Setting Up An Automated Lead Nurturing System for Your Gym
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How many times are you asked simple questions about your gym per day? From basic hours of operations and pricing plans to amenities and services, many times, much of this information can already be found somewhere on the fitness facility’s website or Google business page. But still, potential clients call, email, or text you these seemingly simple questions. If this is all too familiar, you are on the right page.
Lead nurturing is the process of building (and progressing) relationships with potential clients throughout their marketing campaign journey in your sales funnel, with the ultimate goal of having a sales-qualified lead or customer at the end of the process. And while this process may seem cold and robotic, applied against your current system, you may realize that you already do something similar. At a fundamental level, answering non-client questions and supplying them with relevant information, pamphlets, or even discount deals as you work with them to sign up is the relatable explanation of this concept. Unfortunately, many times, this example is exactly how it is done – manually. Implementing automation into your gym’s lead nurturing process can be a pivotal step for many owners when off-loading many of the daily questions and follow-ups, allowing them more time to work on their business for growth rather than in the trenches of their business.
In this page, we will go over the following points for building automation in your fitness studio’s lead nurturing process:
Benefits of Automating Your Gym’s Lead Nurturing Process
Aside from reducing the obvious time suck that responding to individual inquiries poses or filling out the paperwork involved with setting up new members, automating your gym’s lead nurturing process can also have other positive impacts on your fitness facility.
To begin, automation can help with your “customer conversion experience,” which is a fancy name for your sales funnel; however, thinking about it with this title in mind can help shift your way of thinking about the process from the gym side to the potential client’s perspective. That being said, consider the issues involved with a more human-based system – an interested person submits a question, calls your main line and leaves a message, or even wants to book a consultation/gym tour with you. How much time, energy, and motivation is involved with you either handling these yourself or delegating them to the appropriate staff member? Automation can help answer simple questions quickly, direct interested parties to appropriate pages/resources, and even help book calendar events and complete necessary paperwork digitally.
Proactive follow-up with prospective clients is typically one of the more prevalent slipping points for gym owners and managers not utilizing automation or a CRM system. This typically stems from the abundance of daily work that must be done constantly and the never-ending supply of new projects, questions, and issues that arise otherwise. Automation can help in these situations by distributing premade steps for common tasks that require additional touchpoints. One example of a potential solution involves automatic email follow-ups on unopened emails sent from your email system – this feature can help systematically increase the viewership of your email efforts while reducing the time-consuming efforts of doing it manually.
The final benefit we will cover is the freedom to grow your business. Even if you are not the one doing the actual processes that require the daily time commitment, implementing automation into your lead nurturing can free up your gym’s resources to be better utilized for growing your business or improving your client retention efforts (which can also be automated – but we’ll get to that later).
What Processes Can Be Automated in a Gym Business?
Depending on your needs, budget, or general interest in making things as hands-off as possible, automation in a fitness business can have a massive scope. Here are some of the more common automations for lead nurturing that you may find fitness studios, gyms, and fitness facilities implementing:
- Email follow-up for inquiries
- Common question-answering systems
- Gym tour scheduling (and calendar booking)
- Merchandise and service purchases
- New client set-up, paperwork, and even access
- Billing and accounting functions
- Notifications for clients and prospects
While the list of possibilities for potential gym automation options may be endless, the best way to start dipping your toe in the water of process systemization with your leads is to find the most significant pain points or time eaters. Focusing on these areas as potential first projects can be a wise tactic since they can yield a fast return on investment to you or your staff’s time working to grow the business.
Building Automation into Your Gym’s Processes
The thought of automation often sounds more involved or elaborate than it actually has to be, especially if you are just getting started. As mentioned earlier, the first step in lead nurture automation is typically figuring out your current pain points with your gym’s processes and deciding which one(s) have the best potential for return on investment (ROI), better utilization of resources, or even stress reduction.
Once your starting point established, it’s then time to think about the “how” of automation, and depending on your approach, there are a lot of avenues for research, testing, and implementation.
For the DIY’ers
When we say DIY’er, we don’t mean you will be building out a coded system yourself, but rather doing a lot of the leg work to find a solution that either solves your particular problem the way you’d like, fits within your budget, or has an implementation process that you can comfortably manage. Search engines like Google will probably be your best bet for starting unless you already have a recommendation or idea about how you would like to go about this process. By digging into your specific problem, you’d be surprised by the similar results you can find on forums, FAQs, or services offered by various programs.
Once a solution is found, it will likely need to be built into your website, management system, or a physical system (such as a kiosk) installed. Additionally, you will need to design the structure in which you plan for it to operate within your business and how your leads will interact with it. You will want to be mindful of any “flow breaks” where customers may fall off of the automated process or get “stuck.” The same goes for the business processes side; make sure no steps are missed or information gets lost.
Once the system is built out, run tests. Make sure everything runs smoothly and that it helps reduce the workload, stress, or pain points experienced prior – because no one likes adding even more workload when building in automation. Finally, continuously monitor and optimize your systems to enhance the experience, flows, usage, and profitability.
More Hands-Off Approach
Depending on your budget and dedication to this process, you may have some different paths here. If you want to be as hands-off as possible, hire a third-party agency to work with you by mapping your processes, suggesting possibilities for solutions, and then implementing them for you. This, of course, would have a significant price tag associated with it; however, depending on your gym’s profitability and organization structure, it could make sense for some people.
For those who don’t want to take on the heavy financial costs but still want to hire out some of the process of automating their lead nurturing systems at their fitness facility, consider doing the front-end work as much as possible. Map out your gym’s processes and pain points. Before reaching out to an agency for a solution, see what options may be available out-of-the-box for you as well. Finally, once you have some potential options or avenues you’d like to consider, you can either reach out directly to the company and see how their implementation works – they may have a team, or you might have to hire outside help with rolling it out.
When the systems are live, test the processes and ensure they fit your needs and that all the functionality works as it should. Additionally, continue to review your processes and new automation to ensure they still flow well with your business while also looking to the future for other pain points to smooth out through adjustment or automation.
Systematizing Your Gym’s Sales Funnel
The whole idea of automation is to reduce manual work on individuals, especially leads at the top of the funnel, while increasing conversion rates for new clients joining your gym. By adding automation throughout your sales funnel, you harness the power of tactical contact points and information deployment while reducing your or your staff members’ overall daily workload.
As automation is built out based on your processes and sales funnel steps, ensuring you have marketing and sales materials ready for each step of systematized function in the journey is critical. Reviewing the messaging from your fitness studio in each correspondence is also vital to the success of the overall marketing campaign; if it doesn’t resonate with the target audience of your gym, you run the risk of good leads removing themselves from your funnel.
As you work to build more automation to your sales flow and lead conversion processes within your gym, keeping a constant focus on customer experience, optimization, and further systemization is pivotal to overall success. The end goal is not to have your potential clients feel like they are in a machine being force-fed material about your gym, but rather a soft hand guiding them through their journey as they learn why your fitness facility might be the perfect fit for them.
When to Add the Human Touch
While it may feel like the world is heading faster and faster to an all-digital/robot market with AI advances, there will always be the need for human interaction and input. That being said, your sales funnel and marketing processes are the same; at some point, you and your staff will need to get involved in the lead conversion journey.
Depending on your gym’s niche, specialty, or customer type, the point where human interaction is needed may vary. The goal of an automated sales funnel is to systematize (or at least as best as you can) the journey until it needs to be delivered to a physical person to help drive home the final sale. Although this may not have to be the only route for leads either, some potential clients may want to stay completely automated through the final stage of signing up with your gym virtually, so having that as an option is always important. It is important to address that a significant portion of your sales-qualified leads coming out of your funnel will need a trained individual to help answer any remaining questions, ease any last concerns, and work through perceived hurdles to finalize the sale.
Human touch is not a bad thing to have in your business; if anything, it’s an essential tool that helps customers and leads feel connected to your business. Unfortunately, time and energy are the limited resources typically hit when trying to interact with everyone personally, which is why recreating your gym’s personal persona into your automation so it feels as genuine as possible is key to overall success. And when the time comes for the real human interactions to start, you and your staff should have the proper time and energy to efficiently and effectively work with them through their final conversion point (and beyond)!
Making a Splash
Handing over the keys of your sales processes to an automated system may sound robotic and sterile to many gym owners; however, when properly designed, built, implemented, and optimized, these workflows can be an incredibly effective tool to enhance your gym’s ability to cultivate and convert leads. By keeping the customer experience of your target audience in mind when systematizing your fitness facility’s processes, you will lead with a strong stride.