’s email from the dropdown
• Update Existing: Make sure this says Yes
• Tag(s): Select your Athlete Cancels/Trial Doesn’t Convert tag from the dropdown. (This is how the tag is assigned to the athlete)
• First Name: Select your test athlete’s first name from the dropdown
• Last Name: Select your test athlete’s last name from the dropdown
• Team Name (optional): If you have multiple teams and already created a Team Name custom field in Mailchimp, select your test athlete’s team name from the dropdown
• Select Continue when done

12. Now you’re ready to test the action you set up. Hit Test & Review.

You should receive a green banner indicating a subscriber was successfully sent to Mailchimp.

13. This is normally when we head over to Mailchimp to look for the athlete and tag that was just sent in. However, the athlete and tag were already sent into Mailchimp with the first zap we created. Since the tag was already applied to that athlete, no changes will be made in Mailchimp. You can always go back to the test trigger step and select a different test athlete. 

14. Now that we confirmed the automation is properly working, head back to Zapier and select Turn on Zap to launch.

15. You’ll receive a confirmation message letting you know that the zap is turned on

// check in often, measure, and optimize

Coach, you did it. You’ve automated communication to your customers across their lifecycle. From those vital first few days on a trial through re-sell and upsell, you now have a communication machine that is infinitely scalable. 

Be sure to check back in on the TrainHeroic blog for more exciting updates as well as tips and tricks to leverage Zapier and TrainHeroic. 

// welcome a new paying member to your online training community

When you make an online purchase, you probably check your email to look for a confirmation email. Sometimes you’re looking for instructions, shipping tracking numbers, etc. At the very least, it’s reassurance that your order went through. 

So when a new athlete converts from a free trial to a paid client, they are probably expecting the same. No, we don’t have tracking numbers to send. But, think of it as an opportunity to reach out personally and acknowledge them as a new client.

This is also a chance to let them know what else to expect as a new member of your training community, and to deepen the connection between the trainee and your coaching brand. This is an important step in the customer journey, and a vital opportunity for increasing the lifetime value you get from each athlete.  

But the problem is, you just don’t have enough hours in the day to personally reach out to each and every new client. So how do you welcome them with open arms?

Automation!

We love email automation because it takes away manual and repetitive work, while also ensuring that each email is sent at the right moment. That is what we will cover in this guide. 

We’ll be walking you through what to send when a client converts from a trial and exactly how to set it up using Zapier & Mailchimp. 

// Email copy and creative: building a welcome email that deepens the connection between your brand and your customer

When creating your welcome email, it’s important to remember that this athlete just completed a 7-day trial.

If you set up an automated trial email sequence using this guide, then they will have already received information and resources to get started with their training. TrainHeroic also sends a series of emails throughout their trial to get them up to speed on using the TrainHeroic app.

With that being the case, we don’t need to resend and repeat information that they already received during their trial. 

The purpose of the welcome email is to begin to deepen the connection between your training community and the new client. Keep in mind that consumers are always (consciously or subconsciously) weighing the price they pay for any product / service with the value they perceive they are getting from it.  Letting them know about your social media pages, blog, YouTube channel, etc. is a great way to expand from one channel connection to many.

This is your chance to take your business outside of the platform and show them how else to engage with (or rep) your brand. Remember, the battle against athlete churn starts at day 1. If you can change the mindset of your athletes from a transactional one to an emotional brand connection, you will have created a long-lasting customer. If an athlete feels they get not only their training from you, but also education, entertainment, guidance, and maybe even a few closet staples or their favorite training shirt, you’re on the fast track to a loyal repeat customer. 

Build and design your email

Below, we’re going to lay out recommended email topics & suggested copy. As you read through, begin building your email template in MailChimp. If you’re starting from scratch and need help getting started with templates, follow this MailChimp guide.

Use our template (including product images) as a starting point with this link.  Note: you’ll need a MailChimp account to access this. Don’t forget to edit all links including social.

// creating email automation with TrainHeroic, Zapier, and MailChimp

After your email template is built, you’ll need to create a tag that ensures the email is sent to the right people. 

Select Audience from the left menu then Tags.

1. To get started, select Audience in the left navigation then Tags.

3. Give your new tag a name. We’re going to call this one Converted Trial. After naming it, select Create.

Creating your automated campaign

Now that you created your Converted Trial tag, you’re ready to set up the automated email campaign.

Build your workflow

Now we’re ready to configure the settings for this campaign.

1. To change the trigger, select Edit. 

2. Let’s send this email 1 hour after they convert from their trial. To do this, change the delay to Wait 1 hour.

Under Settings, select the tag Converted Trials.

Not adding a tag will result in the email sending to everyone in your audience, which we do not want.

When complete, select Update Trigger.

Have multiple training communities?

If you have multiple teams and are sending team-specific campaigns, follow the step below. Otherwise, skip this next step.

1. Select Add next to Filter by segment or tag.

Check the box then select Contacts match the following conditions

2. Select the dropdown, and locate the custom field you previously created: Team Name.

Next, indicate which team this campaign applies to.

Team Name is <enter your team or community name>

Make sure spelling and capitalization are correct or else the filter may not work properly.

3. When finished, select Save Segment in the top right corner.

You have now told this workflow to only send to athletes who converted from a trial and who are part of a particular team.

Adding email templates to your campaign

1. Next, you are ready to select your email template. Select Design Email.

2.Give this email a name and fill in your desired email subject, preview text, from name, and from email address. Then hit Next.

3. Click on the Saved Templates tab, find your desired template, then hit Next.

4. Review your template, make any necessary changes, then select Save and Continue when done.

5. This campaign consists of one email, so you’re done with the setup. Go ahead and select Send a Test Email so you can see what it looks like in your inbox. (If you don’t see it right away, check your spam folder.) When you’re happy with your email and ready to continue, select Next.

If you would like to send additional emails in this series, select Add Another Email and follow the same steps.

6. You’ll see an overview of the campaign you just built. Give it a once over and when you’re ready to launch, select Start Sending.

7. When you view all of your campaigns, you will see that this campaign is now Sending.

Now, anytime a Trial Conversion tag is added to a user, this email campaign will trigger.

// connecting zapier, trainheroic, and mailchimp

Now that your campaign is actively sending in Mailchimp, let’s automate it through Zapier.

1. Head to the TrainHeroic Integration page in Zapier.

Scroll down on the page and locate the section labeled Connect TrainHeroic to 3,000+ Apps. This is where you will find our pre-built templates to help you connect supported apps even faster. 

Select Try it next to the template named “Send welcome emails in Mailchimp to new trial converts in TrainHeroic”

Only use this template if you are using Mailchimp as your email provider. If you’re using a different email service provider, you’ll have to make a new zap and start from scratch.

2. Next, in the bottom left corner, select Go to Advanced Mode. This step is important so we can configure an additional setting for Mailchimp.

3. Begin by hovering over the trigger and selecting Edit. 

4. Under the Choose app & event dropdown, you’ll notice that the app and trigger have already been selected because we started with a template. Simply select Continue.

5. Next, select your TrainHeroic account. Then hit Continue.

If you haven’t previously connected your TrainHeroic account, you will be prompted to log in. 

6. Next, select Test trigger.

7. Next, Zapier will search for an athlete on your team to be used for testing. We recommend choosing yourself. That way, you will be on the receiving end of emails during testing and one of your actual athletes will not receive an email out of context. Once identified select Continue.

7. Now that your TrainHeroic trigger is set, let’s set up Mailchimp.

Since we started with a template, the app and action have already been selected for you. Select Continue.

8. Next, connect to your Mailchimp account. Then hit Continue.

10. To set up your action, fill in the following fields:

• Audience: Select your Mailchimp audienc
• Subscriber Email: Grab your test athlete’s email from the dropdown
• Update Existing: Make sure this says Yes
• Tag(s): Select your Converted Trial tag from the dropdown. (This is how the tag is assigned to the athlete)
• First Name: Select your test athlete’s first name from the dropdown
• Last Name: Select your test athlete’s last name from the dropdown
• Team Name (optional): If you have multiple teams and already created a Team Name custom field in Mailchimp, select your test athlete’s team name from the dropdown
• Select Continue when done
  

11. Now you’re ready to test the action you set up. Hit Test & Review.

You should receive a green banner indicating a subscriber was successfully sent to Mailchimp.

12. Before turning on the zap, let’s look at what was just happened in Mailchimp.

In Mailchimp, click on Audience then All Contacts. You should see the user and their associated data that Zapier just sent in, including the Converted Trial tag.

13. Now, find your converted trial campaign in the Campaigns tab and View subscribers in queue. You should see your email waiting to be sent. It’s in the queue because we added a 1-hour delay when setting up this campaign.

14. Now that we confirmed the automation is properly working, head back to Zapier and select Turn on Zap to launch.

15. You’ll receive a confirmation message letting you know that the zap is turned on

// don’t leave your athletes feeling unwelcome

Let us paint a picture…It’s your first-day training with your new coach / trainer. You walk into a new gym for the first time. People are moving, sweating, getting in their training sessions, talking in small groups to one another. 

No one comes to welcome you in. 

You’re in a gym, but is it the right gym? 

You can’t visibly discern the staff from the folks training – much less make out who your coach is, where you should go, or even if you’re in the right place. 

You’ve got a bit of that awkward feeling of walking into a party your friend invited you to, but you can’t find them and don’t know anyone else around. 

What do you do?

As a business owner you’d never let this happen in your gym, right? 

Running a training community in the TrainHeroic Marketplace should be no different. You want to create a welcoming experience that converts the person “walking through the door” into a raving fan, and their first moments with you will make all the difference. 

// Send automated welcome emails to athletes who start a trial of your programming using Zapier

Zapier is the self-proclaimed “Easiest way to connect your apps and automate workflows”. And we agree.

Zapier allows users to connect apps to send information and signals to one another. We chose to connect with Zapier for a few reasons:

• They are focused on helping small business owners like you automate marketing, communication, sales, and admin functions like “the big guys”
• They connect with over 2,000 apps making the possibilities almost endless. (Hint-hint) today is the first announcement of more to come. 
• They are SUPER user-friendly

So, what does this mean for you? Well, among nearly countless possibilities, it means that TrainHeroic now can send a signal to your email service provider (ESP) letting it know that someone has started a trial of your training community. You can use that to trigger a series of emails to welcome and onboard that new athlete. 

Even though the possibilities are endless, we wanted to provide you with an A-Z guide. So, we’ve chosen MailChimp as our recommended ESP. We’ll use MailChimp in our examples here, but you can easily use any other ESP you like. 

If you’re not already using an ESP, MailChimp is a great introduction to email marketing for small businesses in particular. It’s user-friendly and integrates with many apps that help you to automate tasks. A big bonus is tracking the performance and engagement of your emails, a feature you don’t get when using Gmail, for example.

We recommend purchasing the Standard plan because it’s the most affordable plan that allows you to create a series of automated emails.

// Email copy and creative: building engaging emails that deliver the right message at the right time

Why do we do this?

We want to make sure that athletes are comfortable with using the app as quickly as possible, this way they can jump right into their training. We’ve seen that athletes who log a session on their first day are 3X more likely to convert. So knowing this, we specifically cover how to use the app as an athlete and provide helpful guidelines for getting started. The faster they get started, the quicker they can engage with you, the team, and get their first session logged.

We also want to form good habits early on. We express the importance of logging their sessions so you stay informed on their training, progress, or setbacks so you have the tools and the data to be as informed as possible. 

TrainHeroic is also your client’s resource for any technical support. As always, if an athlete has questions about their account or they need technical support, direct them to our help desk and customer support team.

Our goal with these emails is to let you focus on coaching. We’ll tell them the nitty-gritty details on using the app and providing technical support so you don’t have to.

You focus on coaching, we’ll handle the rest. 

Topics we cover:

• Getting athletes to log their first session with a quick how-to video 
• Using TH Chat to connect with you and the team
• How to share their session stats on Instagram
• Viewing Profile Analytics to track their progress

Build and design your emails

We recommend sending a series of 4 emails over the 7-day trial. We designed this to align with the emails that TrainHeroic is also sending. 

Day 1: Welcome

Day 2: FAQ’s

Day 3: Communication

Day 7: Upsell/cross-sell 

We’ve included email templates from our faux-brand Doug’s Gym to give you some inspiration and insight into what these emails can look like.

Day 1

Think about the following as if you were physically in the gym with this athlete: 

What would you run through with them? 

What do they need to know? 

What are they going to love about being part of your training community? 

These are clear calls to action you can put in this email. 

And remember that starting the free trial was the first sale to this client, to keep them for the 7-day trial and beyond, you need to reinforce the sale. Remind them why they made the decision to pick your training in the first place. You can do this by reinforcing your positioning statement, your promise to your customer that differentiates you from other coaching programs. 

Ideas for inspiration:

• Create a welcome script, or better yet, a video to hype up the athlete
• Let them know where to start. Do they just jump right in? 
• Make intros to your community – have the athlete introduce themself in TH Chat 

Day 2

Ideas for inspiration:

• I’m new to the program, Where should I start?
• How should I warm-up / cool down? 
• Can I swap exercises if equipment isn’t available?
• Can you help me track my diet & nutrition? 
• Can I post videos for form check?
• Where do I go for support help?
• How do I update my working max?

Day 3

How involved are you with your team? What they can expect from you? Do you do weekly check-ins? Video reviews? How do you stay engaged while coaching remote? Let them know here. 

Day 7

Drive your value home, let them know what else you offer as a coach, and encourage their friends to join. This is where we’ll work in upsell, cross-sell, and “pre-marketing”. 

If your client started as month-to-month, tell them about your annual plan, especially if you offer a discount for upgrading. Put a time limit on that discount to create a sense of urgency.

Do you coach other training communities in the TH marketplace? Perhaps a client really likes your coaching style but they didn’t start with the right programming for them. If you offer other programs that span different ability levels or goal-specific training, let them know so you can keep them in your organization. This is called pre-marketing. 

Referrals and word of mouth marketing are a great, free way for you to gain more clients. Ask the athlete to invite a friend to train with them. Include a link to your TrainHeroic Marketplace Page so they can send it to their friends and take advantage of the free 7-day trial. 

Lastly, get them to follow you on social, subscribe to your blog, YouTube channel, or anything else you offer. The deeper your connection with these athletes, the more value you provide them, and the longer they’ll stay a paying fan. 

// creating email automation with TrainHeroic, Zapier, and MailChimp

If you’re a coach who has more than one team in the TrainHeroic Marketplace, you may want to send different emails for each team. For example, each of your teams might have a different logo and branding. Or maybe you have a beginner team and an advanced team and you’d like to send different messaging to each. Rather than send one generic email to all of your athletes, you can use automation to send team-specific emails. 

If you coach one team and don’t need to indicate in Mailchimp who is on what team, then you can skip this step. 

We do this by creating a custom field in Mailchimp. This will allow us to send the Team Name associated with each athlete into Mailchimp.

1. Click Audience from the left-hand menu then Signup forms 

2. Locate Form builder and hit Select

3. On the right-hand side, locate Add a field then select Text

4. Fill in the field label. We’re going to use Team Name.

Using a Field tag allows you to pull an athlete’s team name into the email copy for additional personalization. We used TEAMNAME which we can be easily referenced in emails.

Once you’ve filled in both of those fields, select Save Field.

5. Now, select All Contacts from the left-hand menu. You will notice a new Team Name column.

Later in this guide, we will show you how to send Team Name into MailChimp from Zapier.

Set up a tag in MailChimp

1. To get started, select Audience in the left navigation then Tags.

Creating your automated campaign

Build your workflow

Setting up multiple workflows (for coaches with multiple training communities)

If you have multiple teams and want to send different campaigns to each team, we will now add an additional filter to the workflow. If you don’t have multiple teams in the TrainHeroic Marketplace, you can skip this step.

1. Select Add next to Filter by segment or tag.

Check the box then select Contacts match the following conditions

2. Select the dropdown and locate the custom field you previously created: Team Name.

Next, indicate which team this campaign applies to.

Team Name is <enter your team name>

Make sure spelling and capitalization are correct or else the filter may not work properly.

3. When finished, select Save Segment in the top right corner.

Now, you have told this workflow to only send to athletes who started a trial and who are part of a particular team.

Adding your emails to the workflow

Next, select Add Another Email to build the fourth and last step in the sequence. 

Now you have all 4 email automations set up within your workflow. 

Testing your workflow

If you’d like to make any adjustments, select Design Email to head back to edit your templates. 

Once you’re ready to move forward, hit Next. You’ll see a recap of the workflow you just built. 

Here you can review the audience, tracking, and emails that will send in this workflow.

Make sure everything looks correct. If not, select Edit next to the section that needs to be adjusted. 

Once you’re ready to launch, select Start Sending in the bottom right corner. 

Congrats on setting up your first campaign in MailChimp!

// Setting up your first zap: connecting zapier, trainheroic, and mailchimp

1. Log into your TrainHeroic Coach account. Click the drop down in the top right corner then select Zapier Integrations.

3. You’ll be directed to the TrainHeroic Integration page on Zapier. 

Scroll down on the page and locate the section labeled Connect TrainHeroic to 3,000+ Apps. This is where you will find our pre-built templates to help you connect supported apps even faster. 

Select Try it next to the template named “Send Mailchimp welcome campaigns for new trial starts in TrainHeroic Marketplace”

Only use this template if you are using Mailchimp as your email provider. If you’re using a different email service provider, you’ll have to make a new zap and start from scratch.

4. Next, in the bottom left corner, select Go to Advanced Mode. This step is important so we can configure an additional setting for Mailchimp.

5. Since we’re starting with a template, you’ll notice that the Zap is already named with the apps and triggers selected for you.

Simply begin by hovering over the trigger and selecting Edit.

6. Here is where you will log in to your TrainHeroic account. Select Sign in to TrainHeroic.

Next, enter your TrainHeroic email address and paste your Magic Pass Key. Then hit Yes, Continue.

Testing the trigger

1. Next, select Test trigger to search for an athlete in your account. 

Under Action Event, select Add/Update Subscriber then hit Continue.

Head back to your Zapier setup and select Continue. 

Make sure Update Existing says Yes to make sure all trial athletes will receive the email whether they are a new or an existing contact in MailChimp.

Find your sample athlete’s first and last name. Adding these will allow you to personalize emails.

Now let’s see what it looks like in MailChimp

1. In MailChimp, select Audience from the left navigation then All Contacts. 

Head to Campaigns in Mailchimp and find your trial campaign. After selecting it, you’ll see a snapshot of all emails in the campaign. Click View subscribers in queue under the first email.

Head back to your Zapier setup and select Turn on Zap.

// check in often, measure, and optimize

Make sure to stay tuned to our blog and Instagram accounts for more tips on measuring and optimizing your automation flows.

For now, check in a few times on both Zapier and Mailchimp within the first few days.

Be sure to note your conversion rate before AND after launching this automation.

// the (only) three google analytics reports you need to optimize your marketing efforts, and sell more online training

If you are like the thousands of trainers and gym owners we serve, you’ve got a coaching business selling remote training service online. You’re marketing your services and training packages, perhaps using the TrainHeroic Marketplace. You’ve got more work to do than hours in the day. 

From programming to communicating with your clients, providing coaching services to your clients takes up most of your day. 

You know finding the time to be active on social media, create blogs, and other marketing efforts is vital to growing your business. But, let’s be honest, chances are you aren’t a trained marketer. If that’s the case, you’ve probably found yourself wondering: 

• Is any of this working? 
• Should I lean harder into any specific area?
• How do I maximize the return on the time I’m spending trying to market my remote training business?

Each of these questions is multi-faceted and could be a blog in their own right. The first, and by far most powerful step, is understanding what’s going on on your website by setting up Google Analytics. 

In this blog, we’ll walk you through how to use three simple reports in Google Analytics to analyze and optimize your marketing efforts. 

For coaches using the TrainHeroic Marketplace, we’ll also cover how to create a custom conversion tracking event on your website that will easily show you the number of people leaving your website to your TrainHeroic Marketplace checkout page. 

This article assumes you already have Google Analytics installed on your marketing website. If you don’t, Google has great documentation that will walk you through every step. If you’ve got a WordPress site, the installation of the Google Analytics code is easy with several plugins. If you have a website manager or someone who regularly updates your site, they should be able to get you set up in a breeze with a few lines of code.

Using Google Analytics to effectively market online training

With all of the following reports, it’s important to double check the time frame you are asking Google Analytics to show. The drop down in the upper right-hand corner allows you to select the date range you want to monitor specifically. You can also compare one time frame to another.

I recommend looking at each of these month-to-date and week-over-week.

Report 1: Total traffic

Why it’s important: The first step to understanding your marketing efforts is to understand the number of people coming to your website. You want to understand how many people you are reaching with your marketing message who are taking the next step in their purchase journey by visiting your website to learn more about the products and services you offer. After all, people can’t buy something from your website without visiting it.

Understanding the numbers that matter:

• Users: this is the number of people who visited your site over the selected time period. A single user can visit your website more than once. 
• Sessions: this is the number of total visits across all the users on your site. 
  • If one person visits your website once on Monday and again on Tuesday in a given week, that is one user and two sessions. 
• Pageviews: during a single session, a user can visit multiple pages on your website. Pageviews is a total count of all the pages visited by users across their sessions. 
  • If one person visits your website 2 times, and sees the homepage plus a product sales page each time, that’s: 1 user, 2 sessions, 4 total pageviews. 

Putting the numbers into action: When selling remote training, users should be your target focus. Are you driving more users to your website this week than last week? What about month-to-date compared to last month? 

If so, something is working – graphs that go up and to the right are always a good thing. If not, something is likely off – and it is likely a marketing volume issue. 

Have you dedicated social media posts to promoting or supporting your online training product this week? Did you do more of these posts the previous week? Did you send out a massive email blast last week, and nothing this week? 

If you’re following a consistent content and social media marketing strategy, a dip in traffic to your website is most likely related to the volume of posts or content with a direct link and call to action to visit your website. In today’s content-saturated digital reality, if you aren’t putting out your message frequently (daily), your messages aren’t going to land. Yesterday’s post is old news today.

Report 2: Acquisition channels

Why it’s important: Where is the traffic coming from? This is the logical next question in understanding your website traffic. Google Analytics does a pretty great job of breaking this down for you. It’s not perfect, but it gives you a great place to work from. 

• Organic search: this is traffic coming from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. 
• Paid search: this is search traffic coming specifically from Google search ads. 
• Referral: this is traffic coming from a link on another website. You can click on the word referral to get a breakdown of what exactly those websites are. 
• Social: traffic coming from social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, etc. Again, you can click on the word in the report for a detailed breakdown of different social media channels. You may be surprised at which channels actually drive traffic to your website. It’s not always your biggest channel in terms of following or even engagement. 
  • Tip: People won’t buy something from you if you don’t ask them to. Don’t fall into the trap of being afraid to include a hard call to action on your social media posts. A post breaking down coaching cues for a specific movement pattern in your programming provides educational value to your audience first. Why not include a call to action to try out the training with you for 7 free days? If your social media posts are providing value on their own you will not turn off your audience by selling to them. Don’t fall into that trap. The only way to quickly piss off your followers is to stop providing valuable content. If people are engaged, they are a fan and want more from you.

• Display: this is traffic coming from display ads you might be running across the Google network.
• Email: traffic driven by links in an email. 
• Direct: direct traffic includes several sources, and is more than likely your biggest source of traffic. It includes visits where people typed your url into their web browser, bookmarked your page, and any traffic that Google can’t attribute to any of the previously mentioned channels. In a big way, direct traffic is Google’s catch-all bucket. You can’t do much to understand this traffic at a deeper level. 

Putting the numbers into action: It’s important to understand that Google Analytics is working off of a last-click attribution model. That means that a user’s visit is attributed to the last link they clicked on before visiting your site.

In reality, decades of marketing best practice from companies around the globe tell us that the average consumer sees at least 7 messages from a business before making a purchase decision.

It’s worth keeping this in mind when looking at the sources of your traffic.

True attribution modeling would assign some value of a single conversion to each of these 7 (often more) touchpoints. But, this is extremely complex and more of an art than pure science.

For instance: you might give 2x more weight to a video view than a blog read because research suggests the combination of visual and auditory cues has a larger impact than the written word on buyer psychology. But, what if you’re a great writer and not great at making video?

You might give 5x the value to the first engagement than the last. Or, maybe you want to ramp the attribution exponentially across the customer buying journey.

You’ll find competing schools of thought from the best marketers in the world. The truth is, attribution modeling isn’t perfect. Even a great algorithm assumes buyer behavior is logical, and we know that isn’t always a fact.

As of today, there is not a single attribution model or tool widely available to small and medium businesses that I would personally recommend.

You might be asking, “well isn’t that important for me to know?” Or, “how do I optimize my marketing efforts without perfect attribution detail?”

While it’s tempting, chasing the perfect attribution model as a small to medium sized business is a quick path to spending a lot of time, energy, and money on something that isn’t going to give you a return – kind of defeats the purpose of maximizing the return on your efforts, right? If you are spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per month on different marketing efforts, attribution modeling could be a useful tool. Simple changes in budget allocation at this volume could lead you to massive changes in ROI on such a large spend.

In reality, this probably isn’t you. More than likely, you’re running email campaigns, producing blog and video content regularly, and running a social media presence that is actively posting at least once per day. All of those things are foundational to any digital selling success. Marketing is like a machine. You cannot remove one of the basic cogs and expect the machine to work.

While it may be tempting, this report should not be used to answer questions like: is social media working? Should I stop doing (insert marketing effort here)? Can we get rid of our email marketing?

Instead, use this report to understand the digital highways and byways by which people are getting to your website. Use this information as a guide to ensure you are putting enough marketing messages with strong calls to action into the market on a weekly basis across multiple channels. If you aren’t actively keeping the roadway open, people will not come to your site.

Report 3: pages viewed

Why it’s important: You know how many people are visiting your site and how they are getting there. The next logical step is knowing what they’re looking at while on your site. This is essentially understanding your selling funnel.

You have a homepage on your website that gives visitors an intro to your brand. More than likely, you have multiple product-detail pages branching off that. These are sales pages that include information about your digital training product, price, benefits, features, etc. Perhaps you have more than one – for different communities (teams) or different programs you sell.

You designed the site for visitors to engage with these pages, and you likely want to know which are getting a higher share of the pageviews discussed at the beginning of this article.

Understanding the numbers that matter: This simple report will order the pages on your website with at least 1 pageview over the selected period in order from most visited to least. 

• Pageviews: Covered earlier in this article. 
• Time on page: this metric is exactly as it sounds. It measures the average amount of time a user spends on a given page. Don’t read too deep into this figure, but use it to sniff out potential issues. Have a text-rich page chock full of valuable information? You might expect that people spend more time on that page than your homepage. If not, it might be time for some adjustments like adding images, trimming back the text-fat, etc. 
• Bounce rate: Google defines a bounce as a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session. These single-page sessions have a session duration of 0 seconds since there are no subsequent hits after the first one that would let Analytics calculate the length of the session.
  • Is a high bounce rate bad? That’s a great question. We’ve pasted Google’s answer below. It depends. If the success of your site depends on users viewing more than one page, then, yes, a high bounce rate is bad. For example, if your home page is the gateway to the rest of your site (e.g., news articles, product pages, your checkout process) and a high percentage of users are viewing only your home page, then you don’t want a high bounce rate. On the other hand, if you have a single-page site like a blog, or offer other types of content for which single-page sessions are expected, then a high bounce rate is perfectly normal.

Putting the numbers into action: If you notice that your sales page(s) are not getting very many pageviews, visit your own website with a fresh set of eyes.

Imagine you are your target trainee. You come to the site for the first time. Read the copy on your page. Click through the first button that catches your eye. Find potential roadblocks or distractions and erase them. 

Is there a clear call to action (button) on your homepage that links to your training sales page? Is something else getting more prime real estate and causing a distraction? Are you providing images and copy that guide a website visitor to your training products in the same way you would guide them if they walked into your gym?

conclusion

With these three basic reports in hand, you should have the insights and info you need to optimize your efforts to market your online training services and products. 

I want to leave you with one takeaway: keep it simple and be consistent with your efforts. Don’t outthink yourself. The key to great marketing is a focused audience (niche), great positioning, content that adds value to your audience, and consistent effort. 

Over 95% of the time, if you see a dip in your trial or sales numbers, the culprit is easily identified using this guide. More than likely, the issue is a lack of marketing efforts with a clear call-to-action. 

Yes, the modern consumer is being bombarded with marketing messages. Choosing to swim against the flow isn’t going to bring you success. It’s about providing value, teaching, engaging, and being authentic. You’ve worked hard to get the education and licenses you need to provide a product and service that will change the lives of those you train. Be proud of it. Ask your audience to give you a chance to prove it to them, and do it consistently (daily). 

// Extra reps

Many coaches use the TrainHeroic Marketplace as the cart for their funnel while keeping the marketing and sales pages on their own website. 

Coach Website Homepage → Coach Website Product Detail Page → Coach Website Start Your Free Trial Button → TrainHeroic Marketplace Account Creation and Checkout Page

If this looks like your funnel, you more than likely want to know the number of people you are sending to the TrainHeroic Marketplace (your checkout page).

You can easily see how many free trials are being started on your team within the TrainHeroic analytics suite, but you want to know your conversion rate from a website visit to a started trial. 

Good news, our team is working hard to develop a robust suite of business analytics. We’ve given you insight into trials and more is in the works.

In the meantime, the steps below can help you get this insight. 

While you won’t be able to see the number of people entering your checkout page on the TrainHeroic Marketplace right now, you can easily see the people leaving your site by clicking your CTA button. 

This is like measuring the number of people going through a doorway, and not being able to count the number of people coming out the other side. There is nothing in between. The numbers will be the same unless you’ve made an error on the URL link in the button. This is easy to check, just go to your website and hit the button. 

All this takes is having Google Tag Manager installed on your website and following the steps listed in this blog. If you don’t yet have Google Tag Manager installed on your website, you’ll need to do that first. This is essentially the same process you followed to install Google Analytics, requiring you or your website manager to drop in a few lines of code into your website.  

// putting social proof to work selling online training in the TrainHeroic marketplace

When potential clients land on your marketplace sales page, they want to know three things before they buy your programming*:

Our team did a killer job setting you up for conversion success with the new Marketplace 3.0 PageBuilder, laying it out in a super pro-looking but still easy-to-manage way.

By now, you’ve nailed your value prop, amping up potential clients (niche) and selling them on the many features and benefits of working with you (offer). Your next task: overcome objections with FAQs and social proof.

Cool, cool… So what is social proof?

*This golden nugget is courtesy of Angie Lee, digital marketing ninja and nailer of niches.

// social proof: the lowdown

Social proof taps into our psychological desire to conform, harnessing the “But everyone else is doing it!” feeling your Mama warned you about. 

Social proof can be a powerful sales tool, but only if you execute it correctly by finding the relatable sweet spot.

Generic Testimonials: Not believable

On one end of the spectrum are written testimonials. They often feature a one-sentence soundbyte, the kitschiest of which may be attributed to “John S.” with a suspiciously stock image-like headshot. There’s a time and a place for real written testimonials, for sure, but they can also feel generic and anonymous if you forget to add the flavor packet. 

Influencer Testimonials: Not relatable

On the opposite end, there’s celebrity/influencer testimonials. These are more aspirational. If your training program was what helped Gerard Butler transform into King Leonidas for the movie 300, you KNOW you could sell clients on that alone. Ehh, maybe… because your clients only have so much in common with Gerard Butler.

The sweet spot

The most impactful social proof lands us in a relatable sweet spot between anonymity and celebrity. Your potential client wants to know that your programming has worked for other people just like them. People who are also busy professionals and/or parents, preparing for the college hockey season, training for their next Olympic weightlifting competition, trying to lose 15 lbs. after years of inactivity, etc.

// the anatomy of great social proof

We’ll get into how to track down social proof below, but let’s start with some ground rules. 

What makes for good social proof?

Feels authentic 

Effective social proof uses the language of your ideal client and sounds like something a real human would actually say. Err on the side of conversational; it feels more genuine, making it more credible.

Reinforces the benefits your training offers

Focus on feedback that connects back to your benefit statements. If your programming is designed to increase athletes’ speed, share social proof from clients who’ve shaved time off their 200m, etc. Provide evidence that what you’re selling works.

Showcases your ideal client / niche

If you’re training former competitive gymnasts who are getting back into the gym after giving birth, those are the women whose testimonials you should showcase. Rookie firefighter Sam’s experience won’t pack the same relatability punch.

Pro tip for nailing social proof on your new marketplace page: Get creative with the Descriptor line in the PageBuilder. Descriptive titles or context lend authenticity to your testimonials AND help your potential clients see themselves in your current ones.

Because if it worked for them, your potential clients can envision success for themselves. Boom, you’re one step closer to conversion.

// Where to find social proof

If this isn’t your first rodeo running a business and promoting it on the interwebs, your social proof is already out there. In comments, reviews, mentions/tags, DMs…

The goal is to find positive experiences with you and your coaching business, as shared by current/former clients. Pro tip: When you come across social proof, screenshot it in its original context! The best social proof looks and feels organic and genuine. Highlighting it in its originally formatted glory can be powerful.

Here are three examples from a quick social media search of some of TrainHeroic’s top marketplace sellers:

While the first two are examples of social proof in its natural habitat, Derek Woodske has actually taken the next step and shared the last one to his Instagram story. (Bonus points for tagging @TrainHeroic! You know we shared that to our story.) 

Need more ideas?

Here’s a quick and totally non-comprehensive list of places to look for social proof:

* NOTE: Best practice is to blur out identifying details or ask for permission to share emails/texts, DMs, and in-app messages. They’re not public by nature, so be respectful of your clients’ privacy!

If you’re newer to the game OR are in search of longer written or video testimonials, you can always ask for them, either directly or via a social media call. You know who your most committed and passionate clients are, right? The ones you wish you could sign 100 more of? Ask them if they would be willing to write a Google review, share their session summary to their Instagram story, comment on your latest Facebook post, etc. 

// the power of leveraging instagram stories to source social proof

Instagram stories are an especially powerful form of social proof, because they become a sort of content flywheel. When a client mentions you in their story, engage! If it’s a strong piece of social proof, share it to your story. If it’s not really representative of your brand/business, like and/or reply as positive reinforcement. *Fist bump*

Your other clients and followers will recognize that you share stories and begin tagging you with that goal in mind. The more stories you share (within reason, Friends), the more stories you will find yourself and your business being tagged in. And remember: once you share a story, it lives in your archive as a source of repurposable social proof!

A couple of Instagram story troubleshooting tips:

• If you’re seeing clients post Instagram stories about your business, but aren’t tagging you, message them! Saying something like “Hey, these stories are BADASS. I would love to share them if you are up for tagging me next time.” will usually do the trick.
• If your Instagram is set up as a business profile, you may not be able to share stories that use the music sticker. Your average Gram Fam probably doesn’t know that, so shoot them a quick DM letting know that you would like to share their story, BUT… Some users will delete and repost, while others are just game for future behavior change.

// what’s next?

Want to see all of this in action? Follow @TrainHeroic on Instagram.

Now that you’re a social proof pro, be sure to get creative on your TrainHeroic marketplace page. Then, regularly work it into your social media and marketing efforts. When you show off your star clients, you attract more just like them.