Insights That Nudge Your Membership
If you are an independent fitness business owner, it always helps to find the simple hacks that get exceptional results. Let’s look at some awesome hacks to analyze your operational data in search of small changes that give you big rewards. There is even a new scientific way of thinking about customer behavior that might help find the points where a nudge will get your members to get the fitness results they signed up for in the first place.
Hacking Members With Nudges
The latest thinking in economics (bear with me) is about applying common sense and how people behave when confronted with choices, in finance and other parts of their lives. Behavioral economics is about finding the factors that motivate people to do the things that are good for them. Small business owners of every description can use the basics of the science to get some leverage on their customers.
Behavioral economics (BE) goes something like this: People make decisions, not based on logic or rationality, but by emotions, predispositions, and repeating what worked in the past. You can apply the principles when you’re selling memberships, upgrades, or merchandise.
Some Things To Read About Behavioral Economics
This list is short because small business owners never have much time to read. You might consider the audiobook alternative; you can download audiobooks from sellers like Amazon and the Apple iTunes Store.
- This article in The Economist gives some examples of how you can use BE
- Freakonomics is a best-selling introduction to the topic – ISBN 978-0060731335
- The Undoing Project from the author of Money Ball and The Big Short – ISBN 978-0393254594
Finding The Points To Apply The Pressure
Some of the Principles include an understanding that people tend to take the least painful option. Use this fact to your advantage and frame the choice you want members to make less painful. In selling situations, give members a default choice that’s something they would want.
When the default is not enough, and your client has to make multiple choices, he or she’s going to get overwhelmed quickly, which is another point in itself; consumers who have too many choices tend to make no choice at all. There’s no better option in the eyes of consumers than free. Of course, that decision might come with benefits to you also, such as free if they give you their email addresses.
Behavioral Economics For Fitness Club Members
The reporting systems included in the Insight Cloud Gym Management Software Service suite fits the role of analytics in the gym industry. We have tailored the package to give you the information that pertains directly to club management, membership management, and delivering the revenue into your bank accounts.
The information that you gather can give you hints about what will improve your revenue. There is no one ultimate solution; you have to deal with the market, human nature, technology and a host of other things to figure out what will win the best results for your gym.
The term analytics is a popular buzzword these days, and of course, there is a reason for it. Having a dashboard of all the essential information on your computer screen, tablet, or even on your smartphone makes decisions and troubleshooting into simple activities.
In-store analytics tools make it easier to deploy the range of products and services that work well together, the ones that maximize the selling potential for your gym. We’re now getting to the point that such systems are not just available and affordable, but to where they’re the standard that you can’t afford to neglect.
Nothing Says Nudge Me Like Joining a Gym
Of course, BE is not just for tuning up your business model, you can use them to help your members get better performance results by nudging them too. In the world of fitness training, this might even be the most powerful application of behavioral economics there is.
You can discover hidden hacks that raise your gym business game by analyzing your reports through a lens of BE and testing new policies, procedures, products and services for improvements. If you can learn to read the details of your analytics and experiment to find the points to nudge your members in the right direction, you’ll achieve better results and make your competitors look to you in amazement and wonder how you did it.
Bibliography
Fagan, Lawrence. Gym Membership Selling And Overcoming Objections. September 11, 2016. https://blog.gyminsight.com/3934-gym-membership-selling-and-overcoming-objections/ (accessed December 13, 2016).
Jain, Priyanka. 5 Behavioral Economics Principles Marketers Can’t Afford to Ignore. March 1, 2013. https://www.forbes.com/sites/piyankajain/2013/03/01/5-behavioral-economics-principles-for-marketeers/#f5fe5223c802 (accessed April 9, 2017).
Scheck, Steven. A Comprehensive Overview of In-Store Analytics for Retailers. April 6, 2017. https://smallbiztrends.com/2017/04/retail-in-store-analytics.html (accessed April 9, 2017).
The Economist. Nudge nudge, think think. March 24, 2012. https://www.economist.com/node/21551032 (accessed April 9, 2017).
Welch, Ned. A marketer’s guide to behavioral economics. February 2010. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/a-marketers-guide-to-behavioral-economics (accessed April 9, 2017).