Getting Organized Is The Key To Winning
Organizing your gym members, prospective future members, and members at the edge of retention, is much easier if you have an automated system to manage the process. It’s one thing to have a list of customers and something completely different to have a system that maintains your contacts with them and reminds you of important dates and alerts you to changes.
In fitness clubs, Gym Insight is your best tool to stay on top of the customer juggling game. It is a specialized package that, among other things, does the parts of customer relationship management or CRM without being expensive enterprise software.
Connecting Selling and Building Relationships
CRM applications are prominent in every industry. If you’ve worked for a big-box fitness company or any other type of corporation, you may have experienced how they use Salesforce or a similar CRM package to work with more people and close more sales transactions.
One of the most important things that a CRM will help you with is getting the most out of each potential customer. Used effectively, it will extend your relationships and make your customers more valuable to you over more extended periods.
Software-as-a-Service apps like Zoho, Greenrope, and Hubspot provide many useful CRM features. For example, if you sign up for Hubspot, you can expect to find a whole ecosystem of support and training, at a price. If you want to know about online marketing Hubspot’s website has all types of information that will help you get the most from it.
Email List Management as CRM
When you apply off-the-shelf CRMs to gym business management, there are a couple of problems. First, they cost too much for new and lean fitness clubs. A system that was designed to support big deals made by a corporate sales force is not the best for a people-business that gets by on relatively small monthly payments and pushing additional purchases.
Email marketing services like Constant Contact and Active Campaign focus on sending content to prospects and promoting online sales. Again, these companies offer excellent general service products, but at a price. They are only a fraction of what you need to work directly with people in fitness and maximize the value of gym memberships for both sides of the card.
How Do You Track Gym Memberships?
Of course, for many years, managing contacts with customers in any industry was done on paper with pencils, and if you made a mistake, it could cause all kinds of confusion. If you still use spreadsheets to record your memberships and three-by-five cards to track your clients, things can get out of shape quickly.
You may be familiar with applications that help you keep track of your prospects and customers. The Insight Software Suite for Gym Management includes the ability to work with customers and sales in ways that are tailored to running a fitness club.
Relationship Starts at Reputation
The links you build with your customers are critical to your gym business success. The way that you relate to them and the experiences you create will reflect back in your retention rate and in the lifetime value of your customers. Managing customers is a cycle that begins before you even meet them.
Your marketing and reputation will reach suitable future members first-hand through your investments in the tools that support the right marketing and providing excellent service. You’ll also have a second-hand effect of word-of-mouth praise spread by happy customers.
The Right Tools to Beat The Street
If you are in a competitive fitness marketplace, with gyms and yoga studios lining both sides of the street, you need an organizational advantage. Too many gyms mean that, yes, the charismatic, sales-led clubs have an initial advantage, but a higher customer retention rate matters at least as much.
Any additional monthly membership payments will add directly to the lifetime value of each customer. Additionally, if you can raise the level of the experience for each customer, it will encourage them to purchase more premium products and training sessions.
The critical point is when you become aware of prospective customers, what you do to draw them into your sphere of influence and begin the process of converting them to customers. You can do that much more efficiently by leveraging your efforts through organization and automation with management software like Gym Insight, which we designed specifically for the gym business.
Concluding Statement
If you can do the hard stuff more consistently, keep organized, have a better retention rate, and higher lifetime value, then you will be placed to win the battle in the long term.
Once you organize and automate your connections with prospects and members you don’t have to worry about losing information and missing opportunities. Instead, you’re on the way to building customer relationships for the win long-term win.
Bibliography
Fagan, Lawrence. How Client Acquisition Is Like Client Programming For Marketing. January 22, 2018. https://blog.gyminsight.com/4846-how-client-acquisition-is-like-client-programming-for-marketing/ (accessed September 6, 2018).
Ye, Wendy. Don’t Use a CRM? Here Are 4 Reasons Why It Might Be The Solution You Need. September 18, 2018. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/crm-benefits (accessed January 24, 2019).