As a fitness coach, you need to understand the importance of engaging your audience and building trust with potential clients. One way to do this is a challenge funnel. It’s a marketing strategy that involves creating short-term challenges for your audience to complete.
The “challenge” is designed to showcase your expertise, build trust, and ultimately lead to increased revenue for your fitness coaching business.
learn a step-by-step guide on how to create a successful 7-day challenge funnel for your fitness coaching business through this article.
Because, after reading this article, You will get ideas about
- why you should use a challenge funnel,
- the key steps involved in creating a challenge funnel, and
- tips and ideas to execute your challenge funnel successfully,
and eventually, get more paying clients at the end of the challenge.
So let’s begin.
Why Use A Challenge Funnel For Your Fitness Coaching Business?
Normally, if you ask marketers how to grow your fitness coaching business, most of them will suggest you run lead generation campaigns, take a quiz, and probably book a private call with your clients. While this is effective, it takes time to deliver high results.
A challenge funnel is a concept where you drive more potential customers in a short period of time by making them acknowledge your expertise through an emotional drive.
Let me explain.
Most people that want to improve their body fitness love to take on short-term challenges to try and find the best possible fitness training. Since they are determined to get in the best shape, you can leverage this emotion and convince them to follow your instructions for a short while and get positive results as promised.
By the time your challenge period is over, people who are less serious will drop out. People who will complete the whole challenge and get positive results will now have increased trust in your expertise and will become your highly qualified leads.
Hence, immediately after the challenge, you have a chance to sign a few paying clients if you have the right offer set up.
A challenge funnel helps you get the following benefits:
- Increased Engagement and Participation – With a relevant and valuable challenge you can increase engagement and participation in your brand. This helps to build a community around your business. Also, fosters a sense of loyalty among your audience.
- Improved Lead Generation and Conversion Rates – A challenge funnel can be a powerful lead generation tool for your fitness coaching business. This addresses the pain points and challenges of your target audience. You can also attract high-quality leads who are more likely to convert into paying customers.
- Opportunity to Showcase Expertise and Build Trust – A challenge funnel is an opportunity for you to showcase your expertise and build trust with your audience. By offering valuable content and support throughout the challenge, you can demonstrate your knowledge and build credibility with potential clients.
- Increased Revenue Potential – It helps to monetize your audience and increase your sales. Because With a paid product or service offered through a challenge generates additional revenue for your fitness coaching business.
Overall, the challenge funnel is a great way to get paying clients in a short span of time.
How to Craft A Successful 7-Day Challenge Funnel
Now that you know how a challenge funnel can be a great way to get more clients, let us look at how you can organize a challenge funnel yourself.
It will involve a total of 7 steps:
- Decide on a challenge with a highly desired goal
- Plan a lucrative offer to excite your prospects
- Prepare a funnel to invite prospects into your challenge
- Prepare the challenge tasks and instructions
- Schedule the daily challenge activities
- Plan Your Post-Challenge Session For Paid Service
- Start Promoting Your Challenge
Let us look at these in more detail.
Step 1 – Decide on a challenge with a highly desired goal
When it comes to body fitness, You know your target clients more than anyone. worried about when it comes to body fitness. Find out a set of exercises to bring a great result by the end of the week.
A combination of 3 exercises with increased repetitions each day, or a couple of basic exercises after an added new exercise each day can be a great way to do that.
Make sure you have a measured idea of the outcome. For example, if it’s a weight loss challenge, you need to know a range of amount of weight that can be reduced if the challenge is done right.
Once you have the challenge planned, note down the 7-day activity plan for your challenge.
Let’s say, as a fitness coach specializing in weight loss, you are going to target those who are willing to lose weight, and your challenge topic could be “7 Days to Jumpstart Your Weight Loss Journey”.
Step 2 – Plan a lucrative offer to excite your prospects
Now, invite people to your challenge. To do so, you first prepare a simple funnel that will help you collect leads. Get consent from several individuals who are interested in taking on the challenge.
But before you can start working on your funnel, you have to decide on what special offer you can make to get the potential prospects more excited to join.
For example, there are more exercises involved for better fitness output than just the ones you are suggesting for the challenge. So you may offer free access to courses on other sorts of exercises that people can conduct along with weight loss activities for better fitness output. Plus, you may offer a good amount of discount on your personal training service.
Step 3 – Prepare a funnel to invite prospects into your challenge
The funnel you use here has to be created with good effort. You need to create 2 pages, a landing page and a thank you page. And you need to set up email automation.
i. The Funnel Landing Page
On the Landing Page, include a video at the beginning of the page. In the video, you will share what the challenge is about, the outcome people can expect, and mention that there will be special rewards for a lucky few who will complete the challenge successfully.
And then, below the video, include the benefits of the challenge, how long the challenge will last, the expected results from it, and the rewards they can expect.
There should be no specific offer for your paid service. Just the mention of free access to the courses and the discount amount should be enough.
The CTAs should be focused on joining the challenge along with an opt-in form to collect the names and email addresses of the subscribers.
Also, include a section to display testimonials and trust badges to convey your expertise and authority.
ii. The Thank You Page
Once a prospect opts in, he should be directed to a thank you page. On this page, include a video to motivate the prospect not to miss out on this challenge and specify the date when the challenge will start.
Below the video, ask the prospect to check his email to get a private link to join the challenge group.
Plus, include icons of your social profiles and request your prospects to follow you there.
iii. Email Automation To Send The Joining Link
Set up email automation so that once someone opts in for the challenge, an email is automatically sent where the user will find a link to join the private group where you will host the challenge.
This private group could be a social group (e.g., a Facebook group) or a group on an online fitness app (such as Love HIIT or Squaddy).
Now you have a funnel ready.
Once you decide on the offer, it’s time to create your funnel.
You can create those flows using WPFunnels and Mail Mint.
- Create the pages using WPFunnels on a visual canvas.
- On the visual canvas, add automation actions to add the subscribers to a specific list on Mail Mint.
- Then add a second action item to send an email. This will be the image to invite the person to your challenge group.
Step 4 – Prepare the challenge tasks and instructions
Since it’s a 7-day challenge, you need to get the activities recorded to inform users what activity they will be doing on each day.
Whether it is increasing the repetitions of the same exercise or adding new activities every day, you must create separate videos for each day. And on each video, add some helpful tips and motivational phrases to keep the participants excited.
You may rather choose to prepare written guides with relevant images. But videos have always proven to deliver the highest results.
Step 5 – Schedule the daily challenge activities
Now that you have the challenge videos ready and the funnel in place, it’s time to set up the scheduling process for participants. I know you must don’t want to do boring manual work here. First, you need to schedule the videos to be uploaded. And then you need to set up email reminders to start each day’s challenge.
5.1. Hosting your challenge videos
Once you have the videos ready, how you want to reveal them to your participants may vary depending on where you host your videos.
i. Hosting the challenge videos on a private Facebook Group
In case you want to invite people to your private Facebook Group, then you have the option to upload the videos directly to the group at a fixed time every day.
In this case, you may upload the videos beforehand and schedule them to be published on specific dates and times on Facebook Meta.
ii. Hosting the challenge videos on Youtube
Another option would be to host the videos on Youtube. Simply upload the videos on your Youtube channel as unlisted videos. Then you may include their links in your reminder emails.
iii. Hosting the videos on your website
The best option to host the videos would be your own website.
First, upload the videos on your website. Then, create a page for each of the days. On the page, do not keep any menu items or footer. Simply add a heading to indicate the challenge program and the day it represents, followed by the respective challenge video embedded on the page.
Having these videos on your website will give you more control over their visibility and unauthorized sharing.
For example, you may turn on indexing for these pages. You may even turn them private after the challenge period is over until you run the next challenge to avoid losing the value of these videos to new future prospects. Plus, you may restrict users from opening the video on a new tab or downloading the videos.
5.2. Setting up the reminder emails
Once you have the challenge videos hosted, you can schedule an email sequence to be sent on the starting day of your challenge.
This should be a sequence of 15 emails – two for each day.
The first email for the day should invite them to watch the video or notify them that the new video is ready to be viewed. The second email should be sent 12 hours later to remind them about it.
The very last email of the whole sequence should invite the prospect to join you on a live session or book a call with you for a 30-minute personalized session.
These emails will keep the participants motivated throughout the 7-day challenge period.
You should also remember to update the users about it on the challenge apps group chat section (if you have used one) or on via a post on the Facebook group.
Step 6 – Plan Your Post-Challenge Session For Paid Service
Take some time and prepare a pitch you want to make in the post-challenge session.
A crucial part here would be to keep it very motivating so that the participants are willing to continue training. Plus, announce how they can claim free access to the courses you promised earlier.
Then, mention what other things they need to focus on, and slowly ease in towards promoting your private coaching sessions.
Whether it’s a live session on the group or a private call, the attendees should be educated on the importance of continuous exercise and the possible need to get a personal fitness trainer such as yourself.
And right after this session, initiate a nurturing email sequence to educate them further on more important fitness factors to show off your expertise and eventually offer them your personal training service. This could be a series of 5-7 emails in the next 15 days.
Step 7 – Start Promoting Your Challenge
The final step, once everything is ready, is to start promoting your challenge.
If you have a strong social presence, then make sure to share on your social media and run Paid Ads there as well.
Meanwhile, paid Ads on Google, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube could also be great options.
And, of course, send emails to your already existing leads.
Aim to get as many participants as possible to sign up for the challenge.
Expected Results
First of all, a challenge funnel is not something that will make you a millionaire overnight. But, hosting new challenges from time to time throughout the year can earn you a fortune within a year.
In fact, you can choose to run the same challenge over and over again by signing up new participants every time. This often works because once you host one challenge, you can expect to get testimonials from the participants. These you can use to improve your promotional content the next time you issue this challenge.
At the end of each challenge, if your instructions actually bring positive results for participants, you can expect 20-40% conversion by the end of the whole campaign.
Eventually, you can become the owner of a successful fitness coaching business with long-term clients relying on your instructions. You can even expand with several instructors under you to turn your business into a brand.
But paying clients is one part of it. You will also get several qualified leads that are perfect for other marketing campaigns you may run in the near future. Since you know what these people are interested in, you can easily decide to sell other products or services such as courses, memberships, fitness equipment, etc.
If you are new in the coaching field and need to gain some experience, explore fitness coach jobs on Jooble. With good experience, you can build even better challenge funnels.
Final Thoughts
A challenge funnel is not only effective for fitness trainers, but it is also a brilliant way to promote any sort of coaching services that you may offer. And the whole strategy is designed to get you more leads & sales while growing your authority in the field.
As a fitness coaching owner or a personal fitness coach, go ahead and start planning your first challenge funnel. Now you know all steps on how to pull it off. All you will need is the right people to help you out with the marketing content and the design materials.
In WordPress, you can rely on using WPFunnels and Mail Mint to make the whole process automated and optimized without any hassle.
So go ahead and start preparing for your next 7-day challenge program.
Get WPFunnels+ Mail Mint now!
