One thing we hear independent gym owners complaining about most is not having enough time. Not having enough time to spend with members; not having enough time to spend growing their business and increasing their profit margin – although we did write a blog post on how to do that if you’re interested.
Lately, a lot of CRMs (us included) have been promoting the benefits of automation, and for good reason – companies that automate lead-nurturing emails and offers see a 10% or greater increase in revenue. But automation can mean a lot of different things for a lot of different businesses, so what does it mean to a gym owner?
Dictionary.com defines automation as the technique, method, or system of operating or controlling a process by highly automatic means, as by electronic devices, reducing human intervention to a minimum. The benefit of reducing human intervention? You’ll have more time on your hands to address the annoyances we mentioned at the start of this blog post.
When we talk about automation, we’re talking specifically about two examples of automated communications that can take care of marketing to prospects and help existing members feel loved.
Let us explain.
Marketing to prospects is a perfect example of when automated communications can do the selling for you. When prospects start to sign up to your gym online, there’s always the chance that they may not complete the process. That’s when you would use your CRM of choice (naturally, we recommend ProRight) to set up a workflow to encourage prospects to complete the joining process and make a purchase.
For example:
– One hour after registering, prospects receive an email reminding them to make a purchase. Remember to include your logo and branding so that the prospect instantly recognises who the email is from.
– Two days after registering, if the prospect still hasn’t made a purchase you can send them another email to follow up on the previous one. You can also invite them down to your facility so that they can experience first-hand what your club can offer. Alongside external communication, a task is automatically added to prompt you or your staff to contact prospects that haven’t completed their joining process.
– Seven days after prospects have registered, you can send them a text message that gives them a special offer of a free day-pass that’s only valid for a limited time to persuade the prospect to try out your club properly.
You can even put more communications into the workflow for two weeks, thirty days, sixty days and even ninety days to make sure that the prospect is consistently seeing your business’ name in their inbox.
You can also set up workflow automations for existing members to make sure they’re being taken care of throughout their time as a member of your facility. Here’s an example of an existing member workflow:
– If someone has been a member for a particular period of time, it’s always good to check in with how they’re finding things. You can use automation to send them emails periodically to ask them how they’re getting on.
– If a member hasn’t been into your club for a little while, you can set up a workflow to automatically recognise when a member hasn’t been seen for some time and send an automated email to prompt them to pop in. You can pair this with an automatic task reminder to remind you or your staff to give them a courtesy call.
– A great way to make your members feel like their feedback is valued is to send an automated email after they have attended a class or activity to ask them if they enjoyed their experience.
– If a member’s membership is due to come to an end, you can send them an automated email to remind them to renew so that you can retain them.
– You can use automation workflows to chase unpaid memberships, by setting up an automated text or email notifying your member that they’ve missed a payment or have outstanding payments that need to be rectified. You could even include a link to their Member App so that they can bring all their payments up to date from their smartphone.
It’s clear that automation isn’t going anywhere. With the way that technology is so rapidly improving, more and more mundane tasks will fall victim to automated workflows. If you take the time to look into automating your sales admin, you’ll end up saving a lot of time and earning more money in the long run.
If you fancy learning more about ProRight and how you can use automation to save your business – and yourself – time, you can take a look here!
