For many people not working a marketing career, the idea of email marketing makes them shudder. Don’t worry, you’re not alone; a lot of us working in this profession have the same response as well. The typical thought that comes to mind when many of us hear “email marketing” is SPAM. But really look at your inbox and consider the messages that you receive from businesses. Are there any gems in there that add value to your life? Are there any that you legitimately enjoy opening? Let’s start by focusing on those types of emails and leave the daily email blasts to the other guys with too much time and energy to throw money at that.
In this blog, we will cover why email campaigns are a wise marketing decision for gyms and studios regarding conversion, retention, community building, and sales.
Email Marketing to Boost Gym Conversions
When it comes to marketing, the name of the game is cultivating new leads and effectively converting them into clients or members. The more successfully and efficiently this is done, the more revenue potential and return on investment (ROI) your fitness facility will experience. As a whole, email is only one of the tools in the box for a marketing campaign; however, it can be an extremely effective tool when appropriately leveraged.
From auto-notifications about recent blogs to pre-set drip campaigns that follow up with new leads, email marketing can be established to help enable your studio’s sales funnel to promote better conversion rates. Additionally, automation means less manual work for you and your staff when it comes to regularly having to keep up with the stream of leads coming in from various channels, especially when they are a little on the cold side still or not yet fully qualified for the next step of your sales process.
Emails Can Help Build Community Within Your Fitness Facility
Your eyes are not deceiving you, yes emails can help build and drive the feeling of community within your studio or gym. While social media is a great tool for relationship building and sharing information, it is not the only option for people – and some audiences are even beginning to stray away from their regular use of such platforms overall. Fostering relationships with members sometimes means meeting them where they are at, and for a large chunk of the population, email is still an extremely utilized medium for contact. Oberlo even suggests that email utilization will continue to increase in the coming years!
So, how do you build a community via email? Focusing on making your audience feel involved in what’s happening with the gym, members, or even upcoming events or programs can help members feel like they aren’t missing out on things. Additionally, keeping people informed and involved with the inner workings of the gym and its members can also have an added retention benefit that we will go into more next.
Gym Member Retention Benefits of a Well-Executed Email Program
If retention rates are a focus for your fitness facility (honestly, who isn’t concerned about this metric?!), then email can be a helpful tool. As mentioned earlier, emails can be leveraged to help drive the feeling of community within your client base by bringing a sense of belonging and pride to your studio. However, gyms can actually take this a step further and be proactive with their members by surveying them and giving them a sense of being heard concerning their wants, needs, or pains with your fitness facility.
Of course, we love analytics here since they allow you to track progress and success, so when gyms implement surveys with their audience base, they allow you to track metrics on your members directly. Like, are they happy? By finding out early that clients are unhappy with specific services, access, or even equipment at your studio, you can take steps early to remedy them. This not only can help keep pain points minimal with your clients but also has other positive effects like your members feeling heard and appreciated when they see their suggestions implemented, as well as your business operating more effectively with new members (assuming they are in the same target audience as the rest of your members and have similar values).
Help Drive Sales, Memberships, and Advertising with Email
As mentioned earlier, emails can be a great tool for driving conversions within your sales funnel; however, they can also help your bottom line in other ways aside from new memberships. Email can be utilized with your current client base to run special offers based on membership type to try and transition them to a more long-term membership structure or program type to help promote commitment and retention. Additionally, you can keep any referral programs and competitions to help drive new memberships top-of-mind with your audience.
Further, email can be a great avenue to share any merchandise updates, pre-orders, or even sales on non-moving stock. Even from a cross-promotional standpoint, your email list can be leveraged with local business relationships to help cross-advertise services, deals, or promotions( i.e., adding a 10% discount to gym members to the local bakery into your email in return for your gym flyer and discount code to post on their welcome board) within each other’s businesses to drive mutually beneficial interest.
Making A Splash
Love it or hate it, email is not going away. But as a studio or gym owner, email is still a handy tool for engaging and leveraging your current members. Additionally, email can help drive positive change within your business and help increase the promotion of your business’ additional services, merchandise, or even promotions and referral campaigns to clients.
Dive into learning more about building email into your marketing efforts with our Marketing Campaign Development for Gyms overview.
