Marketing automation has been around for a while but its only in the last 5 years that the benefits of automated marketing have trickled down to small business entrepreneurs. Now, by spending a few hundred dollars a month, you are able to target your users accurately with the same tools used by tech big wigs such as Google and Facebook.
Techniques To Automate Marketing at Your Gym
These are the techniques and segments of marketing where you can effectively use automation to reach your members, bring them back and increase customer retention:
1. Email marketing campaigns
Email is the perfect starting point to reach your members. You can make it almost entirely automated, which makes email a good starting point for any fitness business that wants to test out automation.
Choose an online automation tool with the ability to build email campaigns (like MailChimp or Klaviyo) and segment your audience into different lists depending on whether they are prospects or customers, time since their last visit, whether they are near the end of their contract, etc . This lets you precisely target your email marketing to the customers you want to see it.
Getting Started with Mailchimp
2. Text marketing campaigns
Over 95% of SMS messages received are opened and read. Since text messaging is the one function that’s baked into every device – pre-installed by default, it is hard to overstate how important it is. Another facet of text marketing is that since most people have moved to use other messaging tools such as Whatsapp, Messenger, and Telegram, the messages received on the default messages app get even more attention and don’t get buried under
Couple of things to keep in mind when doing text message marketing campaigns – get the users permission before sending them messages and be compliant with the opt-in and opt-out processes for setting up these types of campaigns.
Also, keep the messages short and simple and make the call to action clear and loud. Think of it as a really good Tweet. You only have a few characters to make an impression and put a call to action to follow the rules of copywriting. Start with the 4 U’s:
- Useful
- Urgent
- Unique
- Ultra-Specific
We cover text marketing campaigns in more detail in our demos and you will get a solid understanding of how to do a text marketing campaign. Another aspect of this to be careful about is to choose a tool that integrates well with your existing POS systems such as MindBody and CenterEdge. This is also something that Gleantap takes care of for you
3. Posting on Social Media
While the reach of organic posts on Social Media has gone down drastically over the last couple of years, it still remains a vital channel to engage with your members, especially current members who follow your page for updates.
One social media feature that still seems to work well is events. People still follow events primarily on Facebook and it still remains a good way to organize events and let people know about updates at your business.
But it also makes sense to use a tool such as Hootsuite or SproutSocial to schedule things to post on social media. This way you can plan your content calendar ahead on Monday or Friday and queue all the posts inside your social media automation tool. This way your social media posting will be on auto-pilot and you can focus on more important things that are part of your business.
4. Landing pages
Gone are the days when you have to master WordPress or learn to code to create a simple landing page for your business or for a specific event. You can now use tools such as Squarespace or Instapage to create landing pages within an hour or two.
I’m assuming that your business will already have a website, so what can you use a landing page for? You can use it to promote specific events that are happening at your business location, you can use it to advertise plan upgrades to select members. You can even write small articles on fitness or post videos on a single landing page. All of this without any tech expertise of any kind
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