When it comes to growing a fitness facility, gym marketing ideas and campaign resources can come in many options and varieties. From social media pages to email sequences, there are many ways to reach and interact with your audience. In this post, we will focus specifically on how you can use text or SMS marketing to grow a gym and improve your client retention rates.
What is SMS Marketing for a Gym
Before we dive right into discussing innovative ways to implement SMS marketing in a fitness facility, let’s first define SMS (Short Message Service). These days, it is more commonly known as texting, but from a marketing perspective, it is a direct, convenient, and owned line of communication with your prospects and client base.
Some points to consider when utilizing text message marketing to grow a gym. Text-based marketing can be very similar to email marketing because you can manually craft, manage, and send your messages. However, in order to make it truly effective, consistent, and scalable, you need to automate it. Second, when working with many automated marketing-based communications systems, you need to have a way to manage it – which typically translates to a service or platform solution. Third, when utilizing these mass-messaging type services, you need to have an opt-in and opt-out procedure to remain compliant; therefore, ensuring you have an easy and convenient way for clients and leads to join is vital to the success of growing the medium.
Welcome Campaigns
In other blogs, we discuss the advantages of creating a welcoming experience for new clients or gym members by operating automated marketing tools like email. SMS marketing can also be another option for this type of initiative.
When a new client or lead signs up or fills out forms, you can ask them if they want to opt into your text messaging services. If they select yes, you can immediately enroll them in your campaign list and kick off an initial automated welcome series of texts. These text message series are also known as “sequences.” They are essentially mini-campaigns that get set off when a specific trigger happens—such as opting into text when becoming a new gym member.
A text welcome sequence can help reinforce post-purchase validation and promote membership utilization (to help reduce pre-mature attrition). Building these campaigns typically involves crafting a few different messages that include some common elements such as identification of message sender (i.e., letting them know it’s your gym texting them), what they can expect out of their membership/your facility, next steps needed for your facility (door passcodes, forms required, etc.), a reminder of additional services or benefits (bring a friend free, open 24/7, etc.), and finally a solid call-to-action or clear next steps (book a session, learn about training services, etc.).
Coming up with a series of these text messages that go to your new members can work in your favor in a few ways. First, open and response rates tend to be more positive when comparing text messages to email. Second, you can break up messaging topics into bite-sized interactions and spread them out over a short period of time to reduce contact overwhelm. Finally, you can craft your call-to-actions in a timely, structured manner that may align with a typical ideal customer journey with your organization to help improve click-through rates on offers, opportunities, or programs.
Personalized Messages and Reminders with Gym Software
When leveraging text message marketing to grow a gym, focusing on integrating it with your gym software can be game-changing. When combining the power of a CRM with marketing tools, you begin to unlock different abilities to customize your message content, timing, and even topics.
Setting up specific campaigns based on various elements of your customer profile data can help your messaging seem more personalized and authentic—two crucial details for establishing brand loyalty with prospects and cultivating long-term relationships with members.
Implementing messaging around influential dates (birthdays, membership milestones, etc.), personalized workout reminders, or even class updates and notifications can all give your customers the feeling of individualized attention. These can also serve as commitment reminders and interaction points within your fitness business, which can help improve retention rates (or reduce gym attrition rates).
Further, setting up thresholds in your gym software system based on declining attendance rates can give you another opportunity to contact them via automation. Reaching out with a pre-scripted text to a member early on when their gym visits start to decline can help avoid churn and increase that gym member’s overall lifetime value as a customer.
Offers, Re-engagement, and Referrals
The other innovative way to use text marketing to grow a gym is for client acquisition and fitness sales funnel optimization. Working offers into your lead development initiatives via text can help drive success due to higher open and read rates, especially when you streamline the process with a click-and-apply redemption configuration.
Similar to the point about using text to reduce gym membership attrition rates, you can use SMS marketing to grow a fitness studio by re-engaging with leads that become cold. Again, combining CRM and gym software data points with your text marketing platform allows you to set metric monitors that flag certain lead journey actions. For instance, automatically sending a pre-built text to a prospective personal training client who hasn’t visited the website, opened an email, or responded to a text within the past two weeks. The primary goal of this type of message is to avoid a lead just going completely cold and give them a chance to re-engage with your sales funnel system by proactively reaching out.
The final discussion point involves building your fitness facility by leveraging SMS and a referral program to grow your gym memberships. The first factor is having an established system in place that not only works for your facility but is also enticing to your current member base. The following points involve promoting it and getting people to utilize it.
We recently published a blog that dives into ways to use email to promote your referral program and create additional interaction points with your clients. Similarly, using SMS marketing to grow a gym through referral programs can be a solid source of untapped potential. From announcing your program to clients and sending limited-time offers to invites for special events or adding a referral program reminder to the end of other text-based messages, SMS can help improve overall awareness of the opportunity and chances of participation.
Making A Splash
Marketing to grow a gym can take many forms. Text message marketing is just one of the many tools available to fitness facility owners to accomplish their business growth goals. When implementing these types of programs into your gym’s procedures, it’s best first to understand the goals you are trying to accomplish. From automating part of your client interactions and new client onboarding to focusing on reducing member attrition or increasing gym member referrals, SMS can be a helpful channel in your overall business development process.
