Online fitness is an interesting concept for a gym. It takes a locally utilized product and turns it into a nationwide or, possibly, a worldwide consumable. It can, ideally, expand your audience well beyond a single zip code. In a sense, it’s as if you’re franchising your own brand. A daunting idea, no doubt. If you’ve risen to the challenge and now offer live streaming, or on-demand through your health club, what steps are needed to grow this business investment? Figure out how customers find you. Intelivideo, a technology company specializing in enabling subscription video businesses, collected data in the [...]
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Don’t lose out on selling a new customer! When a prospect first walks into your health club, they’ve thought about joining for six months. They’re scared and skittish, ready to leap at any chance to say “let me sleep on it,” or even just turn around and leave, while congratulating themselves on their bravery and effort. Don’t let that happen. Here are five secrets to a great gym tour that are sure to increase sales and create clients excited to join your club. 1. Introduce yourself and ask their name. Use it throughout the tour. Memorize it. 2. Slow down. [...]
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What if I told you there was $500 in monthly gym memberships sitting in your computer? As an owner of a studio, would you search for it? Well, it’s right there — in the cancelled customer column. Let’s look at how we can bring these old friends back into the fold. Make a Plan to Contact Everyone knows turnover is high in the gym business, and lately that number’s crawled upwards. However cancelled and frozen accounts are a golden opportunity. These customers signed up once. They know your club. Now it’s up to you and your sales team to rekindle [...]
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Health clubs are in a pickle right now. Not only are they struggling under a load of new regulations and expectations, but they must figure out how to lure clients back into the gym -where the money is made. Just how can gyms rebuild faith in their brand, their facility, their people? Is there a roadmap to follow? Here are the facts In truth, gyms are not petri dishes of disease. Early non-peer reviewed research shows minimal transmission of COVID-19 at gyms when proper distancing and hygiene methods are in place. The Oslo-based study randomized 3,764 people split into two [...]
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What if every gym employee approached their job like a salesperson? How would that affect your health club's businessevery day? Would it help or hurt customer retention? Why would you even want to train employees in basic sales techniques? Wouldn't that become annoying? Probably not. See, sales is not just about selling something. It's an attitude. Employees are a core component of any marketing strategy.They reflect the composition of your gym, your target market.They are the face of who you are as a business and you hired them because of their skills, personality, and ability to relate to customers. So [...]
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As the owner of a gym, drawing in new members is a topic that will always be near the front of your mind. Successful business owners never truly stop marketing. Over the years, you have probably run your fair share of gym promotions, membership discounts, and group signup events. Marketing strategies like these often - for good reason - make up the backbone of gym advertisement campaigns. However, sticking to these tried and true methods can feel a little stale after a while. Not to mention, if you neglect the technical and online sides of your marketing campaign, you are [...]
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If your gym operates solely on income you bring in from client memberships, you could be leaving a whole lot of money on the table. Opportunities for Alternate Revenue Streams you can operate from your gym or your website are nearly endless. Passive (Or Almost-Passive) Income The least time-consuming revenue opportunities will earn money for your business with little to no effort or time spent on your part once the initial setup is complete. Truly passive income is difficult to generate, but it is entirely possible to build low-effort revenue streams into your business. From simple to complex, you can [...]
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So, Should You Pursue Alternate Income Streams or No? There comes a limit to the number of memberships you can sell, which is a good thing. You hit the ceiling for your single gym it means you've maxed out the potential for monthly subscriptions. To go further, you have to sell more to the same people with alternative fitness club revenue streams. There're some alternatives to this alternative, but they may not be the best choices. You can do the big-box corporate brand shuffle, which means over-selling memberships and hoping they don't all turn up. Instead, you have to connect [...]
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Promote Your Fitness Club with Private Label Branding Nothing brings credibility to a small fitness club like a unique fitness concept built around a strong brand. As long as you have a robust gym management software system as a foundation, you start to develop streams of income that complement your client programming. It also helps to have your brand on merchandise and products for sale in your gym's store or front desk. You don't need much floor space for these high-margin sales. Now, you can even add custom merchandise and e-commerce pages to your club website with ease. This is [...]
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Glittering Membership Management Performance Indicators If you can do things that keep and reduce change to the minimum your club might just be on the path to finding diamonds. Retention is the key concept of club management. It brings your small gym business dreams to life. That is a constant, but, unless your retention rate is one-hundred percent, it means change is the only constant. Setting Retention to Maximum If you have a limit to your membership management capacity, the longer members stick around, the less you have to invest in recruiting new ones. The difference is like that of [...]
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The Principle of Winning For all of the modern technology in the world, the principles that make the foundations of business are as accurate as they are old. While we designed the Insight Gym Management Software Suite to be a tool that will drive efficiency and profitability, it does so by the fundamentals of business management. One of the most fundamental concepts in business is this: Nothing happens until somebody sells something. Selling is the most fundamental principle in business, and much of everything else follows from it directly. If you can transform the culture of your gym into a [...]
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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 [...]
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Let's Talk About Success What does it mean to have a waiting list? First, you should be thrilled that your fitness club is so in demand! If you have a strict upper limit on capacity such as class spaces adding new members beyond that limit can be a dangerous game. When your gym is overcrowded, service delivery tanks and cancellations skyrocket. Keep A Steady Buzz with A Waiting List You might even want to have a contingency plan that includes cutting off new memberships and waitlisting applicants to prevent chaos. If your gym gets overcrowded or the staff overwhelmed, service [...]
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Categories for client programming must align to sales goals and be complementary to one another. After all, the most fundamental activity in any business is selling. In a people-business like fitness, it's as true as ever; gym business owners have to do some selling to survive. Fortunately, you don't have to start again from scratch to get every sale. The secret is that, as your gym members come to you on a regular basis you have a warm and receptive audience for your products and services. Your Client Programming And Sales Audit If you have never done such an exercise, [...]
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There's not much that a little creative ingenuity can't overcome. The fitness industry is one where you can get a start with or without vast sums of capital to invest. While it might seem easier to do with truckloads of financial backing, there are plenty of things you can do to get started or at least boost your business to the next level. 1. Be The Expert Focus on what you do best. That thing that you're most confident about and for which you have the most experience, this is what management gurus call your core competence. The knowledge that [...]
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