I am quickly growing my email list using Zest resources

I trained at CNM in London, have been qualified for just under two years, and I joined Zest4life about seven months ago. Prior to working as a nutritionist, I was a careers consultant. I worked for a law school and used to organise a lot of employer events, dealing with lots of HR departments that I’m trying to utilise now!

Having said that, a recent corporate contract came through my husband. At the beginning of the year I was running a free sugar-free challenge using the wonderful Zest marketing materials that we have access to as members. I was trying to promote the challenge in groups that I’m part of, and happened to ask my husband whether he could forward details to the wellbeing team within his company - a large, international insurance company. In his team was a lady who is in the organisation's menopause support group; she was interested and sent it on to the right people who then advertised the challenge for me.

She has been great. She took part in the sugar free challenge, and then joined a paid gut transformation programme that I was running. While she was doing that we spoke about doing a paid session for the company’s menopause support group which has about a thousand women in it around the world. I did it via Zoom during women’s health week and had about two hundred people on the call.

As part of my contract with them, I did the talk, provided them with an e-book (again using the Zest resources so it didn’t take me long at all to put together) and ran the sugar-free challenge for the organisation the following week. That was great because I had about 60 people sign up, I had some really lovely feedback from it and she was happy for me to promote other courses that I was running, my 1-2-1 work etc.

It’s been great to have it as a springboard to other paid things that I’m offering. I’m running a happy hormones group programme soon and I will be able to email details to these new people on my mailing list as well. One of my goals this year was to build my mailing list, and everyone that downloaded the e-book or signed up for the sugar-free challenge is now on it. I think I got about 130 new people in May!

I was doing Zest Mentor Antonia Maguire’s Corporate Masterclasses at the same time that this was all happening, so it was really helpful to be able to ask questions and share experiences with other Zest members.

Most recently, as a spin-off from the menopause talk I’m doing another talk with the same company. They have another group called ‘Men as Allies’ which is focused on supporting gender equality within the organisation. Along with a men’s health GP, I’m going to be speaking on the subject of the andropause, and how to support it with nutrition. I’m really looking forward to it, and once again I’ve used resources from Zest. Although I’m not running a programme for men, I’m hoping that I might get some discovery calls for 1-2-1 work off the back of it, and boost my mailing list again!

Melanie Flood, Nutritional Therapist and Health Coach