The fitness industry is among the fastest-growing industries worldwide, but the competition is fierce. There are gyms and studios at every corner, and it's getting more and more challenging to attract new customers. To build a successful fitness business, you have to create a strong brand presence that makes you stand out from the crowd. But you also have to ensure that potential clients can find you and eventually become loyal members. This article will help you to understand the major steps of smart lead generation and effective client engagement.
What Can You Do To Reach And Engage Potential Clients Effectively?
In times of information overload, it's crucial to create a marketing funnel that uses the right marketing tools at specific customer touch points. If you only focus on lead generation, you might waste your efforts and budget because you lose your clients before they’re ready to sign up for a membership or buy your services. To understand how to structure your marketing efforts most efficiently, let’s take a look at the journey of the typical fitness client:
Step 1: Brand Awareness
Every purchase or membership starts with brand awareness. If potential clients don’t know about you and why you’re different from your competition, they will never walk into your door or visit your website. This might sound obvious, but creating sufficient awareness is often neglected by new business owners.
How Can You Win The Awareness Race?
Nowadays, most consumers find products or services online. If your business does not come up on the first page of search results, it’s unlikely you will win the race for new clients. That’s why it’s crucial that your website is SEO friendly and includes the keywords that reflect your service offerings perfectly. Also, make sure that your business comes up on all relevant local listings.
Step 2: Interest
Being visible to potential clients is only the first step in the right direction. Once they have found you, it's essential to convince them that you can fulfill their specific needs better than any of your competitors. What makes your service portfolio different? How can you engage your audience to reach out to you? And – most importantly – how can you capture the new leads before they click away from your website?
Step 3: Consideration
Most people don’t buy a service after visiting a website once. Especially fitness clients, who often lose motivation to sign up for a class, service, or membership after the initial excitement. Opposed to other businesses, you're not only competing against other fitness facilities but also Netflix and a comfortable couch…
So, what can you do to keep them interested in your offers? For capturing leads that can be converted into clients, smart email marketing management is key. Once you have the email address of a potential client, you can provide them with relevant offers or content that further excites them about your services.
That's why it's crucial that website visitors sign up for your email list before clicking to another site. To send people emails, you need their permission, i.e., you need to make them “opt-in” to receive your newsletter, special offers, etc. Unfortunately, the days when everybody gave away their email address easily are over. Consumers don’t want to get spammed by ads. That’s why you must come up with something valuable enough to make them opt-in. It could be a raffle, a special discount, or a newsletter that sparks their interests. In the marketing world, this is also referred to as lead magnet.
Step 4: Purchase
Once you have signed up members to your email marketing list, you can send them emails. They could include special offers or content that gets them interested in buying your services or joining your gym. The biggest challenge here is to create emails that your potential clients open AND read. These days, consumers are bombarded with emails, so it’s crucial to send them something with a compelling subject line.
Having your potential clients opening their emails is a significant win, now it's crucial to provide them with valuable content or relevant offers. Content creation can be tedious, but people can get turned off if they only receive emails that feature special discounts or new offers. Apart from that, you can reuse the same content for a blog or social media posts.
If your subscribers like your content, chances are high they will not only buy your product but also open your next email. In the best case, they even share the email with their friends and family.
Step 5: Repurchase
Increase your leads and improve retention for your fitness business with an all-in-one management and marketing solution. Try for Free.
After the sale is before the sale. Staying in regular contact with your customers (e.g., through email newsletters) will help you to create an engaged audience that identifies with your brand. Loyal clients are valuable assets for a variety of reasons:
- You can retain them easily and thus create a reliable income source
- You can offer them additional services
- You can turn them into “brand ambassadors” that speak highly about your business
The last point is especially valuable because engaged customers that love your facility have the potential to become a powerful referral source.
Unfortunately, many business owners are prioritizing lead over loyalty management. However, research has shown that it’s significantly more expensive to generate a new customer than keeping an existing one.
Conclusion
If you can find smart and effective solutions for ALL 5 steps of the purchase process, you will be able to build a sustainable and robust fitness business.
Do you feel you that you need a million-dollar budget and a big marketing team to implement an email purchase funnel that outperforms your competitors? You don’t. Xplor Recreation offers an in-built marketing automation feature within its gym management software that will help you easily connect with your customers and leads and run effective email marketing campaigns.
Other Useful Resources for Your Fitness Business
- Decoding SEO: 10 Key Ways to Optimize Your Website
- 8 Proven Ways to Convert Your Website Visitors into Subscribers
- How to Recruit and Retain Your Best Group Exercise Instructors
- How to Get Your Fitness Business Ready for the Holidays
