One of the most important things a marketing team can do is know its members. While club staff might have customers pegged, it’s shocking how often I see marketing campaigns that use models who, while beautiful and fit, don’t at all match the consumers that are actually within the gym.
There are a variety of tools out there that can help. Rapleaf, for example, can give you data on factors such as household income level, presence of children, education and even ethnicity. But before you go shelling out money for this data, there are some simple, and free things you can do.
Let’s look at three different areas — demographics, psychographics and behavioral (internal) metrics.
Demographics include age and gender, and every membership database should have these. Concerning gender, you can analyze the male/female breakdown at your club. If you have birth dates, you can turn that information into an actual age spreadsheet in Excel and then look for the mean. You can even look for the mean age of each gender, and the percentage of your membership base that falls into Gen X, Gen Y, etc.
Next up are some basic psychographics — member goals, fitness interests and tendencies. Why is the member joining, what are his or her interests, and is the member the social or solitary type? To get this information you can survey your members, or maybe make questionnaires a part of the sales or on-boarding process. If that’s the case, you can tie that information into your membership records. This can be a strictly analog process. The important thing is the personae that will start to take shape.
You might see that your membership is 58 percent female, mostly Gen X and mostly interested in group fitness. This data can influence everything, from marketing imagery to promotions (friends and family, anyone?).
But take it a step further and tie this data to internal metrics such as join date, cancellation date, workout tally and ancillary spending. Do that, and you might notice that average workouts and membership length is lower for this group. High attrition in your core membership will lead to churn static growth. If you have these data points you can create a profile of an at-risk member, and be able to give them some special attention when they join — all this with an Excel spreadsheet and a few simple equations!
By Ryan McFadden, the consumer insights manager for Club One.
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Rachel Zabonick-Chonko is the editor-in-chief of Club Solutions Magazine. She can be reached at rachel@peakemedia.com.
