The Best Freebie Opt-in Gifts for Health Coaches
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As a health coach, offering a free “intro” resource on your website is a great strategy for connecting with new prospective health coaching clients.
Not only does it help to pique their interest, highlight your wellness expertise and build rapport (an especially important aspect of online health coaching!), but these free resources can also serve as opt-in gifts to grow your mailing list—a key part of growing an audience for your health coaching business, and ultimately getting more clients!
Why it’s so important to grow an email list for your health coaching business
Building an email list for your health coaching business is mega important—and, for online health coaches, essential.
It allows you to continue communicating with prospective health coaching clients via targeted email marketing, continuing to serve them and offer additional opportunities to connect with your health coaching services down the road.
Let’s be real: health coaching is pricey!
Not all of our “somewhat interested” audience members are ready to invest hundreds (or thousands) of dollars in 1:1 health coaching services the moment they first happen upon our websites.
However, if you can add these maybe-someday-interested website visitors to your health coaching business’ mailing list, you can maintain contact with them, continue to offer valuable wellness information or resources along the way, and ultimately build the trust needed to make their purchase decision easier in the future.
How to use opt-in gifts in your health coaching business
An opt-in gift (also called a freebie or a lead magnet) is a free resource or item of value that is offered to your website visitors in exchange for their email address.
This is an important element of growing your mailing list because email addresses are valuable too!
Few people are willing to just hand over their email address these days. (Right?! Think about how many marketing emails you receive daily…we’re all getting increasingly wary of it.)
So, not only does offering an opt-in gift provide a reason for people to happily give you their email address, but it’s also a strategy to ensure you’re attracting the right kind of people to your mailing list. Not in a mean way, but your mailing list should be an exclusive club! It’s a club of people who are truly interested in the content you have to offer, and the health coaching services your specific business provides.
5 opt-in gift ideas for health coaches
There’s a vast, vast range of opt-in gifts that can work for growing your health coaching mailing list (the sky’s the limit!).
If you’ve got a specific wellness service or resource that would be a good fit, that’s awesome! Or, if you’re looking for ideas, here are some of the most common opt-in gifts that work well for health coaches and other wellness entrepreneurs:
Wellness checklist
A downloadable printable/fillable checklist is one of the simplest (and easiest/quickest-to-consume) lead magnet options for your health coaching audience.
If you already have specific checklists you offer to your health coaching clients, consider using or adapting one of those as your opt-in gift.
Or, if you’ll need to develop a new resource, think about: Which area(s) of your wellness expertise could be easily described in the form of a checklist? Do you have any wellness recommendations or protocols you typically offer your health coaching clients that could be formalized into a checklist?
Focus on providing value, rather than holding back to avoid “giving away your secrets.” The value of 1:1 health coaching is in the customized support and accountability you provide, not necessarily the information itself (which, in many cases, is easily available online for anyone willing to search for it). You can both offer a valuable wellness checklist for audience members looking to try their hand at a DIY-approach, as well as provide valuable health coaching services for clients looking for that increased level of wellness support.
For example, we offer a Health Coach Website Checklist—something we work with clients on (designing and launching websites for health coaching businesses). This checklist is an overview of what we do for our clients, in an easy-to-follow list for others to DIY if they so choose. Offering this as a free resource provides value to those health coaches DIY-ing your own website, yet doesn’t take away from the value other health coaches receive from having a professional web designer create their website for them.
Healthy living email series
One of our primary opt-in gifts at Four Wellness Co. is 7 Days of Wellness, an email “mini-series” in developing a simple daily wellness routine.
This is set up with Flodesk (our email marketing tool of choice, though you could also do the same via Mailchimp or others). Subscribers opt in via our website and then are sent a 7-day email automation offering a unique wellness activity to try each day.
Not suggesting you attempt to copy this (that’s copyright infringement and against the law 😇), but feel free to use the example as inspiration in developing a series that fits what you offer in your own business. Maybe that’s a series on eating better, exercising daily, calming anxiety or curing acne naturally—whatever your area of expertise, consider adapting it into a multi-day email series with a helpful wellness tip and supportive message each day.
Healthy recipe e-book
One of the first (and most helpful) “pain points” you can address for many prospective health coaching clients is helping them find healthy and tasty recipes for the particular dietary guidelines they’re looking to follow—whether that’s simply “eating well,” or something more specific like a gluten-free diet, Meatless Monday recipes, low-FODMAPS foods, etc.
Creating a simple healthy recipe book for your target audience is a great way to offer them an item of value that they can put to use right away. If you’re tech-savvy, you can easily design an e-book with a word processor (saving it as a PDF) or with a design tool like Canva (our fave), or you can hire a graphic designer to help.
Health coach video training
Video is an increasingly important tool in communicating both your expertise as a health coach, as well as your personality (health coaching is an industry in which your personal fit with clients really matters—people prefer to discuss their health concerns with someone they connect with and trust!).
Recording a simple video training on an area of your wellness expertise (a yoga routine, how to make cashew cheese at home, a mindfulness meditation, etc.) can be a great way to offer both opt-in value and show your personality (and what it’d be like to be coached by you) to prospective health coaching clients.
Wellness mini-course
Another way to provide a quick teaser of your wellness expertise and personality is to create a free mini-course that walks prospective health coaching clients through a transformation you can help them achieve (think: how to detox your pantry, how to create a couch to 5K training plan, 10 steps to going vegan, etc.)
There are a few different technology options for setting up an online mini-course, including Squarespace Member Areas and MemberSpace (here’s more about how to create different types of wellness membership programs with these two options). Both can be connected to your email marketing service to help grow your health coaching mailing list after an interested visitor opts in to your free wellness mini-course.
Helpful tips for developing your wellness opt-in
Whichever method you choose for attracting your health coaching audience with a wellness-themed opt-in gift, here are a few important things to keep in mind as you develop your particular opt-in gift:
Keep it short & sweet: Your opt-in “freebie” should be easily digestible—something users can reasonably get through and receive benefit from in just 5-10 minutes.
It absolutely must be relevant to your health coaching services: First of all, there’s no point in growing a mailing list of people who are not interested in receiving the health coaching services you offer. It’s important to design an opt-in that reasonably leads into the paid health coaching services (or other wellness products) you offer. (This also makes remaining in contact about those offerings easier to do down the road!)
Provide value: Some health coaches worry that they don’t want to give away their “special info” for free. Let go of that worry a bit, and give away some info of value. That’s what helps your prospective clients begin to trust your expertise as a health coach.
Keep in touch: Don’t love ‘em and leave ‘em—when a new prospective client asks for your opt-in resource (yay!), don’t just send it and then drop off. This is a great opportunity to use a welcome automation to warmly offer a brief series of additional helpful information or material relevant to what they’ve requested via your opt-in.
Adding an opt-in to your health coaching website
Depending on your specific opt-in gift, there are a few different ways to add it to your health coaching website and connect it to your email marketing service (e.g. Flodesk, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, etc.).
Adding an opt-in with Squarespace
If you have a Squarespace website (which we design on and recommend! 👍), setting up your opt-in is as easy as adding a link in the post-submit message of your newsletter block. Here’s how to do that:
Add a Newsletter Block to the page and location you’d like it.
Connect the Newsletter Block to your email marketing service (and the appropriate list, if you have multiple).
In the Post-Submit Message, write a nice thank you message and include a link to your resource (if your opt-in is a downloadable file, you’ll have the option to upload the file via link settings).
Adding an opt-in with Flodesk
If you use Flodesk for your email marketing tool, you’ll actually create the sign-up form in Flodesk and then embed it on your Squarespace website. Here’s how to add an email opt-in with Flodesk:
Create a sign-up form in Flodesk.
Copy the embed code provided by Flodesk.
Add a new Code Block to your Squarespace website and paste the embed code from Flodesk.
Here’s an example of one of our opt-in gift offers set up with Flodesk (it’s live, so go ahead and click it if you’d like!):
Perfect your health coaching website
Grab my free checklist for optimizing your wellness website!
It’s got all the big picture must-haves (& all the important little details!) to make your health coach website shine. ✨
