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Kelly McHugh is the founder of Digital Yoga Academy and Good Yoga Life based out of the UK. She is a yoga teacher, a digital marketing expert, and a consultant for yoga teachers to help them grow their businesses.

Kelly fell in love with yoga a number of years ago, and within the first year of teaching decided to leave her corporate job to become a full-time yoga teacher.

On this episode, Kelly and I talk about the teaching community in the UK, the struggles that she found that yoga teachers were having with their yoga businesses, the importance of digital marketing and being online, and why yoga teachers need a mailing list and a newsletter. Kelly also gives tips for creating an effective email list and newsletter campaign that your students will love!

Enjoy!

Business Lessons from this Episode:

• It’s becoming more and more important to be online – have a website, have your schedule online, being able to be found online
• It can be overwhelming and scary to put yourself out there
• Surround yourself with communities of yoga teachers
• Spend time to understand and learn about the different marketing platforms
• You don’t need to be on every single social media platform! Choose a few based on where your target market / audience / ideal students are and focus on that.
• If there is one thing to tackle, it is an email list and newsletter.
• It’s a privilege to be able to be in someone’s inbox and it’s the ability to create long-lasting relationships with your audience.
• The key with newsletter marketing is to get people to open up your emails.
• The people who come to your classes are your ideal subscribers. They already know and love you and would be interested in your other offerings.
• It’s easier to write a newsletter when you know the person who is going to receive it.
• Authenticity is key to a good newsletter!
• You can connect email lists through forms on your websites – they can be embedded into blog posts, they can pop up, and / or you can have a tab.
• Encourage your students in class to sign up for your mailing list
• Offer an incentive to encourage people to sign up! Make sure your incentive is relative to the student / your niche.
• Consistently offer value to your students
• Use Mailchimp for your mailing list
• Set up an automated welcome email that will engage your students
• Choose a schedule that you can stick to – weekly, bi-weekly or monthly
• Have conversations with your regular students to see what they are interested in learning about from you and what offerings they are curious to learn about.
• Creating an effective newsletter can be a lot of trial and error to see what people respond to and what they are interested in. You can check your MailChimp stats to find out more about this!
• Use Survey Monkey to find out what people are interested in.
• Have a goal when it comes to your newsletter and email list – how many email subscribers do yo want? What do you want to achieve?
• Share personal tidbits from your life. People love to read something that is very personal and that let’s them in on your life.
• An email list can convert people to your workshops and retreats and help you to cut down on marketing and advertising costs from other areas of your business.
• Treat your email list as a key part of your sales funnel.
• Create a two-way conversation between you and your email list subscribers.
• Put some time in your calendar to plan ahead so you can keep up with your newsletter!

Connect with Kelly:

Digital Yoga Academy

Good Yoga Life

This episode of the podcast is brought to you by bookyogaretreats.com! I used bookyogaretreats to book my very first retreat and loved it. It’s a great platform for people who want to book a retreat or training and for yoga teachers who want to lead a retreat. Check it out here!

I’ve also launched a private community on Facebook for yoga teachers who want to learn more about business. Join me here!