When you set up the client acquisition process your club membership marketing, you will be able to manage everything you measure. The fitness marketing insights that you’ll find in the numbers will empower you to improve your sales results and bring new members into your business more efficiently.
It’s much like the way a well-planned training program helps a club member get into the best possible shape. Over time, you gather data and reflect on your performance, improving it from the insights you learn.
Finding The Answers In The Data
Starting out, you’re just glad that you have enough new members signing up to eat every day. However, you want more than that from your enterprise, ultimately. If you’re going to survive as a competitive small gym business, you need to take your improvements where you find them.
One thing that is different when you own a fitness club from just working for someone else is the fact that you don’t have a business unless you can sell your services to people who want fitness. It’s about sales, but also about sorting through the people you meet and finding the right prospects.
Close in on the prospects that have the strongest desire to join, and sell them on signing up. Targeted selling in this way is much less awkward than fighting for sales from people who may not care or need your offerings.
The Fitness Club Client Acquisition Filter Funnel
The basics of client acquisition are about closing sales, sure, but you have to put in a lot of work to get there. If you want your business to survive and thrive, it helps if all of your team who meet the public sell to the best of their ability. Employees will follow your policies and procedures, but it’s up to you to make the system work.
At the highest level, your selling activities must be part of your marketing strategy. If you can learn to acquire customers efficiently, serve them with the best experience and keep them coming back, you’re winning. The starting point is what marketing pros refer to as the marketing and sales funnel.
If You Can Measure It You Can Manage It
You can calculate a number for the number of inquiries converted to customers, which would be the people entering your sales funnel and the new business out of it. That’s great, but such a broad metric doesn’t give you any information about how you can improve your results.
The fitness analogy might be something like comparing the number of days you attend the gym and the corresponding change in your body mass index. It doesn’t say what really worked and what didn’t. The steps in the marketing and sales funnel, and the transitions between each stage reveal useful information about your client acquisition process.
Your Sales Funnel as A Series of Consecutive Conversions
At the top of the funnel, you have touchpoints where you meet potential new members. These may be your website or Facebook page or the front desk in your lobby. Touchpoints are the entrances to your gym business sales funnel, which I’ve written about before, the initial point of contact.
The sales funnel should produce a series of conversions, like steps down from the mouth of the funnel that traps the catch. Measure these conversion rates, and you have even more refined control over the client acquisition process. These are the key performance indicators that put you in control of your gym business destiny.
The Final Sales Opportunity Nudge
Customer conversion works much better when it’s one step that finalizes the process at the end of a sales funnel. Rather than having the public wander in and maybe sign up or not, your investment in marketing goes further if you stage it step-by-step, down through your sales funnel.
It’s remarkable how many principles fitness training and business operations have in common. The ability to extract data from your marketing system to get better results is no exception. When you can measure the progress of your client acquisition prospects through your sales funnel, you can adapt the system to give you more time to do the fun things with your expanding gym membership.
Bibliography
Fagan, Lawrence. A Pro Tip For Small Gym Business Client Acquisition. October 30, 2017. https://blog.gyminsight.com/4705-a-pro-tip-for-small-gym-business-client-acquisition/ (accessed January 3, 2018).
-. What Makes Walk-In Gym Membership Prospects Walk-In? June 1, 2017. https://blog.gyminsight.com/4444-what-makes-walk-in-gym-membership-prospects-walk-in/ (accessed January 20, 2018).
Uhuru. 5 Essential Fitness Marketing KPIs You Should Start Using Now. https://uhurunetwork.com/5-essential-fitness-marketing-kpis/ (accessed January 20, 2018).
Vaughan, Pamela. The Steps You Need to Define the Stages of Your Sales & Marketing Funnel. December 4, 2017. https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33711/the-steps-you-need-to-define-the-stages-of-your-sales-marketing-funnel.aspx (accessed January 20, 2018).