The Importance of Email to Your Fitness Business
In the world of Gyms and Fitness Clubs, your day is usually consumed with signing up members, checking them in, maintaining your equipment, handling the books, monitoring your employees, and all the other minute by minute activity that goes with running your facility, that many of you don’t have time to do promotions or stay in touch with your members to keep your business growing.
Now we all know that word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective marketing tool, but you can’t always rely on it. In that case, email marketing is the second best way to build your business and you can control it. But unless you really know how to use Mailchimp, Constant Contact or Microsoft Word Mail Merge, the whole idea of contacting your members on a frequent basis with email can be mind-numbing in its complexity.
We have some good news. Most facilities have upgraded their business to include one of the new Gym / Member Management Software packages and a few of these packages have some kind of email function that you can use to contact your clients. One of the best email features on the market today can be found in Online Business Manager Gym / Member Management Software by Money Movers, Inc.
If your interest is stirred with this information or if you are looking to add software or update your current package, let me share some of the Email features that are part of OBM.
First, OBM has a built-in function that allows you to give all your clients the option to receive emails or texts from you. It’s a simple switch in the administrator panel that allows you to turn the email function on or off for each member at their request. We also have online contracts that you can call up while your new member is signing up and we have included a simple “Authorization and Consent to Receive Text, Email & Pre-recorded Phone Messages” that gives you their permission.
Next, OBM has a built-in text and graphics editor where you can design your own email templates. The editor allows you to use HTML markup language, upload graphics, and edit the template right inside the software. Our editor also allows you to obtain pre-designed email templates and insert the HTML code and the graphics into the editor. There are a large number of email template companies that design professional-looking templates, and they are easy to find.
Another feature of OBM is the ability to filter your membership to do targeted marketing to selected groups. Think of how simple your life will be when you can apply a filter and produce a list of everyone in your club that is having a birthday, and then send them a special discounted birthday training offer. Or call up a list of all the seniors, or all the members who had reached a certain anniversary in their membership. Our email system also specifically contacts those who have overdue accounts.
An additional feature that many packages have added is live online classes using ZOOM. But if you don’t have an email function, you have no way to contact your members to let them know what is available. The OBM software allows the trainer to schedule a class and put it up on a public calendar which can then be shown on a website, Facebook page, and inside the member phone App. The member purchases the class, goes into their App and books the class. They can tell the trainer whether they will take the class in person or online. The first person that signs up for the ZOOM online class creates a unique meeting inside the club’s ZOOM account. The OBM software then emails the member an invitation and a class link, and sends an email with the meeting code and a link to the trainer. Everyone who signs up for the class, whether in person or online, gets an email giving them the class information. We designed this feature for clubs that need another income stream during the current lockdowns, which have hit the fitness industry harder than most businesses.
Remember, the object of your business is to enroll members and then to keep giving them opportunities to take part in all the programs you have going on at your facility. A health club is not just about selling a membership and then checking them in and out, it’s about personal training, classes, health seminars, dietary information and much more. Successful e-mail campaigns have one thing in common: giving something of value to the recipient, otherwise, your message is just spam. E-mail is still one of the best, and most inexpensive, paths to conversion because when you deliver your message into a person’s inbox, it makes things personal and convenient for them.
So if you are thinking about Gym / Member Management software, be sure it offers you a complete internal email/text CRM feature. And one of the best is Online Business Manager by Money Movers, Inc. In your business, time is money and having a quick and easy way to contact your members every day is one of the best ways to improve your bottom line.
Patrick Craig has worked in the Marketing Industry for the past twenty years. He is a published author and has written extensively about the fitness industry, particularly the gym software aspect of it. He has been with Money Movers, Inc. for the last six years where he serves as the Marketing and Operations Manager, web designer and coder, and maintains the custom websites Money Movers, Inc. develops for their Online Business Manager gym software clients.
