When running a successful fitness business, marketing, communications, and customer service can be pivotal to ensuring that your clients are happy. Some factors that can go into this include helping them feel welcome, experience a benefit, and be part of a community, which are keys to unlocking positive customer experiences and continued business. But what goes into those elements includes a comprehensive list of interaction points, micro experiences, tactical planning, and properly implementing a customer-focused business model.
With this business structure in mind, we will explore three critical email types that you should send to your client base to enhance your customer experience and enable a new lead acquisition channel within your fitness facility. In this post, we will focus on three core themes: Welcome, Praise/Inform, and Ask. But before we do that, let’s discuss why we are focusing on emails specifically.
Why Email Marketing is Important for Fitness Facilities
If you’re reading this blog and think emails are not worthwhile, we implore you to keep reading. For many fitness facility owners operating with a gym and studio management software system in place, you already know the tremendous efficiencies it can deliver in your daily business operations. With these time and effort savings in mind, consider your marketing efforts. Do you focus on utilizing, capitalizing on, and optimizing the tools at your disposal?
Email is a fantastic tool in your gym owner marketing toolbox as it typically involves information you already have but might not be employing. Normally, when members sign up or book a new client, you collect their contact information; one of those fields is email. With this in mind, it makes sense to invest time and energy upfront to establish savvy and effective ways to leverage this information to help boost your business operations and prioritize automation to reduce additional tasks for you or your staff.
Additionally, emails are a proactive measure that can serve as an additional point of contact and interaction with your client base. They also open an extra line of contact with your customers to you, your staff, or your business. For those engaging with the email content, this may further their overall brand loyalty or increase their feeling of belonging.
Where to Start with Sending Emails
As we mentioned above, starting to send emails for your fitness business isn’t all that hard. Assuming that you have gym management software or collect email contact information, the biggest question is typically, “How do you send the emails?” If you are running a smaller studio-style business, your studio management software may already have it pre-built in. But for those looking for additional options, you may be able to find free or affordable software for this.
When picking a marketing email delivery service, there are a few things to recognize:
Once you’ve established your email lists, and automation, and are ready to start developing your email content, it is wise to examine your gym’s marketing campaign efforts and consider how best to integrate your email marketing. To begin, we will look at three areas that make a lot of sense for many fitness business owners just starting out.
Welcome – Introductory Emails
A welcome email is one of the most practical email types you can implement into your business procedures. Not only can these typically be automated, but they also become an instantaneous point of interaction right after a customer purchases a membership to ensure they’ve made a good investment.
Welcome emails allow you to greet your new member while acknowledging their investment and trust in your fitness facility. Additionally, these emails give you the opportunity to make a statement about your business. Points that can be beneficial to address in a welcome email include:
This email is critical because, many times, customers can have a sense of regret after making a purchase. An immediate welcome email helps combat buyer's remorse and helps solidify their choice to improve their life through fitness.
Additionally, this message helps show your unique selling proposition, remind them of your value, and push them to utilize their purchase. This last point is vital to retaining the customer after the initial investment. Multiple interaction points are needed, especially early on, to help members feel welcomed, part of the community, and invested in the facility.
You can add more interactive elements to this email to help drive interest and engagement with your content further. If you have a Facebook group for your members or clients, send the link to join the community and chat. If you are savvy with video, giving a personal tour or “meet and greet” with staff to help familiarize them with some regular faces and places can help new people feel more comfortable faster. Again, the goal is to welcome them in and help them succeed.
Inform and Praise – Update and Check-In Emails
As mentioned above, interaction points are critical to customer retention. Often, gyms and fitness facilities will build member interaction points into their operations—such as a staff member greeting people at the door (in and out) and asking them semi-personalized questions. Again, email can be a utility to help serve this goal. Two common types of emails for this purpose are praise and inform-style messaging.
Let’s look at inform-style emails, as owners commonly implement them. Typically manifesting as a newsletter or facility updates email, this message type focuses on facility news like holiday schedules, upcoming closures or events, member or staff spotlights, and even recent upgrades.
These emails are a great option to roll out within facilities as they help keep everyone aware of important information and show value-added enhancements. Additionally, they can still serve as an interaction point for your members. One point to consider is still building your branding or facility’s personality into the mix and driving a “next step” through a strategic call-to-action (such as an upcoming community outing, event, or new program roll-out).
The other type of email is the praise type. Before going too far into this one, it’s worth pointing out that newsletters are typically not automated but built into a template and then scheduled to send them in bulk to members. Praise emails, on the other hand, can (and should) be heavily automated.
So, what are praise emails exactly? The idea is to focus on getting touch points for your clients at critical times during their customer experience journey. These moments can include their first week of consistent classes taken, ten sessions, a six-month client/member, their birthday, or even a week without visits. While these might sound simple enough, some of you may wonder how you would accomplish this consistently, especially when you factor in tracking all that information. And the answer to that is automation! Utilizing collected information at sign-up and integrating your management software can allow you to unlock emails that auto-trigger, populate, and send customized emails.
Ask – Referral and Testimonial-Focused Emails
The final email type is an ask to your happy customers, but before you can do this, you must ensure you have an established referral system for your facility. The email itself needs to be straightforward, to the point, and have an apparent call to action: Please refer us to your friends/family, give us a testimonial, or leave us a rating online.
Customers seldom follow up on these seemingly simple tasks once you are not top-of-mind (i.e., the moment they leave your facility). So make a point to email them and directly ask, explain specifically the instructions of what you need them to do, and then enable them to do it by making it simple (i.e., referral links, a form to send testimonials/photos, or a direct link to the online review channel of choice).
It’s worth noting that you can add elements of an ask as a reminder within your other emails. Implementing points like “Refer Us” or “Rate Us On Google” to the bottom of your correspondence and automated messages is one such way.
Wrap-Up
Whether you are looking to grow your client list through additional referrals or build a more engaged and retained customer base, emails can be a useful tool. By implementing these three basic types of messages into your marketing strategy, you can help ensure you are taking calculated and strategic steps to grow your business.