Investing in your fitness business is something you do every day. You invest time, effort, and money. However, sometimes the focus of these investments is overlooked.
Often, communication is the investment that is grossly overlooked. As it relates to your fitness business, communication is extremely important because it is directly related to your profits and revenue. Communication means interaction. To make money in this business, you must interact daily with the three of the most important groups of people in your world: your members, your prospects, and your employees.
Yes, communication is your biggest investment, and unfortunately, it can be a huge cost. In this article, I’m going to show you how you can maximize your communication with zero or no cost, and increase your revenue at the same time.
Traditional Communication
First, let’s look a little deeper into the traditional areas of communication with regard to your three important groups of people:
• Members: You must communicate with members to keep them engaged and motivated to use and pay for your services. Each communication should make members look forward to using your club and should be “baited” with new things for the future. This means spending money to contact your members on a regular basis.
• Prospects: Communication with prospects means initial contact, sales follow-up and ongoing promotions. The more contact and communication with prospects, the more activity you’ll have (shows, tours, and sales.) The “numbers game” of communication is the key to increasing new sales. This means spending money to contact and persuade your prospects on a regular basis.
• Employees: The importance of employee communication is often overlooked. Most employees get a whirlwind training regimen with little follow-up or accountability. High turnover and employee resignation is the result. This means spending money to keep your employees trained, educated and accountable to your business model.
Using traditional communication techniques in all of these areas is difficult, expensive and hard to maintain. In each situation, you have to do any or all of the following: 1) Pay employees to use the phone or write letters; 2) Spend money on postage and/or in-house advertising to send materials via regular mail; 3) Hire a service to do everything for you – which is quite expensive. Because they take time to plan, execute and track, these types of traditional communication methods usually fall by the wayside and become non-existent or inconsistent at best.
So, what is the answer? Email!Email is free, easy-to-use, and easy to automate. Retention techniques, sales follow-up, lead generation and employee training can all be automated with email! Unfortunately, many club owners/ operators have not committed to making email a part of their business model. If this is you, you need to wake up and allow email to increase your revenue!
Here’s what you need to do:
1. Collect emails from every prospect: Do your ads, marketing pieces and letters all require prospects to give you their email address in exchange for your offers? Are you offering a free incentive on your website in exchange for a prospect’s email address? Are you requiring your club visitors to give you their email addresses before they take a tour? Are you having your front desk people collect email addresses along with phone numbers from every incoming call (from prospects)? Are your salespeople getting email addresses from their missed tours? Are you getting your members’ friends’ email addresses and sending them incentives? If not, you need to start doing these things!
2. Collect emails from members: Are you actively collecting emails from your members? Do you have a script to collect the emails, or are you asking the horrifying question, “Hey, can I have your email address?” Are you offering your members any incentives for giving you their email addresses? Do you have an email newsletter for your members? Do you require members to go to your website for incentives which require them to give their emails? If not, you need to start doing these things!
3. Collect emails from employees: Do all of your employees have active email addresses? Are they required to check their emails daily? Do you communicate daily with them via email? Are you sending them periodic training tips and info via email? Do you have an automated email sequence that overviews employee training, for every new employee? If not…You get the idea.
Let’s say you start to do what I just recommended…How much will it cost you? Probably nothing but a few hours of time, one time.
The key is to make email a part of every aspect of your communication with your members, prospects and staff. To do this, you need to start collecting email addresses, and using email as a regular part of your systems.
Here are some tips:
• Get computers with Internet access within your club. Give employees access, but be sure to restrict usage to relevant web access only.
• Issue club email addresses to each employee and send them emails. Require them to check their club email daily.
• Deliver valuable information to your members via email, such as newsletters, statements and membership notices
This will get everyone acclimated to email, and pave the way for more and more usage. Email is pure leverage. It allows you to leverage your time, your effort and your impact on your world. Start using email and watch your stress decrease and your sales increase.
Pat Necerato is a Sales and Marketing Expert with over 15 years experience in the fitness industry. He can be contacted at 866.468.2832, or go to www.MoreNewMembers.com and get his FREE Marketing Video & Report.
