What You Need To Know
- Save time and don’t forget to communicate with every client.
- Automated emails can (and should) be used for more than just marketing.
- When setup intelligently, will improve your retention, service levels and bottom line.
- Register for a free webinar here. (Tuesdays at 1:00PM PST)
Gym owners, we feel your pain. We know there’s 1000 things to manage on any given day, and often times the most important things get neglected because you’re busy dealing with the chalk bucket someone tipped over.
One of those critical components that often gets overlooked in the day to day chaos of running a gym is communicating with your clients. As important as it is - it rarely gets done effectively and equitably.
Automation to the Rescue!
Thankfully, many of the paths of communication that need to take place can be automated. Read on to see how a system as simple and cost effective as Mailchimp ($10/month starting plans) can make an immediate impact on your bottom line.
First Things First
- Your lists must have meaningful merge fields.
- You must have a way to automate updating of these merge fields.
For automation to work, you must have these two things. Your business management platform should push key data to your lists, in a meaningful way that you can automate.
Just The Concepts For This Post
Today, I’m only going to discuss the concepts. In future posts, I’ll go into detail on how to implement each of these automation processes.
1. Lead Funneling
One of the most important aspects of your fitness business will be attracting new potential clients and educating them on why they should do business with you.
Lead funnel automation will look something like this:
- Determine your perfect client. If you have not already done so, download our Perfect Client Generation Template
- Attract leads using a “Lead Magnet” and marketing. A “lead magnet” is simply something that is appealing that you can market and attract your client.
- Drop Leads into a lead email campaign. As leads redeem your offer, drop them on a mailing list that will automatically start to send them content that will either entice them to find out more information about you, or nurture them to become clients.
2. Beginner Onboarding Series
Nurturing is a big part of any business. In ours, it is critical to take a newcomer, bring them through whatever beginner program you run, and turn them into a full member. An automated email series that is centered around your beginners would do just this.
Torrance CrossFit does this amazingly well by automating an email that is kicked off by each checkin of a beginner. Every time a beginner checks in for their first 10 classes - an automated email is triggered to send off information to really funnel the new person thru the beginner process.
3. Client Interest Discovery and Development
Getting to understand your clients is key. As they are members at your gym longer, their interests and goals might change. Understanding that is important.
Setup an automated email that sends off over a longer timeframe of a client. Each time asking them to identify which (if any) things are important to them. As the client identifies new things, you can drop them into other automated email channels, or bring them in for an upsell or a change of membership.
“By asking our clients for things that interest them via automated emails, we are able to create a custom individual experience” states Carl Neidholdt of CrossFit Cerberus. “Goals and education specific to their needs increases the rate of individual client progress and results.”
Incidentally this topic was so meaningful to Carl that he took time out of his honeymoon to talk to us about this. That’s playing with fire…
4. Significant Event Messages
This one is such a no-brainer I almost left it off. Come up with a plan for significant events and automate messages around that. You’d be surprised how far a simple birthday message or a “Congratulations on your 100th Checkin” message can go.
Caveat: Don’t be stupid and send them “Happy 3rd Anniversary” emails when they quit your gym 2 years ago. I’m still getting those emails from my first gym and every year it reminds me how amateur that looks.
5. Exit Interviews
We all lose members. It’s a part of the business. But when they leave you can get some value out of that by sending an exit interview. By asking them key questions and engaging them in a dialog around why they might have left, one of three things will happen:
- You will re-engage them and save that membership.
- You will find out a critical failure in your business that you can evaluate fixing.
- You will not hear back from there, which is just as good as never sending the email.
This Is The Tip of the Iceberg
These are a few of the ways you can immediately impact your business by implementing automated messaging to your clients. But this is literally just the tip of the iceberg.
If you’d like to learn more about how PushPress can help facilitate your email and communication automation using our industry leading Mailchimp Integrations.
Free Webinar
We’re offering a free webinar to go over how you can leverage Mailchimp for a very cost effective and simple way to setup your own automation.
The webinar will run every Tuesday at 1:00PM PST for the next 8 weeks and is limited to 5 participants per week. If you would like to join, register below!
