This time of year, it’s easy for clubs to calculate the value of customer retention. This quarter, millions of dollars will be spent marketing to new customers to replace the number of members that inevitably walk out the door every year. To combat this, fitness facilities focus varying amounts of resources and energy on combating attrition by increasing customer loyalty. The facilities with the best amenities and strongest sales staff tend to fair well this time of year.
However, the marketplace is shifting. Fitness businesses are beginning to leverage technology in new ways to gather robust consumer intelligence, allowing them to customize their messages and offerings to their target market.
Most clubs have some sort of member management software to help them analyze check-ins and communicate with customers. This is important, but the data collected in this fashion is more of a trailing indicator of customer engagement. New technologies arriving on the scene over the past couple of years show promise in helping business owners retain customers, by analyzing leading indicators of customer activity after they’ve passed through the door.
How to do it:
True consumer intelligence involves more than implementing a CRM and taking head counts — it also needs to include transactional data. Here are three ways you can increase the quality of the data you collect, and use it to proactively engage your customers before they disengage and leave your gym for good:
1. Understand your customers’ activity once they enter the gym. There are many exciting technologies to help you with this. Most of the major manufacturers — including Life Fitness, Matrix and Technogym — have embedded technology from Netpulse in their cardio equipment. Precor also has its own Preva system that serves a similar purpose.
2. Gather feedback directly from your customer. The options here are not as integrated, but there are many ways to use e-mail and web-based polling solutions to get feedback from customers. Most CRMs have options for helping customers gather feedback during customer interactions, and many businesses are finding success using social platforms, such as Facebook to create polls and gather feedback from consumers.
3. Personalize Communications. Personalizing communication with customers best leverages all the tools and work mentioned above, as well as aggregating the data to more proactively reach out with targeted products and services. Retail chains such as Target and Wal-Mart have become adept at this process. If fitness businesses are to continue to be relevant in this information-driven marketplace, they will need to keep pace with the other retail businesses engaging their customers. The usage data and individual feedback collected through the tools listed above will allow facilities to tailor development of new programs and products. Some of them even integrate the information to make personalized suggestions to customers on products and services they may enjoy. This data, paired with more robust demographic information, will allow for a targeted, efficient marketing messaging and help facilities get better bang for their marketing buck.
As health club technologies continue to evolve and mature, the ability of businesses in our market to better understand consumer demands and industry trends will offer ever-increasing value to club operators. These are exciting times in the fitness industry as clubs race to integrate new solutions, better understand their customer and keep a leg up on the competition.
Dave Kraai is the founder of Fitness On Request. He can be reached at 888-520-7501 or sales@fitnessonrequest.com.
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Rachel Zabonick-Chonko is the editor-in-chief of Club Solutions Magazine. She can be reached at rachel@peakemedia.com.
