It is incredibly difficult to accurately predict how the market will respond when clubs can safely reopen. Will prospects have lost interest? Will members have created new habits? Will they still be put off knowing that gyms have been high risk from the beginning? Or perhaps will lots of them have regressed from their goals and jump at the chance to return? It remains to be seen, and so all clubs ought to prepare themselves with a strategy to generate leads and drive sales in order to recover. These pointers are certainly not exhaustive but be sure that you have all of these covered to begin with.
1. Contact all existing prospects ASAP
Bear in mind that you can still call prospects that have opted out of marketing, so long as you approach it in a certain way – i.e. opening by simply informing them that you have reopened, and then asking if they would like to hear about your club then and there, and opt in to further marketing. If they opt in to hearing more, find out more about their goals, and how these have been impacted by COVID19. Reassure them of additional safety and hygiene measures you have introduced, and what the latest government advice is, as well as communicating your service offer clearly. Don’t forget to make use of ClubWise’s Campaign Manager module to send email and SMS campaigns to prospects that have opted into marketing too.
Send an essential service campaign overriding marketing opt outs to all members and prospects. You are able to do this so long as its content is strictly a reopening notice and does not constitute marketing communications. You can instruct ClubWise to set the campaign up to override GDPR choices by logging a request with the campaign title to [email protected].
2. Promote and engage through FitSense
For any clubs that use the FitSense Member app, make sure that you are consistently promoting its features so that your members continue to be engaged. Don’t underestimate the power of word-of-mouth (don’t rely on it either), as you are far more likely to generate leads and sales through referrals when your existing members are achieving their goals. Features like the Body Composition Analysis and FitSense Rewards can make the difference to ensure members are more likely to recommend your club to someone they know. FitSense is a fantastic source of differentiation from other clubs that will be competing for the same leads, so ensure that its functions are communicated with your prospects in your campaigns and sales calls too!
3. Promos, guest passes, open days… Get creative!
Aside from campaigns, active CRM and social media management, you may wish to create promotional tools like these that can generate new leads. For example, if you were to setup an open day, you could encourage prospects to register their interest with their contact information, whilst asking them if they would like to opt into marketing. Using ClubWise’s prospects module, you can then make use of the active CRM and call scheduling available to convert these prospects to members. Or another example could be a month where you allow all PT appointments to bring a friend for free. Similarly, capturing the friends’ contact information and encouraging them to opt into marketing can give you the opportunity to convert these members, at the same time as promoting PT, and engaging customers with your staff. Get creative and come up with your own ideas – just make sure it is designed in such a way to generate and convert leads from the information you have gathered!
4. Refresher training on club tours and prospect calls
In order to convert as many of your prospects into members as possible, make sure your staff are given the resources they need to provide the wow-factor to your prospects. Are your staff experts in their own right? Are they able to talk in detail about the products and services on offer? Adopt ideas like mock club tours and prospect calls or renewing an induction to develop your staff’s sales skills. Not only will this help to get staff back into a routine, but it will serve them well over the long-term, and possibly even iron out any bad habits they may have picked up over time.
5. Perform a competitor analysis
Make sure that you are fully aware of what your competitors are doing to drive sales, so that you can be sure to differentiate yourselves. Exactly how you do this, may depend on your competitors’ activities, or you could focus on your own unique strengths, but whichever route you take, you must always be able to stand out from the crowd. Analyse their promo’s, memberships, facilities, their strengths and weaknesses, and do something different.
