Customer research is a crucial task when opening up a gym.
It allows you to get to the heart of what your members want, allowing you to serve them better. You can use customer research data to guide your positioning in the fitness industry as well as set prices and help determine your offering in the first instance. However, many clubs glaze over customer research in favour of more exciting steps like ordering equipment.
If customer research isn’t something you’ve actively done before, it’s never too late to start. We’re sharing our advice on how you can get started with your research and how to use your findings to grow your new venture.
What do you want to learn from your research?
The first step in conducting customer research at your club is to determine what you’d like to learn from it. Are you wanting to gain further insight into your customer demographics? Perhaps you want to learn more about your members’ buying habits? You can even use customer research to pinpoint new opportunities for growth so that you can stay ahead of the rising costs we’re all experiencing at the moment.
Another powerful aspect of customer research is being able to confirm where your members found out about you; was it on social media? Through word of mouth? Getting clear on your most effective marketing channels allows you to invest more time and money into them, helping to grow your membership base.
Choose your CRM tool.
Now it’s time to decide which tools you’re going to use to complete your research. You’ll need a secure CRM that allows you to collect and store your research data, as well as something that allows you to analyse the information you’ve collected.
To give you an example, ClubRight offers several different features that allow you to conduct, store and analyse customer data effectively. The online joining process enables you to ask new members where they heard about your club and automatically generates a report on the different marketing sources, so there’s no extra work for you to complete.
You can also use the communication tools – automated email, text and push notifications – to engage with your customers and learn more about them. You can also use the Activity Attendance report to establish which of your activities are most popular, giving you a deeper understanding of your customers’ buying habits.
Act on your findings.
The final step in customer research is to act on your findings. It’s easy to get lost in the data and focus too heavily on organising your new-found knowledge, but you need to come up with actionable next steps that lead to operational improvements. Think increased growth, improved efficiency and greater retention.
For instance, once you’ve identified all members that park their car in your onsite car park by collecting their registration plate using Custom Fields, you can search through to see just how many people use the car park. From here you could decide to expand your car park to make your club more accessible to your members; improving their experience.
Customer research should be completed regularly, usually once a year. But if your CRM offers automatically generated reports, you could run them monthly since it’s no additional work on your part. Doing so will allow you to plan more successfully for the future and adapt faster to changing spending habits.
Want access to powerful reporting, seamless customer communication and advanced search features? Speak to us on +44 (0)203 884 9777 or book your free trial to see our solution up close.
