If you own and operate a fitness club, you know that spending quality time with your members is important. You didn’t start a gym to file paperwork or be a human resources agent—you started a gym to help your community live a more active lifestyle.  

Yet, more and more, it seems that the limited hours in your day are being taken up by administrative tasks—and it’s taking you away from your valuable personal training time with your members. And when you try to imagine spending any more of your time working on marketing your gym to prospects, it makes you want to pull your hair out. 

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Sound familiar? If it does, you make benefit greatly from implementing a series of marketing automation in your gym to help grow your business. While automation might seem to many like a cold, mechanical process with no human touch, it can offer a more personalized experience for your gym clients.

What Is Marketing Automation? 

Marketing automation uses software to streamline processes in your gym’s day-to-day operations without the need for human intervention, making them effortless. Examples of automated workflows include online scheduling systems for classes, reminder text messages triggered by registrations, and segmentation of your gym members by specific demographics, to name just a few processes. There are many areas where you can apply automation, including email marketing, social media, lead nurturing, analytics, and so much more.

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The goal of automation is to make processes more efficient by utilizing the power of software to take care of small, but important, tasks for you. For example, imagine how much time it could save you to have your member management software automatically group your gym members by the date that they joined the gym. This would mean not having to manually do it yourself, which saves hours of time by the end of the month—hours of time that could be spent with your clients. 

Automation may have a bad reputation as being a lazy, cheap way to engage with your members, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. How well automation works depends entirely on who is operating it, and how much thought they have put into the processes. Automated marketing strategies still require work to refine. 

Automation Strategies Your Gym Marketing Could Use 

Curious about how you could streamline some of the administrative processes at your gym for the long term? Here are a few key strategies to start with: 

Set Up An Online Booking System 

The first significant process you should be automating at your fitness business is the booking and sign-up sales process. Not only does it save time for new members who want to get started working it, it saves time for you as well if your new members can get started with a membership on their own. 

Once you see that someone new has signed up, you can still reach out and make sure they are enjoying the facility so far. But in the meantime, having an online booking system will save you time spent talking to prospects about memberships and guiding them through the sale process, whether it’s on the phone, or in person. 

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Xplor Recreation’s platform-as-a-service software allows you to easily create single or recurring classes, courses, drop-ins, programs so customers can easily register for activities, private and group classes. It’s time to make enrolling and withdrawing simple and painless for your team and your club; Xplor Recreation provides a user-friendly platform to easily navigate, so members can pay for classes, drop-ins, and private classes online 24/7 using any device. 

Send Invoices & Bill Members Automatically

With an advanced member management software, you don’t have to restrict the hours you collect payments to your gym’s hours of operation. Offering 24/7 online booking means that your point-of-sales system will be collecting payments 24/7, too.  

Plan ahead by knowing all the fitness industry trends:
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With Xplor Recreation, you can sell all kind of products both on-site or online, which members can access from any computer or smart device.  Different payment methods and options are available to fit any situation. Our accounting module makes tracking financials simple and straight-forward. Learn more about how Xplor Recreation can help you effortlessly complete multiple transactions in a single payment, and more.  

Track The Metrics You Want 

Let’s say, for example, you want to put a focus on guiding prospects who have indicated their interest in your gym to collect a free trial pass and try out your gym. How would you go about engaging with that audience? 

Without marketing automation, you may need to go through your member management software, group your audience by who has registered and who hasn’t, and group them further by registrations within the last two weeks. Next you would need to continually update this list and send out this email repeatedly. At the end of the week, you may lose hours optimizing this process, just to gain one or two registrations. 

Plan ahead by knowing all the fitness industry trends:
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Instead, this is a process that Xplor Recreation can optimize. Take advantage of our marketing technology to Reduce time spent on administrative tasks by using specific parameters to send targeted, scheduled emails on a regular basis. Learn more about how Xplor Recreation can efficiently connect your customers, maximize how many of your emails are delivered and opened. 

Group Your Member List By Specific Demographics 

How you group your database will depend greatly on the services you provide, the areas you service, and other specific factors. For example, if you are promoting a women’s only class at your gym through email, you will want to make sure you promote that class just to the women at your club. Segmenting your messages like this will help boost engagement and open rates on your emails, as the messages is more targeted for your audience. 

Plan ahead by knowing all the fitness industry trends:
Get your FREE 5-year Gym, Health & Fitness Club Industry Outlook Guide

Create, track and measure all your marketing campaigns in one place with Xplor Recreation. With our platform-as-a-service software, you can generate more leads and reduce dropouts, while regularly nurture your prospects and members. Learn more about how you can use Xplor Recreation to customize email lists using preset criteria. 

Explore Our Solutions: Marketing Automation For Gyms 

If you’re curious to know how marketing automation could help you in your business, Xplor Recreation may have the answer you’re looking for. Contact us today to book a demo!