When looking at customer satisfaction and retention rates for fitness facilities, a positive correlation is often drawn between client engagement or interactions and retention rates. With this engagement variable in mind, we will dive into some gym marketing ideas you can implement through your email system.
But before we splash around with this concept too much, this blog belongs to a four-blog series that covers gym email marketing ideas for:
- Gym Lead Nurturing
- Gym Member Engagement
- Personal Training Studio Client Retention
- Boosting Gym Referrals
Why Client Engagement Is Critical for Gym Retention Rates
As mentioned above, client engagement is essential when calculating your gym membership retention rate. If you are struggling to keep members month to month or your attrition rate is getting too high, retention becomes a vital factor in your business’s health and stability.
Engagement with clients is a crucial element in improving retention due to the increased awareness of your facility’s operations. Additionally, this interaction can get you faster insights into your customers’ experiences with your studio and give you the ability to get direct feedback from your target audience on what is (or isn’t) working.
Gym Marketing Ideas for Email Campaigns
It’s best to start with a strategic mindset when developing the emails to implement for your membership engagement campaign. By building a solid marketing campaign around engagement on the front end, you will have a more substantial plan going into the actual message creation with your emails.
Unfortunately, due to the nature of different business structures and audience types, there really is not an easy template you can use here. However, you can utilize this list of gym marketing ideas as a starting point to build off of. One point to consider is that there is always an opportunity for someone to report your emails as spam or unsubscribe. Having a legitimate purpose for emailing your members is a good practice rather than constantly blasting them with unwarranted marketing vomit.
Customer Surveys
Customer surveys are one of the most straightforward methods of client engagement through email. Whether you plan to run a large-scale survey of all members or an automated ongoing quality of service examination, these emails can have multiple benefits.
The first benefit is that an email from your fitness facility asking for genuine feedback can make members feel cared about. Further, when members take the time to fill out these surveys, it not only serves as an engagement point with your business but also gives you direct feedback from your audience—an invaluable resource for gauging your audience’s satisfaction or even areas of growth for your training studio.
Referral Program Promotion
Assuming that you already have a gym referral program in place for your facility, one of the common mistakes with growing these initiatives is forgetting to market them. That’s right. Often, a flyer or maybe a short blurb in the onboarding materials is posted, and then it gets left alone.
To help breathe new life into your lead generation activities, give you relevant content to send, and allow your members to benefit, building a marketing campaign around your referral program can be a great start. Implementing emails as part of an inform and remind campaign can be a great way to approach this project. Additionally, running follow-up emails and notifications surrounding the success or setting up goals with prizes can be an additional way to take it even further.
Interactive Newsletters
Gym email newsletters seem to be the go-to recommendation for utilizing email within fitness facilities. While there is nothing wrong with having one or starting one, these can become “more noise” to members if they aren’t really into your brand or you’re not delivering quality content aligned with their interests.
That said, one way to make gym newsletters more engaging is to add interactive elements to them. Running community polls, asking questions (explicitly directing them how to ask), or giving updates from previous interactive newsletter element results are just a few examples.
Another option is integrating mediums and promoting other interactive opportunities with your studio. One potential opportunity is to announce in advance when you go live on social media channels. The goal, though, is to have something that will resonate with your target audience and get them to do something other than quickly glance through the email before deleting it.
Employee and Client Shout-Outs
People like people, especially ones they know. This concept is taught in many journalism courses and can be successful when appropriately implemented in the local fitness facility market. Adding familiar faces to your emails, especially with an interesting write-up about them specifically, can better capture eyes and attention. Whether you want to run a staff member/client of the month or spotlight exemplary progress/work, these types of emails can be a terrific way to shake up the content in your email campaigns and recapture your audience’s attention.
There are two things worth noting about these types of email-based gym marketing ideas. First, if you are highlighting a client or staff member, make sure you have proper release forms allowing you to do so. It also doesn’t hurt to let them review the write-up before going live or sending it, allowing them to make any edits or changes to help them feel comfortable with the final product. Second, hosting the full write-up or story on your website or social media channels and only giving a sampler in the email where they can click to read the entire thing. This call-to-action can help drive additional traffic to your other channels, but it also creates an opportunity for your audience to share this content and expand your gym’s organic market reach.
Giveaways, Promotions, or Competitions
Sometimes, offering “exclusive content” to email subscribers can be an enticing hook to get members to sign up. Running semi-regular giveaways can be a great driver of interest and interaction within your audience. Additionally, running promotions that incorporate referral elements or bring-a-friend opportunities can entice readers and help drive growth. Finally, running competitions can be an additional option. From feats of strength to longest streaks of healthy activities, owners can promote challenges via email – and follow up with results from them as well!
Community Engagement
Community is often an influential element for small business owners operating a fitness facility. With that, it’s common to see gyms participating in community events, volunteer opportunities, or even open-house-style events at their studio. Keeping your email audience informed about upcoming events or opportunities can be advantageous for growing awareness and interest. Also, these types of events tend to draw members together and build better relationships with each other – facilitating community building within your facility. Further, writing snippets from an event recap on a gym blog or social media post can be linked to your email.
Make A Splash
Fitness facility owners looking for gym marketing ideas to boost their email engagement levels with their audience can benefit from implementing a strategic plan. Creating a marketing campaign structure for your studio’s email initiatives enables you to build consistent, relevant, and interesting material that may better align with your audience. Additionally, by implementing some of the content ideas mentioned above into your emails, you may find better engagement levels with your content. Finally, continuous testing, monitoring, and refining are necessary to best position your email and content with your gym’s email audiences.
