Growing Your Club’s Revenue With A Creative Marketing Mix

By Casey Conrad

With the busiest quarter of the year for the health club industry behind us, guest walk-in traffic will begin to slow, leaving clubs searching for ways to maintain membership sales.  Unfortunately, for many clubs, making decisions about marketing promotions is often done on a month-to-month basis, with no long-term strategy in place.  This reactive behavior as it relates to marketing creates an unstable environment for a sales team as well as the management.  All successful businesses have a clear marketing strategy and have their marketing plan done at least six months, if not one year, in advance.

If your club does not have a minimum of a six-month marketing plan in place, now is the time to do it.  The process of creating and writing a marketing plan is a challenging yet wonderfully rewarding task that will allow you to take your business to it’s next level.  It does not have to be a complex document but should include a month-to-month itinerary of internal, external and guerrilla marketing promotions and strategies that the club will implement and follow.  If, on the other hand, you already have a marketing plan in place, now is a time to evaluate your overall performance as it relates to your goal.

In addition to creating and/or evaluating your basic marketing plan, below is a list of marketing audit questions that will help you take your business to the next level of success.

Are you testing your marketing efforts?

Although this sounds like a very basic question, it is one that almost never gets done in the health and fitness industry. “Testing your marketing efforts,” means that prior to launching an ad or a marketing campaign, you sample it on a small scale to find out what will work best.  For example, let’s say your club was going to do a direct mail post card and mail it out to general zip code area.  Before sending out the entire mail, put together a 500-1000 piece sample of two different pieces (with two different headlines and offers) to find out if the headline and offer is compelling enough to get a decent response.  Even if you choose not to do that type of testing, something as simple as showing the pieces randomly to individuals who have similar prospect profiles and getting their honest feedback is a must.  It may sound funny but we have made more successful changes to marketing pieces just by showing them to my Mother and her work colleagues than any industry “experts” have provided, simply because these people represent the profile of who our industry is going after.  Once you have tested your pieces for headlines and offers (you can test other things but these two are a must), then go to press with it on a large scale.  Something that may take very little time to accomplish could bring you a major return on investment!

Are you using “up-sells” and “cross-sells” at the point of sale?

There are only three ways to grow any business and up-sells and cross-sells are one of the most effective AND least expensive.  (The other two ways to grow your business are get more customers and get them to buy more often from you.)  Up-sells and cross-sells are when you get a customer to buy either a higher value product from you at the point of sale or you get them to buy a related product from you at the point of sale.  Perhaps the most notable up-sell in the world is done by McDonalds.  They used to always ask, “do you want fries or a drink with that order?”  Of course, now they simply ask, “Would you like to ‘Super-Size’ that for just .39 cents more?”  Although .39 cents may not sound like much, when you multiply that by the millions of up-sells that one location does a year, the result is hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Although the same principle can be applied to the health and fitness industry, very few clubs are tapping into these strategies.  Offering things like a “Towel Membership,” or a “Locker Membership” for an additional $5.00 per month might only be attractive to 10-20% of your members but if you had a membership base of 2,000, that would be an additional $12,000- $24,000 per year!  And, what is preventing you from being more creative?  Think of all those serious morning members who regularly buy a shake, sports drink or energy bar.  What is stopping you from creating a “Fitness + Supplements Membership” whereby for an additional $10 per month the member will get 6 items of their choice (shake, drink, bar), giving them a discount but ensuring a minimum number of purchases (so you can get them at a better discount).  Of course, you are only limited in this area by your creativity.  Think out of the box and you will be amazed at the ideas you will come up with.  If you offered two or three extra revenue-producing membership options, that could potentially mean thousands of dollars added to your club’s bottom line!

Do you have a system for marketing to missed guests?

More and more clubs are having less and less success with the more traditional forms of advertising due to less people reading the newspaper and having more TV and radio stations to choose from. Therefore, the road to sales success for clubs will partially lye in their ability to maximize every lead that walks through their club doors.  This means having a well thought out system for marketing to missed guests.  For many clubs, the only mailing that goes to a missed guest is a once or twice a year mass mailer announcing some special that the club is running.  This approach is missing the mark because the reason most people don’t enroll is because they don’t see value in the membership.  Hence, only a small percentage will respond to a price sensitive ad.

The better, more systematized approach to marketing to missed guests is through targeted, educational mailings.  If your club software has the ability to query on multiple levels, prospects should be coded according to the date of their visit(s), their primary area of interest in the club, if they are a current exerciser, previous exerciser or non-exerciser, and what their primary objection for not joining was.  With this information established, clubs can now send targeted mailers to groupings of prospects.  For instance, a piece on the benefits of regular exercise might go to all non-exercisers.  For the past exercisers you might send them information on a new, simple workout program the club is introducing.  For everyone with the price objection, you will send them a discount offer. For people with the time objection, you might send them an offer for a short-term membership, a free trial or a money back guarantee.  The point being that having missed guests coded on multiple levels will allow your sales team to send out smaller groups of more targeted marketing on a monthly basis, rather than just once or twice a year.  Not only will these types of mailers get a better response (because they speak to the very issue the prospect has) but they are less costly (can be done right on letterhead) and can be tested and altered easily to find the right text and offer.

Do you have a formalized referral system at the point of sale?

As a consultant, I am shocked at the number of clubs that are not pro-actively asking for referrals from new members at the point of sale.  Sure, most clubs have their salespeople hand or send a new member two guest passes of some sort, but that is usually the extent of it.  Even with clubs that have some form of point of sale referral program using a registration sheet for members to write down names of friends, almost never does management monitor and track the success of the program.  This is a huge mistake.  From experience I can assure you that if you are not monitoring referrals, they are not being asked for by a majority of staff members because most people (especially new salespeople) are timid about asking for names.  Here are some general rules of thumb for creating a successful referral program.

• Have nice, professionally printed guest passes made to look like gift certificates (with a dollar value printed on it) so as to increase the perceived value of the pass.
• Put a limit on the number of guest passes each new member can receive.
• Have a referral form for new members to fill out at the time they enroll.  If they don’t fill out the form, they don’t get the passes.
• Have a scripted referral presentation that salespeople must memorize.
• Make it mandatory that salespeople pass their referral forms in with paperwork to be accounted for, then give them back to them once checked.
• Regularly follow up with salespeople to ensure they are contacting either the referral or the member to pro-actively get the new prospect into the club.

A report put out by IHRSA in the last week noted that growth in the club industry is stronger than ever.  More than ever consumers are educated on the benefits of regular exercise and are looking to clubs for solutions.  In order to maximize your club’s growth, get your marketing plan in order, regularly assess its performance, and begin to implement some of other marketing strategies.  Not only will you save money in your marketing efforts, but you will also watch membership sales explode!