Are Your Web Leads Falling Through the Cracks?

By Casey Conrad

Every club operator I talk with believes the Internet is an important part of how they should be finding more prospects and selling more memberships.  Unfortunately, most operators are unknowingly letting hundreds or thousands of eLeads fall through the cracks (an “eLead” is any lead you obtain through using the Internet.).  This article will outline several of the biggest mistakes club operators are making with attracting, and capturing web leads into memberships sales.  

Attracting Visitors

Getting eLeads requires that people somehow reach you on the Internet.  Although there are many different ways in which that this can happen, this article will focus on situations where people are visiting your website.  

There are two primary types of visitors to your clubs’ site; those that are actually looking for your business and those who find you through an Internet search.  There are often significant differences in what each of these visitors are looking for on your site.  Not providing the right information can dramatically decrease the success of turning a visitor into a prospect.  Let me explain. 

Obviously, someone who was looking for your specific health club knew you existed.  Maybe they saw an ad, drove by the club or heard about you from a friend.  Regardless of how they know about you, this prospect often has a different “sales” frame of mind than someone who is unaware of your business.  

First of all, a prospect who has some knowledge of your business may trust you more—especially if you have been around for some years, or they were a referral.  Second, they are coming to the website to learn more about your health club.  That may be a blinding flash of the obvious but it is an important distinction; this visitor is pro-actively thinking about joining a health club.  Therefore, they are farther down the behavioral change process, hence closer to making a buying decision.  

Contrast that thought process with someone who finds your site through an Internet search, “Starting a fitness program in Wakefield, RI.”  The former is looking for club details while the latter may be searching for general fitness information but has no intention of joining a health club.  

Here’s where this distinction is important.  Most club websites only have information about the facility; rarely do they provide visitors with educational information about fitness basics—how to start, pitfalls to avoid, and specific health issues and how exercise can improve or eliminate those problems, etc.  The result is that visitors who find your website—but are not yet ready to consider joining or even clicking on for a free guest pass—aren’t staying on your site and they certainly aren’t sharing their contact information with you because the site is “all about you.”  

When your site is nothing more than an on-line brochure for the club you are letting many, many potential leads fall through the cracks.  Conversely, sites that provide visitors with information that helps them understand and solve their problems gains trust and respect.  Once a visitor likes and trusts a site because of the content it provides, they will be much more apt to do business with that company now or sometime in the future.  

There’s another important benefit of having health and fitness content on your clubs’ website; content drives search engine optimization (someone finding you when they type in key words or a sentence).  In fact, you can pay a Webmaster thousands of dollars to “optimize” your site but those strategies have limited success and are almost always short-term.  Content, on the other hand, is what drives the search engine rankings and keeps them high.

In order to maximize the possibility that all kinds of prospects find your clubs’ website you need to do the following things:

• Make sure your URL (domain name) is on everything you produce—not just advertising and marketing materials.  
• Add meaningful and current health and fitness content to your website.  Make sure it is the type of information your “client profile” is seeking and that it gives them solutions to their most pressing concerns and questions.
• Add multiple types of media content—articles (text), audio and video.
• Find ways to get links in and out of your site, making sure they are “enhancing” your topic/content, not detracting from it.  
• Although it has lower importance to search engines nowadays, be certain that your Webmaster has as many key words and phrases attached to your website that you can possibly think of.  I have seen some sites that have more than 100 key words and phrases tagged.           

Capturing Prospects

Having an attractive website is a good thing.  Having a website that provides the type of information prospects wants is more important.  But getting them to your site is just one part of the Internet marketing process.  Next, you must turn that visitor into a “prospect” and that can only happen if you capture the visitors contact information.

Sadly, most club websites do a terrible job at capturing visitors’ information.  Often you will see a tiny little box in some obscure border of the home page offering the visitor to sign up for the club’s eNewsletter.  Enrollment rates are understandably low and more often than not members of the club, not prospects.

Many clubs offer visitors some sort of free guest pass; this is a good strategy.  Unfortunately, most Webmasters have inefficiently set up the lead capturing system for guest passes.  Typically there is a series of “required fields” that the visitor must fill out, often including address and phone number.  Next, upon completion a PDF guest pass pops onto the screen of the visitor allowing them to print it out.  The incoming information is then e-mailed to a general manager or sales manager who then doles the leads out to the appropriate salesperson.  

This system seems logical enough but anyone with Internet marketing skills recognizes the pitfalls.  First, the more information you require of a customer the less likely they are to complete the form.  As a result, the concern management has about “wanting the phone number and information to follow up on” backfires with many people simply clicking off the site before completing the form.  If you don’t believe me simply put Google Analytics on your site.  You will find the number of visitors who click onto your guest pass page much higher than the number who are submitting the request.     

Second, when your system has a pop-up guest pass Internet savvy people know they can cheat the system; simply make sure all the fields are filled out and get the guest pass anyway.  If you’ve ever had bogus phone numbers or “Fred Flintstone” subscribers you know what I’m referring to.  

Third, having the person’s information go to an e-mail address and not an auto responder results in too many leads falling through the cracks with a “manual” follow up system.  Think about it; the salesperson follows up by has no luck getting the prospect and eventually that name gets put into a file folder or at best a data base.  Either way there is a human element necessary for the follow up.

You can make your clubs on-line guest pass incredibly powerful and efficient by doing several things:

• Reduce the amount of “required” information that is necessary to obtain a guest pass.  Let’s face it; your goal is to get them into the club.  So what that you don’t have their phone number?  If your front desk is working properly you can screen guest pass abusers at the point of entry.  Make the telephone number an “optional” field and those who want to talk to a salesperson will give it!
• Do NOT use a pop up guest pass system.  Instead, have the guest pass be delivered to the person’s e-mail address.  They may put a bogus name down but if they want the guest pass they have to at least put a valid e-mail.  
• Have the entire system connected to an auto responder system so you are capturing all the information into a system that will work for you while you are sleeping!  I could write an entire article on this but if you want to know about the system I encourage all our clients to use go to www.OurFavoriteCart.com.
• Put Google Analytics onto your website to monitor the conversion statistics and continue to tweak the offer and the fields until you are maximizing opt-ins for guest passes.  

Cleaning up your on-line guest pass system will go a long way to prevent “lead-losses,” but that’s only going to attract visitors who are ready to join or at least close to a decision to visit, hence the registration for the guest pass.  To attract the “not yet ready to join” visitor clubs must find ways to entice these individuals to give their name and e-mail address.  

The most popular and successful Internet marketing strategy utilized to capture visitors’ information is the eBook.  An eBook is exactly as it sounds; a book (or booklet) that is distributed in an electronic format, usually a PDF.  Regardless of what is being offered, a visitor to a website obviously has some interest in the products and services of that company (unless their search erroneously brought them there).  An eBook that offers the visitor information, insights or possibly solutions to their current search could prove valuable enough to the visitor that they are willing to give their name and e-mail in exchange for the free eBook.

Imagine on your clubs’ website you offered visitors an eBook entitled, “How to shape up at home so you feel better visiting a fitness club!”  Or perhaps one called “How to create a lunch-time walking group at your workplace.”  

Whether you like those titles or not isn’t important; they key is that these eBooks are geared towards attracting people who just aren’t yet ready to join the club but ARE ready to start living the benefits and privileges of exercise.  If you can get someone exercising at home there is a much greater chance that they’ll eventually come to the club.  When they are ready, where do you think they will join?  The club who just had an advertised special or the one who has been helping them get into shape at home?   

Of course, the eBook concept is just as applicable to a visitor who could be closer to buying.  Imagine offering an eBook, “The 5 biggest mistakes people make when finding a health club & how to avoid them.”

You can immediately begin utilizing eBooks/booklets to obtain more web leads.  Keep these things in mind:

• Choose topics that are relevant to the market you cater to—not what your fitness staff might think is interesting.
• Make sure the content is high quality and rich with information.  If the person gets the eBook and reacts, “This is lame,” you have completely sabotaged the process.
• Once you have great content spend the money to have the eBook formatted by someone who has reasonable design skills.  We’re not talking about Illustrator quality here but you want nice formatted text and some graphics or photos to make it more visually interesting. 
• Be certain to PDF all your eBooks.  This ensures easy delivery no matter what computer type or program the individual is using.     

The bottom line is that an eBooks is a fabulous tool that can entice a visitor to give up their contact information.  Once you have their e-mail you can begin the important process of communicating with them and building a level of trust that can ultimately lead them to eventually buying a membership at your club.  I will be discussing the conversion process in my next article.

The Internet is an incredibly powerful tool.  Ironically enough, like a “power tool”, if you don’t know how to use it, it really doesn’t matter whether you have a 6-volt or 12 volt battery attached!  By taking the time now to educate yourself on how to use these incredible Internet marketing strategies and then ensuring your club is using them to the maximum benefit, you will not only prevent your valuable web leads from falling through the cracks but will begin seeing the numbers grow at an amazing rate.

If you would like free eTips on Internet marketing strategies, tactics and tools, please visit our website, www.SmartClubMarketing.com.  You can also submit a question on our new Internet marketing blog at http://SmartClubMarketing.com/blog.