How to Write Direct Mail Copy for a Yoga Studio

How to Write Commercial Copy

How to Write Direct Mail Copy



© 2010 Ugur Akinci

Yoga studios are popping up all over the place in every big city these days. Once the closely-kept secret of an initiated few, yoga is now enjoyed by the masses.

When writing a direct mail advertisement piece for a yoga studio you must first consider the kind of “yoga” you’ll be writing about. If you're not already familiar with yoga, you have to educate yourself a bit in order to deliver copy that rings true and gets results.

There are all kinds of different yoga school and techniques out there; some generic and others named after their enterprising “founders.”

Bikram Yoga, for example, also known as “hot yoga,” is the name given to a set of 26 vigorous hatha yoga exercises performed in a very warm (105 F) exercise hall, as dictated by its founder Bikram Choudhury.

Generically speaking, perhaps the best known yoga style is “hatha yoga”, that is, the familiar set of PHYSICAL exercises lie Surya Namaskar and others that comes to mind in the West as soon as the word “yoga” is mentioned. This includes “pranayama yoga” as well, that is, set of breathing exercises.

Yet there are other types of yoga that does not emphasize physical exercise as much, or does not elevate it to a principal position.

“Kundalini Yoga”, for example, aims at awakening the “dormant spiritual energy” that all yoga masters claim residing in our “muladhar chakra” or the energy center at the bottom of our lower-back.

“Siddha Yoga”, a proprietary yoga school and community, combines kundalini yoga with Guru worship. The energy transformation from Guru to the Discipline calle d”shaktipat” is at the core of Siddha Yoga.

There are other yoga schools which also emphasize the importance of shaktipat in spiritual awakening.



There are non-Indian yoga schools too like the Korean Dahn Yoga which is becoming more popular in the USA as these lines are written. Dahn Yoga blends traditional hatha yoga routines with martial arts and tai-chi.

There is also the “Raja Yoga” which claims to synthesize all different kinds of yoga schools and approaches.

That should be your broad background before sitting down and writing a brochure or mailer for your yoga client.

Sell the Benefits

You also have to stress the BENEFITS of yoga to your readers. Unless you can sell the benefits, the specific features of the yoga studio in question really does not mean much. No use a non-vegetarian analogy, you gotta sell the sizzle before you can sell the steak.

Consider the following list of yoga benefits:

 Inner peace made possible by meditation
 Better posture
 Better sleep
 Deep breathing and more oxygen to the brain – more clear thinking
 Better balance
 Improved flexibility of joints
 Improved blood circulation
 Help with weight loss and maintenance
 A more positive outlook on life
 Help with fighting depression
 Increased energy and renewed enthusiasm for life
 Pain relief or mitigation
 Increased concentration and increased capacity to handle complex tasks
 Support for a fortified immune system

HOWEVER, you have to be VERY CAREFUL not to make any medical claims in your copy or you can get into trouble with FDA or some other U.S. federal agency.

Specifically, you cannot use the word/verb “cure” in your copy since any claim of cure needs to be proven in a clinical test trial. Even the well-funded pharmaceutical labs spend millions over many years to proven that a certain drug “cures” a malady. So you need to be careful and considerate when composing your ad copy.

Self-Assessment Questionnaire

One great writing style for a yoga studio is a self-assessment questionnaire that the reader is invited to fill out. The questionnaire is full of personal questions health to which most people would give negative answers. When the negative answers pile up the implication becomes obvious: become a member of our yoga studio to help alleviate these conditions…

Here are some Yes-or-No questions for this kind of special questionnaire: