Purchasing something involves a journey for the customer. Whether the item is big or small, we all go through an internal and external process before deciding to buy or not buy something. Even the tiny “impulse” purchases go through this. And while we may think that we make the majority of decisions in a vacuum between our ears, many external factors also come into play. For fitness facility owners, developing your gym’s marketing campaigns to make your leads feel like they are discovering the answers to their questions on their own can be a game changer when optimizing your training facility’s customer journey experience.
In this blog, we will discuss how utilizing a sales funnel for your fitness facility can create a seamless customer journey for your gym leads on their way to becoming loyal members.
What is a Sales Funnel for Gyms
So what are a customer journey and sales funnel anyway? As defined by Adobe, “the customer journey is a series of steps — starting with brand awareness before a person is even a customer — that leads to a purchase and eventual customer loyalty.” Similarly, a gym sales funnel outlines the multiple pathways a customer may take; however, many view it as a structured system for marketing purposes to enable organic and relevant information flow for gym leads as they transition from stage to stage. As the leads move down in the funnel, content and information become more refined to their specific needs and add more emphasis toward the goal conversion.
Viewing the customer journey and sales funnel as similar experiences is not unusual. However, when there are breaks in the customer experience (i.e., many leads exiting the funnel at a particular point), these issues are adjusted on the sales funnel side. Another way to think of it as the customer experience is the individual’s unique engagements and responses, while the sales funnel is the structure they interacted with. Gym owners have some control over the situations, content, and mechanics of the sales funnel; however, they can’t control how users interact with it. Fitness facility owners can only make adjustments to their funnel to try and get better results.
How to Get More Gym Leads Into Your Funnel
To begin the customer journey process, you must start with how, where, or why people enter your sales funnel. Whether it’s interested parties finding your gym on a local Google search, someone seeing your social media pages from a tagged friend, or even seeing a flyer at a local shop, people will learn about your business in various manners. The real goal is finding, targeting, and attracting the right people.
Knowing your gym’s target audience is critical to your sales funnel. Knowing your audience will help you craft your branding, messaging, and the look or feel of your fitness facility’s space. Additionally, creating irresistible gym offers and promotions to drive membership sales based on your target audience’s interests can drive traffic in your sales funnel.
Creating the Seamless Gym Lead to Customer Journey
Fitness business owners often want to drive leads and online traffic to their membership sign-up or consultation booking page. While this may seem like a tempting solution for all your marketing needs, remember that a gym lead can come to your website through various means, and often, each can carry a slightly different customer intent for clicking/visiting. Therefore, building a sales funnel that allows potential clients to interact with content or material and constructing a site that enables self-serving information can give your leads a more organic and informational experience.
Reviewing website traffic flow reports or monitoring page bounces can help you find how leads enter your site, where they go, and when they end their visit. These insights help you find potential gaps in content, information, or resources your audience might be interested in. Over time, you can make progressive adjustments to your site, materials, and marketing campaigns to help reduce sales funnel drop-outs and improve your overall conversion rates.
Utilizing Automation to Optimize the Customer Journey
After smoothing out content gaps and pain points for your customers’ organic information search, the next step for owners is to automate marketing features to engage and optimally develop leads. Automating emails, returning visitor promos, and connecting your website leads to a gym membership management system can reduce the day-to-day manual labor involved with lead cultivation.
Another benefit of automation includes expedited response times. Both campaign and physical follow-up times usually benefit from implementing automation. Having built-in lead scoring systems, next-step triggers, or even sequenced emails can reduce the stress of personally tracking where individuals are in your sales funnel. And, because much of the non-essential physical contact points get reduced through automation, many gym owners find they, or their staff, have more time and energy for the hot leads ready to convert.
When and How to Add the Human Touch
As we mentioned above, automation does not mean utterly hands-off lead management. Instead, when leveraging programs and software like gym management software, you reduce your overall workload for lead management to focus on the quality and high-conversion probability-based leads at (or near) the end of your sales funnel.
Usually, leads that have gone through your sales funnel and reached the bottom choose to join your fitness facility or realize it might not fit them. While you can still automate client enrollment, reaching out to them is still influential. This type of interaction can help in the long term when it comes to retention rates due to built-in interaction points with clients. On the flip side, for those leads who choose not to continue with the goal conversion, you now have an opportunity to personally reach back out and see if there is a possibility to drive home the conversion. Even if not all the leads are saved at the end, having the opportunity to capture a few not only boosts your bottom line but also gives you a great insight into other gap areas or pain points in your funnel to improve on.
Refining and Working Out the Bumps
Finally, as we always go back to, analyzing your processes and working to optimize and adapt continually are essential for long-term sales funnel health. You must constantly monitor your metrics, KPIs, and sales funnel flow to keep a healthy pool of leads and new clients. If numbers start to skew or trends change, revisiting your sales funnel stages, interaction points, and marketing materials with fresh eyes is always a good starting point. Testing other methods, messaging types, or even promotions can also be a great way to experiment and find more productive processes.
Making A Splash
Customer values, interests, and needs vary from person to person. Implementing a sales funnel is critical for long-term sustainability and growth in operating a fitness facility and trying to grow by getting more gym leads. By focusing on your target audience, website visitor traffic patterns, and marketing content gaps, you can automate and optimize our customer’s journey from lead to new member. Over time and continual testing, you can turn your gym’s sales funnel into a seamless customer journey to your gym as their pain point solution.
