“How To Maintain & Improve Your Google Business Profile”

A Google Business Profile, a feature previously known as Google My Business, is a vital but often neglected piece of online infrastructure for any business.

We’ve noticed that Gyms and Fitness Club owners aren’t always on top of their Google Business Profile and there is a very fine line (and amount of effort!) between a sleek and professional-looking profile and one that looks shabby and abandoned. 

So for today’s article, we will be looking at what we can do as Gym and Fitness Club owners to improve our Google Business Profile and really stand out.

All Your Questions Answered (click them to skip ahead)…

What Is A Google Business Profile?

How Quickly & Easily Can Your Improve & Maintain Your Google Business Profile?

 – Visual Media

– Keywords

– The Correct Business Category

– Update Regularly

What Is A Google Business Profile?

Chances are that if you’ve googled a business in the last eight years, you’ve seen a Google Business Profile. Their success and omnipresence make them a powerful tool for communication and legitimacy. 

Many people, even those who don’t really understand the concept of a Google Business Profile, gravitate to that box in the top right hand corner of their google search or those little pins on Google Maps. 

But despite their status as one of the most well-known and efficient methods of business communication in the business world, it is often misused. Everyone can remember the time they came across a nonsensical or out-of-date Google Business Profile while looking for legitimate information. It is an instant turn-off and a quick indication that some aspects of the business in question need polishing.

And there are very few excuses for this. Google Business Profile is a free service for businesses, provided by, you guessed it,Google.

It is a simple and effective tool for communicating the nature of a business, including key contact information, pictures, and location, all within a succinct information box. 

Having this box filled in is vital for driving business from the online arena, into your actual Gym or Fitness Club. 

Too often we have found that Gym Owners have suboptimal or poorly filled in Google Business Profiles. It has reached a tipping point where many people within that key demographic of 18-34 will assume that the business may be in trouble or has ceased to exist if they can’t find a confirmation that it is ‘Open’ on the Google Business Profile.

This reflects a compounding consumer trend of reliance on the Google Business Profile to determine whether a business is open, or whether it even still exists.

As such, you can imagine the damage that not having a sufficiently setup profile can do to the prospect of converting internet interest into feet through the doors. 

Not only that but due to the poor state that many Gym and Fitness Club’s keep their Google Business Profiles in, having a functional one can greatly increase your visibility in your area. A fully optimised Google Business Profile makes it more likely that it’ll be your Gym that shows up higher on the list when someone googles ‘Gyms near me’ or ‘Gyms in *your area*’. 

So How Can You Quickly and Easily Improve and Maintain Your Google Business Profile?

So how can you improve your Google Business Profile you are asking? We’ve set out the immediate and impactful steps you can take to give your business profile a boost.

Visual Media (Photo and Video) are a MUST!

It has been estimated that businesses with photos and video are clicked on 30% to 40% more than those without. That is without the inestimable psychological effect that it has on the average potential customer to see what a business hasn’t even uploaded any pictures.

While it is a simple bar to clear, it is one that many businesses do not do successfully and it is an easy and effortless way to stand out from the crowd. Use the pre-existing photographs and videos that are on your Gym website, pick the most striking one first, as they will be the thumbnail that most potential customers see. Alternatively, pick the feature you are most proud of, or that you think makes you stand out the most from your local competition.

Be sure not to just put up pictures of an empty gym, wide shots of your gym or fitness club being used by many people are a must, as well as any classes that you hold. This will show people a snippet of what you have to offer, and psychologically it will be more appealing than just an empty Gym (even if said empty Gym is well furnished). 

Add Keywords (or get your Keywords in order) and Make Them Relevant

While keywords are a kingdom unto themselves, we can simplify it for the sake of this section.

Make sure they are relevant! And understand that more does not equal better. Ten pertinent and powerful keywords will do more than 100 vague and meandering ones. Keywords are a tool to be used precisely and sparingly.

For anything more advanced, we recommend you visit a dedicated guide regarding keywords. But with just a thorough review and a refresh, you are guaranteed to be displaying higher than you were before. 

Choose the Right Business Category

Much like with keywords, this is another case of less being more. Google will let you select up to ten Business Categories but it is not recommended to use your full allotment. For the average Gym or Fitness Club, it will only be necessary to use a few. For instance, if you specialise in combat sports such as MMA and Boxing, it might be pertinent to put ‘MMA Gym’ or ‘Boxing Gym’. From there, you could also put ‘Octagon’ as a sub-category if that is a feature your Gym has. Conversely, if your club has a Swimming Pool, it would be fair to say that that is a category unto itself.

Make sure your categories are distinct from one another and that each one is contributing something meaningful or adding a layer of specificity.

Overlap will only confuse the issue and too many will dilute the potency of the search terms and result in less overall hits.

Update Regularly

Because a Google Business Profile is free and low maintenance, it is often completely neglected. In our experience, a useful paradigm is to consider your Google Business Profile to be like your Twitter or Instagram feed. If you hadn’t updated or maintained those for a week, we would like to think there would be raised eyebrows.

As such, we recommend you dedicate a small amount of time regularly to the maintenance of your Google Business Profile. Whether that is responding to reviews, updating the circumstances of your business or just adding new pictures.

Given that many will use the state and circumstance of your Google Business Profile to determine the health of your business, make it look alive! Less than ten minutes of care a week can make a significant impact in the long term. 

We hope you’ve enjoyed the article and you’ve learned something about this small but powerful and transformative piece of internet infrastructure.

Chances are you had seen it every day of your life and never questioned what was driving such a useful box.

Want to understand more about your membership?

Ashbourne can help you gain unprecedented insight.

Here at Ashbourne Membership Management, we are committed to not only working with our partners, but growing their businesses in every way. Whether it is something as large and vital as streamlining the collection of monthly membership fees, or something as small but impactful as fine-tuning their online presence. We are interested in being a valued partner that elevates your Gym or Fitness club to the next level.

Interested in knowing more? Follow the link here and a member of our team will be in touch swiftly to see how we can help your Gym or Fitness Club to reach the next level.

If we said you could have free advertising for your gym, with access to millions of viewers, would you take us up on it?

Well the good news is, you already do – it’s your Instagram!

The only thing that holds you back from fully utilising the power of your Instagram page is how you use it. We’ve already gone into how paid advertising on the Instagram and Facebook has been broken recently, but that doesn’t mean that you still can’t grow a successful and engaging community on Instagram.

There are so many recent changes to Instagram lately that you need to implement to maximise your reach. So keep reading and discover our 5 top tips to growing your gym’s instagram page without spending a penny.

Tip 1 – Start Using Instagram Reels

Instagram Reels are the new photo posts. More and more users cite that video is their preferred way to consume content on the internet.

Creating small 60 second videos and spreading your message is the new way forward on Instagram, to mix up your content beyond just images.

It should be no surprise that Instagram wants you to use its newest and most popular features, so Instagram actually pushes your reel posts much harder than normal posts. This gives you more chances to be seen by more people and therefore grow your follower count much quicker.

And the good news is, you don’t need to be super tech-savvy to create good content with Instagram Reels.

Here is a super quick tutorial on how to set up a reel:

1. Go into the Reels creation screen and tap on the photo square in the bottom left corner of your screen. …

2. Select one or more videos to create your Reel.

3. Edit the length of each video, one by one until you have reached the 15 second maximum time.

4. Then click the back arrow to watch the whole video.

5. Add some music to it OR a voice over. A voice over feature is brilliant for gym tutorial videos. Get your staff and PTs involved and use their knowledge.

With just a few simple steps, you now have engaging content, which contains more of your club’s personality, reaching more people than ever before.

So experiment between your regular posts and your new Instagram reels and see which one brings you more attention.

Tip 2 – Switch To A ‘Business Account

If you don’t have one already, ensure you have a business account on Instagram.

Beyond just sounding more professional, a business account for your Instagram gives you access to more analytics which can help guide the kind of content you want to make.

You see everything from when your followers are active, so you can post strategically to get maximum views; All the way to the demographics who are watching your content, so you can post content which suits your members.

For example, if your gym has got 60% male following and you want to engage with more female followers, you can easily identify this and post more content that women relate to in the gym.

You can see these by clicking the ‘Insights’ button on your main menu.

Great social media is equal parts art and science (with a dash of consistency)

Tip 3 – Re-Share Your Customers Tags

When your members tag you in a story or post, try to re-share their posts to encourage more customers to share and tag you in their own content.

If you can make your members feel special and included in your community, then you can truly build a loyal customer base.

However, don’t get too re-share happy. Be mindful of re-sharing the same content too many times. Once is plenty, as there is nothing worse than seeing accounts re-share the re-shared post over and over to pretend like they have something to say.

Instagram is all about trying to widen your reach, and one of the main source of new followers will be from tags. To tag someone in a post or story type ‘@’ followed by the account name. 

So give it a go, here’s just a few ways you could shout out your members:

1. Shout out your members who have been signed up with you for the longest.

2. Celebrate members who have hit their fitness goals and made the most improvement.

3. Make it a routine of tagging every single new member to your gym and give them a warm welcome.

The possibilities for engaging with your audience are truly endless if you make it a part of your business’ philosophy!

Tip 4 – Use Old Content That Did Well

If creating new content is taking up too much time, well we have some good news for you: You can just recycle old content.

Don’t be afraid to re-post an old post that is already featured on your page.

Posts that did well before, did well for a reason. So don’t waste them!

Whenever you post, only a fraction of your audience will ever see that post, so it will always be fresh even when you share it again. Maybe some of your new followers will benefit from seeing it who weren’t around the first time as well!

It takes a long time to build trust in your service and brand. Consumers need to see your service multiple times to be convinced to sign up or buy what you are selling, so make sure to maximise value from every single post, so your brand is always at the forefront of your potential members’ minds when they’re looking for their next gym home.

Tip 5 – The 10k Followers Limit To Link In Your Stories Is Gone!

Recently IG has changed its restriction for smaller accounts to add links to their stories.

The traditional ‘swipe up’ feature is still only available to accounts with more than 10,000 followers but now any account can add a ‘link’ feature to a story.

This means that you can link this to your gym ‘Join online’ page, or a product like Personal Training.

So start creating a journey and plan to get your Instagram viewers over to your gym’s website. It’s time to turn your social media marketing into profit!

Instagram is at its peak…so don’t miss it!

It can be very easy to assume that a social media platform will be around forever and you can get round to making the most of it someday when you have more time.

But social medias change. Facebook was once seen as a goliath of social media, but it’s reporting a drop in user numbers for the first time ever. And it’s no surprise, that when a social media platform wants to maximise its profits, then it can quickly become a “pay to play” service, where you start having to spend a lot of money to get a basic reach to your audience.

Instagram has been around for a few years, but it’s still finding its feet and has so much potential.

Its audience numbers are growing, and most importantly, it’s still being used by a younger audience who haven’t abandoned it for the latest social media trend.

So take advantage of the moment and start experimenting with your Instagram’s business page. You never know, you might just discover the fun in your marketing again!

Get the notebook out and start brainstorming ideas with your team!

And we can help…

As you can see, we really get stuck into every aspect of helping gyms and clubs succeed. Our success is directly tied to the success of our partnered clubs, so we are always ensuring that we’re at the cutting edge when it comes to helping all of our gyms grow and market themselves effectively.

If you’d like to get in touch about how we can help your club succeed, then you can always book a demo with our sales director, Grant Harrison, who would love to show you how our full club management package can help you improve and grow every aspect of your business.

With so many gyms, fitness clubs, personal trainers, and online health resources readily available today, it can be hard to define your business and know how to best set yourself apart from your competition.

At Ashbourne, we think it’s important to test out new strategies with the end goal always being in service of trying to attract more members. Before sharing these ideas, we always ensure to trial these ideas in one of our in-house run gyms so we can confidently share the most innovative approaches that have solid evidence of working to grow your gym.

Explore our most recent 20 new tried and tested ideas below and see which ones pique your interest and start implementing them today!

If you want our advice in getting started, or have some ideas of your own that you’d like to share. Please come and join our free gym owners forum and begin networking with like-minded fitness professionals.

Hold a membership referral drive

Referrals are widely believed to be the most cost-effective method of attracting new members, which is why you can afford to incentivise your existing members for attracting new customers.

Why not supercharge this process with a membership referral drive

Offer a prize each month to the member who refers the most new members who sign up for 12 months. From experience, investing in an attractive prize doubles or triples the impact. A flat-screen TV, a good quality bike or even £100 in cash can generate around 30-40 new members every month, with the winner usually referring to around 3-4 friends.

How To Implement An Effective Referral Campaign

• Purchase a good-looking prize and display it in your reception with balloons and banners to catch people’s attention.
• Put up signs around the club explaining the rules and that the member who refers the most new members this month will win this incredible prize.
• Display a list of the members who have referred people to your club, complete with a running total. You will find that if two of your members have referred the same number they will both try to get more new members in order to win the prize.
• Present the winning member with their prize on the last day of the month – take a photo and put this on display. Include a list of the other members who referred friends and thank everyone for their efforts. Keep this picture displayed for the whole year and then add each new month’s winning picture.
• Start the whole process again on the 1st of the following month with a different prize of similar value. How to ensure your referral campaign is effective:
• Start your campaign on the 1st of every month. If you go about this in an ad hoc manner, it won’t seem professional and your members may be hesitant to recommend your service. 
• Always present the prize on the final day of the month and display the winner around the club. At the bottom write that next month it could be you walking away with the prize.
• Keep a running total of who is in the lead – this keeps everybody motivated.
• Make sure you have a few people signed up before the campaign begins or pad the list out with a few names from the staff. No one likes to be the first one on a list. 
• Make sure the prizes don’t feel cheap. Personal Training Session might not cut it. 
• Maintain the display. Nothing looks more tragic than deflated balloons and a chipped sign. Keep it fresh, keep it relevant. 
• Make the winner the person who refers the most rather than having a prize draw – this rewards hard work.
• To keep the campaign strong in November and December offer an even greater prize such as a trip to Paris.

Closing consideration: Securing membership referrals has been proven to be one of the most cost-effective forms of growth a Gym or Fitness Club can embark on.

A campaign such as this will cost significantly less than the corresponding Radio or Television campaign and should result in a large membership boost if executed correctly. 

Label and Number Your Equipment

Not everyone knows what the Rear Delt Fly Machine is (which is a shame because it is definitely the best machine mankind has ever invented). 

But they are much more likely to know what Machine 3 is, as indicated by the large number 3 sticker you are going to put on it.

Back when I was a novice Gym-Goer, a system like this saved me so much time and effort.

Include a small sign or label with the officially recognised name of the machine and soon even your newest members will be sounding like veterans.

Display quality motivational banners

Avoid cliche motivational banners and posters.

Do your research and look into messages that will really speak to your members.

Make sure to include signs of moderation as well. Encourage your members to push themselves, not hurt themselves.

Cultivate a collection of fitness resources

Your Gym or Fitness Club should be an institution of knowledge and experience.

With the internet, this is easier than ever. Collect articles, journals, and blogs of interest and put them in a dedicated area on your website. This will allow you to showcase your dedication to fitness as more than just a profitable venture.

Enable your members to give effective and actionable feedback

Most club owners feel that they have the greatest club in town but it’s your members who really have the final say in that respect. If you don’t listen to your members you won’t know if there are areas in need of improvement. Create a lockable feedback box that only the gym owner has access to and allow your members to post their comments anonymously.

This box should be positioned in an area away from reception so that members can post comments without the glare from staff (who they might be commenting about). If the member has left their contact details, follow up immediately by thanking them for their feedback and stating that you will give the matter your immediate attention. And then ensure that you do!

Provide your members with free Wi-Fi within the club. Keep the publicly offered Wi-Fi and your club’s own Wi-Fi separate to protect your PCs and data. Provide the Wi-Fi code when members purchase drinks etc. from you and change the code regularly. You can even give the code when members check into your club on Facebook!!

Provide free Wi-Fi

Free Wi-Fi isn’t as expensive as it used to be, and members will really appreciate it.

As we mentioned in point 45, it also allows you to offer more data-intensive feedback systems without the presumption and burden of draining your customer’s data allowance.

Display the History of Your Club

Like any business, your fitness club or gym has had a journey. No matter how big or small, it is a personal story that will endear your members and prospective members to it.

History can help make a fitness club or a gym feel less like a building and more like a living institution that they can contribute to.

As we mentioned earlier, the inclusion of success stories from your club’s past can help feed into this legacy. Make your members feel proud to be a part of your success!

Be generous with exercise programmes. Don’t unnecessarily gate resources off.

Many club owners have the desire to gate off as much content as possible, to incentivise your members to pay that little extra. This is not always prudent.

Attending a gym can be a very personal experience, and exercise programmes being made readily available can have a vast impact on the individual member. 

Offering these programmes can effectively make the difference between a prospective member choosing your club or a competitor.

Take this as an example of a thought process that might secure you a membership: 

“So Mary, as you can see, we provide you with a complete personal training programme for you to follow, so you know exactly what you’re supposed to be doing to get results every time you come to the club. Then in 6 weeks’ time, we will have a re-assessment of your programme to ensure your time with us is even more beneficial”.

The last thing you want is for a member to be left to wander aimlessly around the club guessing at the best exercises they are supposed to be doing.

Especially not when you have perfectly good exercise programmes ready to go! 

Make sure your staff and personal trainers have their names displayed

It is daunting to walk into a new gym and not know anyone, and while your staff will hopefully be friendly enough to introduce themselves. Monogrammed or name-tagged clothing can really help break down the barriers for new members and members on trials.

I first learned the name of my adored and feared Trainer of choice Marcel by his name tag. A handy and timeless ice-breaker.

Let the t-shirt do the talking for your fitness club or gym

A free t-shirt, especially a good quality one that you’ll actually want to wear out or to the gym, can make all the difference.

Give it to members when they cross a certain membership threshold, say 3 months. Or as a sign-up incentive during certain campaigns and pushes. 

Discount on your first visit

Create a culture among your staff and PTs of offering a discount on the first visit of someone. This can be particularly effective during referral drives or on ‘Bring a Friend Friday’.

This once again helps trigger that primal desire known as ‘Fear of Missing Out’.

Offer to refund a joining fee on the spot. Short term gain for a long term commitment

If you have a guest in your club who has decided to pay for one session or if they are there on Bring a Friend Friday, then now is the time to put them on the spot and offer an incentive.

Whatever incentive you decide, ensure that the guest knows that this option is available to them and that they will need to make a decision at the end of their session. Only offering a limited number of membership options might be a reason some prospects leave your club without joining. Create several tiers of membership so you and your staff are more likely to find a membership package that will make them buy on the spot.

Not everyone is confident to sign up for a year on the spot. 

Here are some membership options to consider:

• A short-term deal such as 1 month cash paid in full (highest price)
• A one month rolling direct debit membership (slightly lower price)
• 12 month direct debit contract memberships (lowest price).

By creating tiered options in this manner, you are more likely to find the sweet spot that the prospective member is happy to sign on at. 

A cash-only option should be available but only as a last resort. Direct Debit is always preferable.

Offer membership alternatives

As previously inferred. One-day passes, week-long passes and other modular alternatives can be a great way to get prospective members in the door.

This can allow friends of your existing members to work out with them for a week and get a taste for it.

Alternatively, a prospective member who isn’t aware of the myriad free trial schemes we’ve suggested will be able to buy in for a set amount and if your service/business pulls them in, they will hopefully be inclined to stay. 

Online sign-ups are a must

If we could put this point twice and still be satisfied that we’ve maintained our principles, we would.

Make sure your website has online sign-ups. The year is 2020, there is no excuse. Ideally, you should be signing up members inside your gym on your online system for ease of use.

Make time work for you by introducing off-peak and peak membership times

As we indicated earlier, Off-Peak and Peak membership is a good way to offer your prospective members a gateway package that they might eventually wish to upgrade.

The other big, tangible benefit to this is maximising the number of members you can have. Using some fairly basic data-mapping and projections you can work out how many members you can accommodate during a normal peak and off-peak.

If your peak membership capacity is full, it is the perfect excuse to push off-peak.

Boost your profits by introducing additional products

Maximise the amount of cash flowing through you by selling supplements, clothing and accessories in your club. Make sure any clothing with your brand on it is actually comfortable to wear and well priced.

Now is not the time to be making a large profit by selling an overpriced, generic t-shirt. The clothing will be a reflection of your brand and will impact how often the buyer wears it. 

You want to create one of their go-to items of clothing, not something they buy, regret, and throw to the back of a cupboard. 

Keep track of your stock levels using a digital EPoS (Electronic Point of Sale) system. This can also be used to track which member of staff sells the most clothing with a little bit of setup. This can be a vital reward metric for incentivising your staff.

The first 45 days are crucial for member retention

As we touched upon in our section on Fitness Programmes, the first few weeks are vital for determining if a member will stick with your Gym or Fitness Club.

Just as we detailed in that section how it is important not to withhold resources from new members. It is also important to encourage them and focus on their process in the first 45 days.

This is a key time period as it’ll determine whether they fall off their latest health kick or grow disillusioned with your gym. 

Get your Personal Trainer or staff to check that the new members are happy with their programme. Incentivise them to contact them via their preferred contact method to find out how things are going and when they will next be in the club.

Highlight to them how much they have improved or how much time they have spent in your gym or fitness club. Motive and encourage them.

Again, this approach will depend on the size of your gym or fitness club. This approach can be resource-intensive but intensely rewarding.

Member testimonials on online and onscreen

Use a high-quality smartphone or a video camera to record short snippets of your members explaining how they have improved by attending your club. Low-quality footage will reflect poorly on your Gym or Fitness Club so make sure it is up to a certain standard of audio and visual. 

Get the member to explain how they felt before they joined, what they feel now that they have achieved their goals, and what a prospect will find if they join.

Record their testimonial and post it onto social media. Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are all great places to share and spread this message. This is the sort of message that will really resonate with a certain type of prospective member.

Alternatively, email a link to your prospective members and add it to your Gym or Fitness Club’s website. Video testimonials are extremely simple and powerful methods of engaging new members. 

Hone the brand identity of your club

As with any institution or business that wants to succeed and make a name for itself, branding should be one of your main priorities.

Branding for your Gym or Fitness Club doesn’t end at a logo above the entrance door.

Your logo should be on every letterhead and email signature, as well as featuring prominently on your social media feeds. It should be displayed as your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter profile picture, unifying the brand identity of your social media presence

Your branding should become synonymous with your club so that whenever people see your two colours together they think of your club. For example, the colours red and yellow together make you think of McDonalds, so think of your own branding in this way.

Show off your gym or fitness clubs qualifications and accreditations

Joining relevant trade associations and professional accreditation bodies gives your club credibility and reassures prospective members that you have achieved a certain standard.

Encourage or even sponsor your PTs to achieve the highest levels of professional qualification that they can and then promote their achievements on social media as well. 

If someone leaves you to go to another gym, give them some really good reasons to come back to you. If you’re running a good gym or fitness club, chances are they will be regretting their decision. Figure out what the deterrents might be keeping them from coming back and address them.

It might cost money, it might not. Figure out what makes good business sense for you and do it.

And if you thought 20 ideas to get you started on attracting more members to your club was enough, then you’ll be delighted to hear that it really is just the start. Our team have collated an astounding 100 tried and tested strategies for you to experiment with. You can find all 100 ways to attract more members in bitesize chunks in our blog posts, or in our completely free downloadable PDF.

So what are you waiting for? Get started today!

We know you’re here to get the inside information on 20 tried and tested strategies that you can implement into your gym or fitness club to immediately start getting more sign-ups.

So we won’t make you wait any longer, if you want to start getting more members into your gym then keep reading!

• Offer Friends Free Friday

Friends Free Friday is a marketing ploy that pretty much explains itself. It’s a great way to gain some extra members without spending a fortune on advertising.

Contact your current membership database, offering them the chance to bring a friend to train at your club completely free on a Friday. Friday is usually a quiet day in the club so this is also a great way to generate a buzz around the place. Maybe have a designated Friday such as the last Friday in every month as the day when members can bring along a friend for free. If you just let the friend in to train, they will train and then go home and you will have gained nothing. As in any business this “friend” is a new lead which you should work hard on to achieve the sale:

• Allow friends of your members to train for free provided they fill in a membership form.
• Input their details into your membership software as a prospect.
• Give them a full induction and even a training programme.
• Work as hard as you can to show them why they should join your club.
• Give them a tour of the facility so they get to know where everything is, allowing them to become a part of the club from day one.
• Provide the friend with a discount if they join your club today, creating urgency and the fear of loss if they don’t join TODAY.
• Use your current member to try and sell the club for you. Provide them with an incentive if they can get their friend to join today.
• If a prospect doesn’t join on the day they visit, use their contact details to find them on social media – interact with them and send them emails to find out what you could have done to have got them to join.
• Be in their mind, so that when they are ready to join a gym it is your club that is top of their list.
• Promote Friends Free Friday as part of your use of the popular
• #FitnessFriday hashtag for any twitter posts made on a Friday.

• Keep your Staff, keep your customers

Your trainers and staff are a vital part of your service. Personally, I have left a Gym because my personal trainer left and I know I am not alone in this.

Gyms and Fitness Clubs that retain their good staff, retain their members. In the same way that you should strive to embed yourself in the community, great staff will be pillars of your Gym or Fitness Clubs own smaller community.

Do not waste this opportunity. Ask any veteran gym-goer and they will have stories about a personal trainer they knew and loved, even if they were never personally trained by them!

Mine was called Marcel!

• Utilise your trainers whenever you can, host events

If your trainers are worth their salt, they will live and breath fitness and the multiple, branching interests that that entails.

Utilise them! Host events based on the various aspects of fitness. Fitness is as fascinating as it is complex. Whether it is diets, breathing techniques, specific exercises, or the latest internet workout challenge. You want at least an event a month.

• Incentivise your staff to learn how to sell

Some club owners expect their trainers to push continuing membership to their club with the same vigor that they practice their actual fitness passions with. This won’t always be the case and this approach will only get them so far.

If a Gym or Fitness Club owner wants to really see results, they will need to formalise the process into a commission system. This will supercharge the process, as presenting tangible awards to each new customer will motivate your Personal Trainers even more than just the abstract reward of increased membership at their gym.

If you have a well-developed set of online tools supporting your gym, you can easily keep track of this on your own website/portal. 

• A key to success for any Gym or Fitness Club. Get a great website.

Speaking of which, leading directly on from the previous point. If you want to succeed in business after 1998, you’ve got to have a stand-out website, and this is no exception for even the smallest Gym or Fitness Club. 

The secret is to minimise the amount of effort it takes for a visitor to your website to understand and access the information they want to know about your business and the services it provides. 

The internet is a more naturalistic place for many of your younger prospective members to gather information than the newspaper or radio and your website must have the resources put into it to reflect that. 

Make sure your website is accessible and well-formatted on mobile as well as computer. Increasingly consumers are moving away from Desktop PCs and a sub-optimal mobile site will put off the vital and energetic 18-35 market. 

Without a sleek website, your chance to stand out on perhaps your most important battlefield outside of physical space will falter.

Your website needs to quickly and effortlessly demonstrate to potential customers why your Gym or Fitness Club is different and a cut above the rest. 

• Don’t copy your competitor’s website, lead the pack

It can be tempting to look through your competitors or other large Gyms and simply copy what has worked for them.

This is not the way.

If you copy, at best your website will be uninspiring and soulless, at worst it will be downright derivative and uninspiring.

Your website is one of your most valuable assets as a business operating in the 2020s. Take the time and invest in a vision that will deliver time and time again. 

• Buy now, pay later, a potential Membership Style of billing

A simple method, but effective. The business psychology behind this is setting up the trust for a continuing relationship. 

Just make sure that Direct Debit is set up and ready to go

• Data is King, keep data on your old members, attempt to market to them

Ex-members are not exactly a resource you want to have loads of. But, with that being said, they are a resource you can use.

Maintain a database of your old membership and advertise to them. Mount special campaigns, mail pieces and offers with the explicit intention of winning them back. 

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  Utilise Social Media to target new members of your Gym or Fitness Club

Social Media can help offer a very personalised touch. If a member has just joined, reach out on your Gym or Fitness Clubs Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. 

Social media is designed for posts to go viral and by offering promotions that involve retweeting, this can quickly and effortlessly occur. 

Use your existing members and followers to help spread the message out to non-members.

If your content is good enough, they might soon be followers or even members

• Remind your Off-Peak members of Peak Membership Upgrades

A quick and easy win as a potential mail piece. Make sure that all your existing Off-Peak members don’t fancy a very quick and easy upgrade to a more expensive membership package. 

• Fear of Missing Out: Revisited

Are there more terrifying words in the English Language than “Offer Ends Today”.

We don’t think so. Even if you are going to make the same offer next month or next week.

Setup your campaigns in a way that reinforces that this is a LIMITED TIME offer. 

Works especially well in the fast and furious world of Social Media. Less effective through traditional advertising. 

• Up Close and Personal (Trainer). Free Personal Training Sessions.

An extra point to build on Fear of Missing Out. Offering a personal training session as a limited sign-up offer can be a quick and easy way to get people on board and for your members to start forging links with your staff.

• Push and Publish your Membership Testimonials

Get your membership testimonials online and in print.

Nothing should speak to prospective members of your Gym or Fitness Club more than seeing a believable story of a transformation.

This is the sort of transformation they will be coming to your business to see in themselves.

This is also the sort of transformation that can quickly go viral (as we mentioned previously).

• A limited time offer on the bottom of receipt at your club and other shops

Similar to our tactic with the Restaurant receipt.

Your own receipts shouldn’t be immune to injecting FOMO into your members and their friends.

Moreover, use your business partnerships we have previously discussed to open up new avenues of advertising and marketing

• Making the most of that 30-day free membership.

So we have talked about offering 30-day free memberships.

But a member signing up and taking advantage of that offer isn’t the end of the battle, it is the beginning.

Have a doctrine in place for using those 30 days to make sure that member signs up.

Whether it is a free personal trainer session, a blitz on their mailing list, or free fitness lessons.

Engage with this new prospective member that has entered your Gym or Fitness Club and ensure that they feel noticed without feeling targeted.

Finally, when that 30-day membership is up, if they haven’t already signed up for more, make sure to have an automated email to ask them whether they are ready to join.

• Create video content for YouTube

Video content is nowhere near as expensive to make as it was, and thanks to the utter market dominance of YouTube, it is easier to distribute than ever before. 

• Celebrate the success of your members online and in-person

Use the newsletter, social media, and space in your physical Gym or Fitness Club to celebrate the success of your members.

Whether they have hit their weight loss goals or started to bench 100kg. Shout it from the roof.

You are more likely to retain that member and bring in new ones. Create a sense of community 

• Members versus staff referral competition

Host a competition between staff and members to see who can bring in the most new members in a particular month. Pay your members £10-£30 for every referral that joins and pay your staff their standard commission (surely they don’t need more motivation than that). Every membership secured gets a ticket that goes into that particular team’s pot.

The team with the most tickets wins £1,000. Your members will pay a great deal of attention to that amount and it will really get people motivated. How many memberships do you need to sell to cover that? The motivation of winning £1,000 will be enough to sell extra memberships to more than cover the cost.

Stage a presentation of the prize at the end of the month, with no limits to the number of entries in the pot. Keep a poster in a visible area of the club showing both teams who are ahead and by how much. This will help keep them motivated as well.

• Set a Membership Refund Prize for Referrals

Not to generalise unfairly, but in our experience Gym and Fitness Club members tend to be quite a competitive bunch, and they love hitting goals.

So set them a personal goal. When they hit 5 members that they have referred to your club that stay for a set period of time, they get their Membership Fee refunded. Simple as that.

As you can imagine, word of mouth will quickly spread about this offer.

In fact, everyone who comes to your club by way of this method will then be aware of this offer and may, in turn, want to recruit five more themselves in order to gain their own refund. 

• Advertise members’ businesses on screen

Offer on-screen advertising on your club TVs to local businesses. Start by offering this to members who own local businesses. Charge £300 per year for an ongoing loop video. Get 10 businesses to do this and you have enough to buy a large flat-screen TV (choose one with a built-in DVD player) and have at least an extra £2k in profit. You will also have the opportunity to continue earning at least £3k each year from this TV.

And you don’t have to stop with 10 businesses. Profits are unlimited. You could then get another 10 businesses and set up another TV in a different area of your club. Or two smaller TVs and put one in each changing room.

The business owners or you can create a jpeg ad and then you simply create a CD.

In addition to a slideshow of ads, you can also display club announcements. This helps to draw attention to the ads, which members will watch and talk about. Business owners who are advertising will in turn talk about and promote your club.

And if you thought 20 ideas to get you started on attracting more members to your club was enough, then you’ll be delighted to hear that it really is just the start. Our team have collated an astounding 100 tried and tested strategies for you to experiment with. You can find all 100 ways to attract more members in bitesize chunks in our blog posts, or in our completely free downloadable PDF.

So what are you waiting for? Get started today!

When it comes to getting the most out of your marketing, there are only 2 things you need to focus on:

1 – Reach your customer in the first place

2 – Secure a way to stay in touch with that customer

It’s simple advice, but it’s a keystone of modern day marketing.

The beauty of modern digital marketing, is that you no longer have to leave it up to luck in order to succeed with your advertising. In the past, the best you could hope for was to send out a flyer, take an advert out in the local paper or put a poster outside of the gym. If your advert was catchy enough, people would come to the club. But in terms of perfecting that system and working out which part of your marketing was working, it was as accurate as reading the stars.

You Can Also Download Our Email Marketing Strategy Guide

If you don’t have time to read the blog, then you can always download our complete email collection and remarketing strategy right now, and discover how you can increase your email collection by almost 15x and decrease the cost of your Facebook ads.

How We Tested Our Powerful Remarketing Tool

During the relaunch of our clubs, Ashbourne has been trying to find a method to make every single penny count when it comes to our advertising.  Our proving ground has been The Fit Club Redditch, a club which we directly manage and market. Every single product or service we release to our gyms is always tested and trialled at The Fit Club, so that we can prove it works.

Our latest goal was to drastically improve the number of emails we collected when people visited our website. After all, every single person who came to our website and didn’t give us their email was lost forever. It was the same as them seeing a flyer. Without a way to contact them beyond that intial contact, we were losing potential customers.

We also wanted to use this increased email collection as a way of improving our Facebook ad performance. After all, the more emails we could intially collect when people visited us, the more times we could follow up with them.

Anyone who has run a paid ad knows that the number of “clicks” you get per ad, is far higher than the number of “conversions” you make. That means there’s a lot of interested people clicking your ad, that you lose touch with instantly.

It was turning more of those clicks into conversions which was key to success and the method to do that was collecting more of those clickers’ email addresses the first time around.

How Our Facebook Ad Would Work

Our Facebook ad funnel was simple.

• Advertise to all people within our local area
• Have a striking Facebook ad with an interesting promotion
• Take members to a landing page, which offers that promotion further and gives a full description of the club
• Get viewers to fill in their email to receive our promotion via email
• Track the prospect landing on a thank you page after purchase to confirm the sale of a membership.

But we don’t want to leave it to chance…

After all, not every customer is ready to buy there and then. We instead have to do some followups to keep us in their mind short term and give them the chance to purchase when they’re ready.

For this, we have set an arbituary endpoint for the promotion, which is 3 days after they receive the promotion and then their code deactivates. This is simply to give us a set period to get an idea if our ad is successful, so we can make changes without wasting money, but also creates some pressure to purchase before time runs out.

Here Are The Results From Our 2 Tests

We have now run this exact set up twice. Once with a single traditional promotion offering, along with a simple pop up that asks each visitor to enter their email.

And another with our powerful new email collection tool.

The difference in numbers should be strike you right away.

Test results from traditional email collection

191 leads

£743.91 spent

£3.89 per lead

27 sales

£27.55 per purchase (12 month membership)

VS

Test results from powerful new email collection tool

351 leads

£336.73 spent

£0.95 per lead

34 sales

£9.90 per purchase (12 month membership)

But why the difference when it was effectively the same ad twice?

The logic here is simple.

By ensuring that more people gave us their email after clicking the ad, we could ensure we did more follow up emails and therefore, more people signed up.

Our new email collection method allowed us to collect almost 2x the emails for a quarter of the price.

From that point, we were able to sell members for under a third of the cost, making our money back on the first month of a 12 month membership.

Email remaketing and therefore better email collection is at the heart of this success.

With more followups, we were able to get people purchasing who would have completely passed us by if we hadn’t secured a way to contact them on the first round. And that allows us to not only secure a sale in the short term, but over the course of a lifetime, we can continue to send them numerous promotions and deals, until we catch them at the right moment.

Increasing your emails positively affects every aspect of your marketing.

So what was our special email collection tool? Let us show you!

The Random Discount Wheel

This is an incredible tool that drastically increases your email sign ups.

While a high performing sign up form should have a sign up rate of around 2% – 5% of everyone who sees it, the discount wheel on average has a sign up rate of between 25% – 30%. You can already see why it’s had such a positive affect on our facebook ad spend.

How it works is simple:

• When people land on a page, they will be shown the discount wheel
• You can select a range of promotional discount codes
• You can then select the probability of certain promotions popping up (high probability for the simple ones, zero probability for the really good ones)
• All the viewer has to do is enter their email and then they receive a code

New and interesting ways of collecting emails like the discount wheel spark people’s interest and get them entering their email. Even though the proposition is the same – simply a special discount – the presentation makes it fresh and exciting.

We never even changed our promotion. The 75% off your first month was the best promotion on there, but with the random chance, it excited people to now enter their emails to give it a try.

This is always something to bear in mind. Sometimes it’s the presentation and interest which needs to change, not the offer.

Keep reading to the end of the blog as we have links to multiple wheels that will work with different website types.

The Email Followup Funnel

The next way to make the most from each wheel sign up, is to have some followup emails.

Not everyone who gets a discount is ready to buy there and then, and many people simply don’t bother checking their emails, or lose their promotional code… point being, you can never tell what you’re customer is doing, so you need to make sure they know about it.

In our strategy, we send out 3 emails across the following 3 days from when they fill in the form.

You can click the link to download our email text as a template for your own club:

The First Email – Sent immediately. Confirms that their code is available for the next 15 minutes

The Second Email – Sent 1 day later. Let’s the member know that you’ve kept their code available for the next day if they want to still sign up. The email contains the most common code that the customer can spin.

The Third Email – Sent 1 day later. Gives the member the best promotion available on the wheel as a final incentive (this gesture can be framed however fits your brand style best).

When are people most likely to sign up?

Based on our data, a majority of sign ups occur immediately after spinning the wheel and receiving the first email.

However, the addition of followup emails allows your advert to be more than a single hit. Your gym stays in the customers mind, so you can still convert customers who aren’t the kind of people to make impulse purchases and need a few days to consider purchases.

The best reason to use a set time period to send emails (3 days), is that you can then determine that by the third day, if you haven’t had a sale, then you’re likely not going to have one. While someone might sign up later down the line, when you’re spending money on Facebook ads, you want quick results, so if you aren’t making sales by day 3, it’s time to change something.

A Simple Overview of This Strategy And Why It Works!

To make things nice and clear for the overall marketing funnel, here it is laid out visually, so you can see every step of the process.

Please feel free to download this if you want to review it later.

And here is where you can download every step of it!

You are welcome to download all the copy and assets we used during our latest campaign to use as a template to run your own campaigns. After all, if it ain’t broke, then why fix it.

Our website landing page with wheel – See here

Our Facebook ad image and copy – Download here

Our full email funnel – Download here

Our e-book on how to create a Facebook ad – Download here

The best discount wheels for different website types (ask your website admin if you’re not sure) – WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace

Ashbourne Can Help With Your Gym’s Marketing & More

Ashbourne helps its partner clubs stay ahead in the market by doing something that no other health club manager does… running its own clubs.

By managing our own clubs and testing every one of our services under real world conditions, we can maintain the best club management service out there, whether it’s handling your direct debits, payment collections, your gym’s check in security or your marketing.

Ashbourne has a service to help make every aspect of this marketing funnel, and many others, possible. By joining Ashbourne, we can help build you a fast and responsive site, offer you advice on your Facebook advertising and give you a powerful CRM to automate your emails and control your leads.

If you want to supercharge your club’s marketing and make your business stronger than it’s ever been, then we’d love to have a chat and show you around the system, so you can see your business’s bright future with Ashbourne behind you every step of the way.

Lockdown comes to an end tomorrow! We can hear the sighs of relief and excitement across the country.

And although this now means the introduction of a stricter tier system, you can begin to relax a little knowing that no matter whereabouts in the country you may be – your facility is able to open it’s doors again, whilst following the guidelines appropriate to your location.

It’s important to remember that crisis similar to those of the COVID-19 pandemic leave a long-term psychological impact on people and therefore even now you have been able to open your gyms doors again and some type of normality begins to resume, it will take time for many people to adjust back to how things were before.

Digital experiences such as online classes which have replaced typical in-person gym experiences are likely to stick around long after the crisis and therefore adjusting your focus to meet the needs of your potential members ‘new normal’ will be crucial. You would be wrong to assume all customers will return to the buying place they were at prior to COVID-19, so start turning your attention to how you can amend your marketing strategy to suit the new needs of your audience to give your gym the greatest chance of attracting new members during this difficult time.

YOU CAN ALSO DOWNLOAD OUR COVID-19 MARKETING STRATEGY GUIDE

If you don’t have time to read the blog, then you can always download our COVID-19 marketing strategy guide right now, and discover ways in which you can market your gym during the ongoing pandemic to continue attracting new members.

ANTICIPATE YOUR MEMBERS’ NEEDS

Although you will be opening your gym’s doors again, many people will still be uncertain about returning. The lockdowns were only ever a temporary measure, however their introduction forced people into an unusual situation where their daily habits and routines came to a halt. This subsequently resulted in many people’s needs changing meaning that even once lockdown is in the rear view mirror, not everyone will feel comfortable returning to an environment like a gym, even with social distancing and increased hygiene measures in place. Underlying health conditions may also prevent some of your typical audience from returning and therefore it is crucial to identify individual consumer needs and take steps to address or prevent them before they impact your membership numbers.

Offering online fitness alternatives enables you to engage with members and continue providing health and fitness guidance to the community. So start thinking about what you can offer members on a purely virtual basis, so people who aren’t yet ready to dive back into in-person workouts and group classes can still utilise many other aspects of being a gym member whilst they slowly ease back into the notion of attending your facility.

CREATE HIGH QUALITY ONLINE CONTENT

Gyms and fitness studios across the country have quickly turned their attention to harnessing the skills of their instructors and person trainers to provide digital workouts and classes for their members.

You as a gym owner have the opportunity during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to create an entirely new membership option to entice new customers, accessing your fitness guidance entirely online. Even if your current and potential members aren’t ready to return to your facility once you have reopened, it doesn’t mean they don’t want to engage with your fitness content at all. So allow people the opportunity to continue engaging with your gym on terms that they are comfortable with.

LIVE STREAM WORKOUTS

Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or through video conferencing apps like Zoom; live streaming is a great tool to reach out to your members! Trainers could run classes at the same time each day. Get your members involved and for those that aren’t members of your gym now, it’s a great way to capture their attention and convince them to join your club even if their not yet ready to attend in person. You can also record these live streams and turn them into on-demand video content for your members to continue utilising.

VIDEO WORKOUTS

Use pre-recorded workout videos to offer your members a form of exercise that they can do at any time. Those with children may not be able to join you during your live streams at specific times, so it’s a great way to engage those with time constraints. You can use video through an email campaign to reach only your members or reach out to non-members through social, similar to the live stream workouts.

RECIPES

Provide healthy recipes to keep your members engaged and to help them carry on their health transformation that they started at your club.

BE PRESENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA

With people spending more time at home than ever, the time they also spend on their mobile devices is increasing and the use of online platforms is on the rise.

Video-streaming platforms and social media allow people to connect with the outside world and stay informed so it’s the perfect time to build your gyms online presence with social media marketing.

The use of social media allows you to connect with current members as well as being used as a selling mechanism so be sure to show all sides of your business, as you don’t know who will be taking notice! Post regularly, with varied content and you’re sure to get engagement from current and potential members.

Having a strategy and plan in place with be much more effective than posting spontaneously, so get your team together and start brainstorming some ideas and mapping out a social media schedule.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Re-introduce your team and let them tell their stories of lockdown
• Share how you looked after your staff and members during lockdown
• Workouts targeted at easing back into the gym after an extended break
• Motivational quotes
• Members transformation stories
• Member goals
• Share how you’re staying COVID safe
• Class instructor social media takeover to show behind the scenes

KEEP YOUR MEMBERS SAFE

When your gym or studio is ready to reopen, one of the biggest obstacles you may face is reassuring people that your facility is safe to return to or attend and that they should feel comfortable in doing so.

During your closure you should have paid particular attention to communicating your plans to keep your gym COVID safe utilising your social media channels, your website, emails and SMS. And it’s just as important to continue communicating your safety protocols once you have reopened to ensure your current members and potential new members feel safe in considering coming to your gym.

Clearly define the measure you are putting in place and go the extra mile above social distancing and 1 way systems. It’s time to focus on your customer experience more than ever and focus on instilling confidence in your members and provide them with the means to cope with the situation. Be empathetic to those people who are slightly more concerned and reserved than others and prioritise safety first and foremost. This might disrupt how your gym and any classes were previously run, but by taking the approach of putting your members above all else and providing them with the guidance and reassurance they need, your gym will stand out and you’ll be able to build a loyal customer base.

• Use the provided hand sanitiser on entry to the gym and regularly throughout your workout
• Clean all equipment using the provided cleaning stations before and after each workout set
• Socially distance at all times and don’t gather in groups
• Respect other members’ space during their time in the facility
• Arrive dressed in your gym gear, ready for your workout
• Limit your workout to one hour to allow as many people to use the facility as possible
• Follow any signage that you see throughout the facility
• If you have COVID symptoms or have been in contact with someone with COVID symptoms, then do not enter the gym for the following 14 days
• If any time you see anyone not following the rules, then please inform a member of staff

TARGET YOUR CANCELLATIONS

Unfortunately due to the overwhelming unpredictability of COVID-19 and no realistic sense of what the future may hold, many people have opted to cancel their gym memberships for a range of reasons.

Although some businesses have been fortunate enough to reopen and employees return to work, there are still many who face uncertainty over their employment and may be place on the government furlough scheme resulting in a real fear of economic downturn. This has resulted in people trying to save where they can and as a result cancelling monthly subscriptions, such as gym memberships, as it is not deemed as an essential monthly outgoing.

Even if you gave your members the option to freeze their memberships during your temporary closures, you will have noticed that some of your members will have proceeded with cancelling their memberships anyway as a precautionary measure.

For the majority of these people, their financial positions will have hopefully become more certain than it was back in March and they might be ready to start back up their monthly subscriptions again. So now you are ready to reopen again, turn your attention to marketing to those people who cancelled their membership pre-COVID. Create a tailored (and discounted!) re-joining offer for them and send out targeted emails and SMS to try and entice them back to your facility.

BUILD YOUR LOCAL NETWORK

With so many businesses having been effected by COVID-19, it is important to try and lift one another up. Although this might not be everyone’s cup of tea, a marketing strategy you might like to introduce is partnering up with other businesses in your local area to see if you can leverage off each other’s customer bases.

Perhaps there is a café just around the corner from your gym, you could offer their customers a discounted reopening membership rate and in return they could offer one free coffee to all of your members. In times of hardship like 2020 has seen, these types of cross promotion can lead to an ideal win-win scenario where your gym not only benefits, but you can also help keep another local business afloat as well.

And you don’t have to just think about businesses within a certain mile radius if you’d rather spread your net a bit wider. Consider partnering with online companies as well. Small businesses need support now more than ever, and creating a mutually beneficial partnership agreement may be what you both need. This would work particularly well with a small fitness boutique or emerging protein supplement. Don’t be afraid to think big!

SHOW YOUR APPRECIATION

No one can predict what’s to come next in this global pandemic, or when it will come to an end. But one thing is for certain, everyone, including businesses (large and small), families and individuals have felt the effects of it and have had to face it’s challenges head on.

Something that is so easy to say and has a large impact is thank you. Don’t forget to thank your members for sticking by you. Many of your members will have returned to your gym when you were able to reopen following the first lockdown and will have continued to support you when the news of a secondary temporary closure was announced.

They have followed the rules and guidelines set out in your facility to ensure that everyone was in a safe environment. It is due to their commitment and vigilance that your gym was able to successfully reopen once and it will be down to them again when your gym reopens again in the next few days.

Many of your members will have also opted to continue paying their membership fees in order to take advantage of any online classes you offered during the lockdown. They are the lifeblood of your business and without them, you simply wouldn’t be here.

So show them your appreciation for their ongoing support, it may be something as simple as sending an email. But make sure if feels personal. Posting on your social media is all well and good, but it often lacks that personal touch. So be sure to get in touch with your members on what feels like a more 1-2-1 basis, you might want to offer them some freebies, but that isn’t always necessary. Sometimes all it takes is a simple email expressing your gratitude.

Do what’s best for you and your fitness business.

WE WISH YOU THE BEST OF LUCK

For the majority of gym owners, this will be your second time reopening following a lockdown this year. This is likely to make you feel much more confidence about your reopening, although it doesn’t mean the fitness industry is out of the woods just yet. Navigating your way through the rest of this pandemic will continue to present you with challenges, and ensuring that you maintain healthy memberships numbers will be your main focus.

We at Ashbourne Membership Management are here to help you every step of the way, so please do not hesitate to get in touch and see how we can partner together to take your gym to the next level.

And until then, we wish you the absolute best of luck in reopening your gym and keeping your members healthy and happy.

It can always be tempting to assume that your customers are on the cutting edge of technology. Everyone seems to be using Snapchat, Instagram and Whatsapp, so it must stand that these are the channels that most customers want to be contacted by when it comes to your marketing.

But as the saying goes “the old ways are still the best” and you might be surprised to find out that more traditional marketing methods that have been in use for decades are still the most effective way to get in touch with prospects and convert them into paying customers.

In this short blog, we’re going to take a look at SMS marketing, AKA short service message marketing, AKA text message marketing. And not only will we taking a look at what it is and how it works, we’ll also uncover the amazing data that shows why you need to be using SMS marketing as one of your primary marketing channels.

What Is SMS Marketing & How Does It Work?

SMS marketing in its simplest form, is just a way to send promotional messages to someone in a text.

Unlike emails, direct mail or other forms of marketing, SMS marketing is focused on short and snappy instant promotions. Whilst emails allow for you to send lengthier messages that may include additional information like blogs or downloadable resources, SMS marketing is focused on making the sell.

Of course, SMS marketing like any marketing is there to be experimented with and many businesses do extend beyond simple promotions, but traditionally that’s what works best for SMS marketing.

How Popular Is SMS Marketing?

Very!

Plenty of studies have shown that SMS marketing has higher open rates and higher click rates than any other form of marketing communication. On top of that, customers also report that they feel SMS marketing is “safer” and respects their “privacy” more than other marketing forms such as email.

SMS marketing has a good reputation and that’s very important when it comes to getting customers on your side.

SMS Marketing: The Facts, Figures & Numbers

A recent survey by software and programming giant SAP  discovered that 64% of consumers would prefer if businesses marketing to them used SMS more often.

But their findings don’t stop there:

• 76% reported that they are more likely to quickly read SMS marketing / text message than an email.
• 70% felt that SMS marketing / text messages were a good way for a business to get their attention.
• 62% claimed that they would also like to use SMS / text messages in order to communicate back to businesses.

SMS Marketing Will Help You Stand Out From The Crowd

Do you remember earlier how we listed all the other messaging methods people use today? After all, it seems like Whatsapp, Facebook messenger and other app based messengers are quickly taking over from more traditional SMS messaging.

Well the upside of this is that your customers’ SMS log is relatively clear. Not many companies truly utilise SMS marketing compared to other methods like email, and people are receiving less SMS as part of their communications with friends, since they’re using alternative platforms.

So compared to the regular consumer who can receive hundreds of emails a day, they might only receive 2 or 3 SMS messages a day. This means that every SMS marketing message you send stands out and counts for a lot more.

Get On Top of Your Fitness Business’ Marketing

Whatever part of your marketing you’re looking to upgrade, Ashbourne Membership Management is here to help you supercharge every aspect of your approach, to lock down more prospects and convert more members, to continue to grow your fitness business.

From SMS, to email marketing and on to payment solutions, Ashbourne has spent the last 2 decades helping thousands of fitness businesses, studios, gyms and health clubs realise their potential.

If you want to get the most from your fitness business, then contact one of our amazing Ashbourne team to learn more about our SMS marketing solutions and membership management services as a whole.