Website Must-Dos

We all know we are living in a digital world. But is your website up to digital par? The majority of people that step into your club have visited your website first. You need to make sure you are doing everything you can to move website visitors from the discovery stage of browsing your site, to either purchasing online or in-club.

Over 60 percent of my club’s leads come from our website and almost 40 percent of our total new members each month have come to us as a lead from our site. With this in mind, here are the things you must be doing with your website.

Determine what you want to measure on your site and set monthly goals for each metric. How many leads or unique visits do you want? How long do you want people on your site?

Analyze your site at least once a week. Google Analytics should be your best friend. Find out where your traffic is coming from and make sure you are hitting your monthly goals. If you aren’t, you need to start tweaking your site.

Develop “personas” of your target audiences and create lead-capture forms on your site that speak to each persona. A person who is interested in yoga is much more likely to fill out a form for a free yoga class than a trial group training session.

Do A/B testing. Use different images to see which gets the best reaction. Copy is important — try different text to see which one produces the better result.

If you are using other digital media like social or even third-party sites, it’s vital to use Google Tag Manager when setting up your URLs so you can accurately track your results.

Retarget. Make sure you have retargeting campaigns sent up specific to the page that a person visited on your site. If they visited your group fitness schedule for the first time, retarget them with a free class ad. If they visited your aquatics page, retarget them with a free swim lesson.

Follow these tips and you will see an increase in the amount of leads you receive from your site.

Donyel Cerceo is the marketing director at Merritt Clubs.