Excellent customer support, a strong relationship, and personalization in your marketing and communication each contribute to a valuable and desirable customer experience for your clients. But when your customer experience is really successful your clients aren’t the only ones who benefit, you do too.
Fitness businesses are reinventing the way they build their customer experiences to introduce more opportunities to grow both as a business and in the service they deliver to their members. Taking simple strategies such as asking for reviews, customer referrals, and feedback can be much more useful and more effective when you redefine the objective and the results you want to achieve from your strategies.
How to transform traditional marketing strategies
Take asking for reviews, for example, you could ask 10 gym members to leave you a review, and maybe two or three do. They’ve left the review and you then wait for potential new clients to assess the review and decide whether they want to convert or sign up for say a free trial or gym class. Wouldn’t it be more effective if you
1. Incentivized your members to leave a review thus increasing the number of reviews left
2. Used those reviews in your marketing content to drive interest and attract potential new members?
To some gym owners, this may be food for thought and something to consider for the future but for others, it can be the push they need to take gym brand awareness strategies and turn them into lead generation and growth campaigns for their studios.
In this article, you’ll learn how three simple marketing strategies for your gym can be much more effective for building new customer relationships with a little bit of reframing and transformation. You’ll know a customer experience marketing campaign is a high performer when the following is achieved:
1. Reflects well on your business and builds your gym’s brand reputation
2. Shows your members how much you value their business and customer loyalty
3. Helps you grow your gym with new members and ideal clients
Here are the strategies you can start implementing today:
1. Incentivize your customer reviews and testimonials
Customer reviews are one of the most beneficial and useful strategies for encouraging curious potential members to sign up for a gym or studio. The kind words, proof of results, and demonstration of customer loyalty are great indicators to someone inquiring about the type of experience they could have as a member of that gym.
Getting members to leave reviews, however, can be a bit awkward and tricky especially if you’re not used to asking for them and your members aren’t used to leaving them. Websites such as Capterra and G2can help you build automated review seeking campaigns that will also incentivize and reward your members with a gift card for leaving a review on their platform.
Your member gets to leave their helpful feedback, they receive a reward for their contribution, and you can then use those reviews in your marketing to help attract new potential members. If you’re looking to build reviews on your Google Business profile or for your website’s testimonial page and social media, you can replicate this same simple strategy of rewarding your members with an item or gift card and keep track on your own of who has left a review and contributed to your campaign.
And don’t forget to share those reviews on social media, tag your customer, and encourage them to reshare your post with their own audiences. You’ll likely see some new customer referrals out of this quick and easy flow. But more on that later.
2. Let your customers submit and vote on requests
Customer feedback is a reliable way to collect member requests and suggestions that will improve your business. Your customer says what they want and you evaluate if it’s a valuable and realistic request. Easy enough!
However, a great way to make certain that the requests or suggestions made are important to the majority of your members is to allow other members to vote on or upvote a request. This will tell you which requests are most in demand and help you speed up turn around on new services, offers, and improvements. Not to mention members can see what you’re actively working on and know what’s coming or to expect, and they’ll appreciate the transparency.
You can use a feedback voting system or build a survey and request members vote on their top requests. The information you’ll be able to collect will help you make informed decisions about your business and ensure you’re providing your members with what they really want.
3. Make referrals competitive with a fun spin
Your members will love bringing their friends to class especially when they can also receive an incentive for helping contribute to your growing member list. But another way to entice your customers to bring in valuable referrals to your gym is to keep a customer referral leaderboard. Each month you can give a shoutout to the member iwth the most referrals that most and even set up a competition for members to who can bring in the most new members that month.
Your members will get more of their favorite people in classes and workouts with them and you’ll grow your business with more people who are motivated to come because of the results and experience their friends are getting in your gym and with you.
To sum it up
There are many strategies you can implement to build an excellent customer experience, but don’t forget about the benefits you can get out of them too.
Incentivize customer reviews to build your gym’s reputation, improve your service, create content, and attract new members. Let customers be more involved in the updates and advancements you’re making in your facility by allowing them to submit and vote on feedback and suggestions. Finally, make bringing in customer referrals even more fun with a little friendly competition and a referral leaderboard.
A valuable customer wants to see your business succeed and by utilizing these strategies to help them contribute you can both get something out of the service and experience you offer in your gym.
