Email courses for fitness and nutrition coaches

Writing for people who have already stopped once

The defining fact about this audience is not that they lack information. It is that they have a history with it. Most readers have followed a plan before, often several, and have stopped, and most of them privately concluded that the stopping was a fault in themselves rather than in the plan.

That history rules out the usual devices. A promised transformation is a bet the reader has already lost. A before-and-after photograph is evidence about somebody else. A thirty-day challenge is the exact shape of the last thing they abandoned. None of these are dishonest; they are simply arguing with the reader's own experience, which is a fight nobody wins.

What works instead is small and verifiable. One habit, one measurement they take themselves, and a week short enough to finish. A reader who completes five days is holding evidence that contradicts the story they tell about themselves, and that evidence is worth more than any promise you could make in a subject line.

What the five days should teach

Teach one habit, with an outcome the reader can measure that is not a weight. A step count, a number of repetitions, hours of sleep, protein at breakfast: something that moves within a week, that they can check themselves, and that does not require standing on anything.

Give the mechanism every single day. A reader told what to do complies while the emails are arriving and stops the following Tuesday. A reader who understands why the thing works keeps going, adapts it to a week that goes wrong, and can judge for themselves when it does not apply to them.

Do not send a meal plan or a training programme. A plan written for a stranger cannot know what they can lift, what they are recovering from, what they can afford or what they are able to eat, and a course has no way to ask. The individual programme is what the paid work is for, and the free week is what makes the case that you think carefully about people.

Day four is the compensation, and it is the same on both sides of this trade: eating less after a missed session, training four days in a row to recover a lost week, skipping a meal to earn a weekend. Explaining why a sensible-looking correction makes the following week worse is the most useful email you will write.

The objection your readers arrive with

"I have done this before and it did not last." It is rarely said out loud and it sits behind almost every decision the reader makes about you, including the decision not to reply. It is an objection about themselves, which is why no testimonial reaches it: every testimonial is from somebody it worked for.

The answer is to make the week completable. Five days, ten minutes each, nothing bought, nothing prepared in advance, and a Friday on which the reader can see a number that moved. Completion is the argument. Announcing that this course is different is not an argument at all.

There is a second objection you will never hear, which is the fear of being weighed, photographed or assessed. Say on the page that you do not ask for weight, measurements or pictures, and then do not ask for them. Anybody who has sat through a consultation that opened with a set of scales remembers exactly how it felt.

What your sign-up page has to say

Ask for as little as possible, and say what you are not asking for. No goal weight, no current weight, no measurements, no photographs, and no open text box inviting somebody to describe a condition. Everything collected there is health information about a named person sitting in whatever tool you signed up for one evening, and none of it makes the course better.

Say who should not do this course and what to do instead. Pregnancy, a recent injury, a condition under treatment, a history of disordered eating: name the categories plainly, say the honest thing, which is that a general course cannot account for any of them, and point at the kind of professional who can.

Say a confirmation email comes first and that nothing follows if it is never clicked. Mail about eating and bodies arriving at a mistyped address is not a bounce. It is a message about somebody's health landing in a stranger's inbox, and the click is what makes that close to impossible.

The lines a coaching sign-up page has to carry:

• The one habit the five days build, named exactly, with the number that is going to move.
• That nobody is asked for a weight, a measurement or a photograph at any point.
• Ten minutes a day for five days, with nothing to buy and nothing to prepare.
• That the first email is a confirmation link, and an address that never clicks it hears nothing further.
• Who should speak to a clinician before starting, named as categories rather than hinted at.
• That this is general information and not a programme written for the individual reading it.
• What day six is: an assessment, its price, and that some people will be pointed elsewhere.

What the day-six email asks for

Offer one assessment, priced, with its length and its contents stated. What you measure, what they leave holding, and what it costs. An unpriced consultation in this trade reads as a sales meeting because it very often is one, and the reader has sat through a version of it before.

Say that you refer people on, and mean it. Some of those who reply will be describing something that belongs to a doctor, a dietitian or a physiotherapist, and saying in advance that you will tell them so is both the professional position and the most persuasive line in the email. It is also the line a competitor will not write.

Attach no deadline to it. Urgency applied to somebody's body is the mechanism that produced the eleven-day attempts in the first place, and a reader who books because a price rises on Sunday stops again in three weeks. The ones worth having book because Friday's number moved.