I’ve attended many fitness expo’s, conferences and seminars over the years, and it’s fair to say that most of the conversation around ‘marketing’ and ‘health clubs’ is concerned with customer acquisition, in other words, getting more members to join your health club.
Today, I want to address health club marketing from a slightly different angle so this piece is not about attaining new members (that will come later). Instead, this article will focus on maximising your marketing communications to your current members.
Before we delve deeper into some insightful words of wisdom, I want to initially establish the goals Heath Clubs ought to have in mind when creating their member communications strategy.
There are basically four main goals, and they can be conveniently categorised into the four R’s below;
Retention
Revenue
Referrals
Reputation
I’ll now explain exactly what I mean by each of the 4 R’s so you understand the role they play.
Retention
This is about making members feel connected and immersed with their Health Club so they stay longer over time. Rewarding members for their loyalty will retain members.
Offering an app that allows members to become committed to logging results and seeing their progress over time will retain members.
The overall customer experience your provide each day will retain members.
Revenue
This is about making it easy for members to make purchases of additional products or services.
This can be anything from a towel at reception, to a 12-week transformation package which includes weekly Small Group PT and a nutrition subscription.
Essentially, anything a member can buy falls into this revenue category.
Referrals
This is about making members feeling encouraged to inspire their friends, family and coworkers to join them on their fitness journey too. This may also be considered ‘Customer Acquisition’, but the manner in which it is done, Health Clubs must connect with their existing members as they drive referrals.
Reputation
The final R is all about ensuring that current members think and speak positively about their experience. Ideally, we want members to leave great reviews online and become ambassadors for their Health Club.
On the flipside, any member who expresses dissatisfaction with their Health Club must receive a timely, personal response which leaves them feeling better about their experience.
How the 4 R’s work together
As a Health Club Operator, you’ll appreciate that these R’s don’t work in isolation, but they are all interconnected.
For example, if a member buys a Small Group PT package whereby each session is challenging yet rewarding and promotes the use of an app to log progress, then you will not only be achieving your ‘Revenue’ goals but your ‘Retention’ goals, too.
If that same member then achieves remarkable success in 6 months through a well-devised training program, they may be more likely to shout about HOW they gained such incredible results and in doing so, they may leave a post on their Instagram.
This may firstly pay some acknowledgement to your Health Club which will boost your ‘Reputation’.
This may even motivate some of the members’ Instagram connections to join your Health Club too, thus increasing your ‘Referrals’.
Ultimately, if you are running your Health Club correctly, the majority of your actions should be aimed at achieving the ‘Retention’ goal, even if that may not seem like the prime objective.
It’s no use spamming your members with repeated campaigns to drive referrals and revenue as that will only be counterproductive to your retention. It is this sort of marketing that I want to address today.
So now we all have some appreciation of the 4 R’s and their roles, let’s tackle the elephant in the room!
Being irrelevant is not acceptable
If your gym boasts 300,000 members across the country, this should NOT be viewed as an ‘easy to access’ database of people to hit with information about any product at any moment in time.
If you do still have this belief, then you are supporting ‘scatter-gun marketing.’
A scattergun fires many pellets into the air hoping that one or two might hit the intended target. Most pellets miss and fall harmlessly to the ground.
The scattergun approach in marketing is when you fire out a ‘one size fits all’ broadcast to everyone, in the hope that some people will respond accordingly.
If you exercise scattergun marketing to your members about a new offer on membership to try and drive referrals, some may tell their friends, but the majority of your efforts will be wasted, and actually put members off your brand.
So you might drive some short term membership revenue, but you’ll be having a negative effect on your long term retention, reputation and referrals.
It’s unacceptable to carry out scattergun marketing with your prospects when trying to acquire new members, but if you do this with your members, it’s even worse as you are unknowingly breaking relationships you fought so hard to make.
Accepting the brutal truths
If your goal is to say, drive Personal Training sales, sending the same email, text or facebook ad to every single one of your members, on the whole, will fail.
You may get lucky and you may see an uplift in sales on that day and think ‘Yes, the campaign worked, let’s repeat it!’, but you need to get sight of the potential harm you’ve caused to your members who are not interested.
You need to look at unsubscribes, non-openers, non-clickers and non-purchasers.
If people aren’t engaging, let alone buying from you, then it’s more than likely they are switching off.
If members are zoning out from your irrelevant marketing, then they won’t be receptive to future communications when you might need them most.
‘Surely every member will be intrigued by a Personal Training flash sale?’, I hear you ask?
No, no they won’t. I know it sounds painful to hear that, but it’s true.
‘But, but, but, why would they join a health club in the first place if they don’t want to achieve some form of goal which a PT can help them with?’.
It’s time to grow up, spam doesn’t work
Stop living in fantasy land. Stop making bold statements like the above to convince yourself.
Stop being tempted by another 10-second splurge with the scattergun, as you’ll be the one shooting yourself in the foot.
Dissect your data to your advantage
By having a wealth of online and in club data available, it will allow you to execute much more meaningful personal campaigns.
If you are wanting to run a campaign to drive Personal Training sales among your members, you should firstly look at all your current members who have bought a PT session in the last 6 months.
Are there any more significant behavioural characteristics that connect these members, other than- they all joined your health club, once upon a time?
You may find that, of those who have previously bought Personal Training;
– A large majority expressed an interest in Personal Training when they joined. -The ‘price’ of membership was never an objection made by the majority of these members in the sales process.
– Many had already taken a free Personal Training Consultation and were positive about the experience afterwards.
– Many were promoters (NPS) of your brand at the time of buying.
– Many had expressed an interest in Personal Training independently by clicking on certain buttons within your app.
– Many had held recent conversations about Personal Training with a virtual ChatBot.
– None of them subscribed to two Personal Training packages at the same time.
I’m not saying that this is what you WILL find because every health club is different, but if your data does show findings like these, you would be better focusing your ‘Personal Training FLASH SALE’ on people who have expressed similar behaviour, not your entire member base.
Pay respect to the right channels
The most common digital channels are Emails, Social Media Ads, SMS text messaging and Push Notifications via mobile app. Thankfully, you can use really effective personalisation across all these channels.
The true art to personalisation is understanding which member is likely to interact with which channel.
By analysing the opens, non-opens, click-throughs and unsubscribes via email campaigns, you can see who is likely to engage on this channel or not.
Examing and scrutinizing the common behavioural data of these people may be a worthwhile activity to predict future email audiences.
Similarly, by analysing the click-through rates and opt-out rates of SMS text messaging, you can see who is likely to be engaged and disengaged with this platform.
If someone doesn’t open emails but clicks text messages then there is no point in wasting your efforts on sending them emails. Conversely, if a person clicks emails but has never clicked on a text then there is little point in keeping them on your SMS subscriber list.
By looking at key data on facebook and instagram ads such as age, gender, device, relevancy score, reach, frequency, website visitors and conversions you will start to see if there is any wastage occurring on your ads. At this point, you can adjust your audience age, gender and device.
Alternatively, and perhaps more wisely, you can tell Facebook or Instagram to only remarket to people who have viewed your advert for a certain amount of time, or clicked on the advert.
If your members are clicking on emails about a particular campaign, they may not need to see your advert on FB as well. Eliminating such members from your audience may be more cost-effective, unless you purposely want the member to see your advert across various channels. That’s up to you and the decide what is best!
Some members may well enjoy interacting with all your platforms, others won’t.
By having a system in place to identify who will engage on what platform, you will be in a better place to execute personalised marketing.
Final words on member marketing
The 4R’s must be the lifeblood of your member marketing communications. In this blog, I’ve really offered advice on how to get your ‘revenue’ focused marketing right.
Fundamentally, you will know you have the struck the right balance if your efforts which seek to drive such secondary spend, will not damage your retention, referrals and reputation in the future.
If you are putting the other 3 R’s at risk, then ask yourself whether the short term achievement of heightened sales is really worth it.