You probably know how this customer journey goes: a prospect walks into your fitness club, grabs a guest pass, works out for an hour, leaves, and never comes back.

The first question you may want to ask is: why didn’t they come back?

But the real first question you should be asking is: did anyone follow up with this prospect?

The fact that fitness facilities are no different than any other client-serving business is what many tend to neglect on the business strategy side of gym management. Marketing and sales operations are crucial for the continual growth of your facility and ultimately your business. Consistent efforts to acquire new clients are necessary for the success of any club especially considering the industry-wide problem of customer retention.

What Distinguishes a CRM for the Fitness Industry

With countless CRM tools on the market, what distinguishes one from the other? In particular, considering the unique needs of fitness clubs to acquire customers, an effective CRM for the fitness industry needs to be more sophisticated than typical CRMs designed for customer-facing companies. Fitness clubs differ from other business-to-consumer (B2C) models because they have the ultimate goal of getting consistent customers, not one-time buyers.

Often, their models of customer acquisition end after only one sale. For this reason, most CRM tools designed for B2C companies lack the complexity that fitness facilities need for their customer acquisition lifecycle.

Fitness facilities follow the opposite business model: they typically rely on subscription-based or repeat purchases; they need a platform that can manage customer relations that can turn one-time club visitors into long-term members.

Marketing Automation

CRM Software simplifies the complexity of gym marketing. Marketing automation is a set of tools that streamline marketing and sales roles with the most time-consuming responsibilities. From automating the lead qualification process, and personalizing messages, to creating a central location for digital campaign creation, marketing automation saves marketers’ time and effort. Marketing automation allows you to set up a digital marketing strategy without handling every email, message, campaign, or post. A good automation tool helps manually to help you identify your audience, design the right content, and automatically trigger timetable-based actions and customer behavior. Once your campaign is up and running, you can focus on other tasks, then analyze and tweak your marketing plan as outcomes begin to come in. An automated marketing strategy generated by CRM Software for business can save time and resources while you are focusing on growing your business, driving revenue, and ROI.

Follow-up

So if you had a CRM when the prospect came in or registered on your client portal, your sales team would have followed up immediately not only with a call a couple of days after their workout but also with an automated email to guide them on how to register for the club

Maybe he doesn’t want to sign-up immediately. No problem. Your sales reps can document the call, rate the client’s interest, and schedule a follow-up call or email for the future.

As the member’s contract progresses, a CRM allows staff and employees to stay on top of contract renewal periods. This can include either renewing a contract or making concerted efforts to upsell that push the client to opt for a better contract. This stage of the upselling process can similarly be monitored in member notes and opportunities within the CRM.