When it comes to getting the most out of your marketing, there are only 2 things you need to focus on:
1 – Reach your customer in the first place
2 – Secure a way to stay in touch with that customer
It’s simple advice, but it’s a keystone of modern day marketing.
The beauty of modern digital marketing, is that you no longer have to leave it up to luck in order to succeed with your advertising. In the past, the best you could hope for was to send out a flyer, take an advert out in the local paper or put a poster outside of the gym. If your advert was catchy enough, people would come to the club. But in terms of perfecting that system and working out which part of your marketing was working, it was as accurate as reading the stars.
You Can Also Download Our Email Marketing Strategy Guide
If you don’t have time to read the blog, then you can always download our complete email collection and remarketing strategy right now, and discover how you can increase your email collection by almost 15x and decrease the cost of your Facebook ads.
How We Tested Our Powerful Remarketing Tool
During the relaunch of our clubs, Ashbourne has been trying to find a method to make every single penny count when it comes to our advertising. Our proving ground has been The Fit Club Redditch, a club which we directly manage and market. Every single product or service we release to our gyms is always tested and trialled at The Fit Club, so that we can prove it works.
Our latest goal was to drastically improve the number of emails we collected when people visited our website. After all, every single person who came to our website and didn’t give us their email was lost forever. It was the same as them seeing a flyer. Without a way to contact them beyond that intial contact, we were losing potential customers.
We also wanted to use this increased email collection as a way of improving our Facebook ad performance. After all, the more emails we could intially collect when people visited us, the more times we could follow up with them.
Anyone who has run a paid ad knows that the number of “clicks” you get per ad, is far higher than the number of “conversions” you make. That means there’s a lot of interested people clicking your ad, that you lose touch with instantly.
It was turning more of those clicks into conversions which was key to success and the method to do that was collecting more of those clickers’ email addresses the first time around.
How Our Facebook Ad Would Work
Our Facebook ad funnel was simple.
- Advertise to all people within our local area
- Have a striking Facebook ad with an interesting promotion
- Take members to a landing page, which offers that promotion further and gives a full description of the club
- Get viewers to fill in their email to receive our promotion via email
- Track the prospect landing on a thank you page after purchase to confirm the sale of a membership.
But we don’t want to leave it to chance…
After all, not every customer is ready to buy there and then. We instead have to do some followups to keep us in their mind short term and give them the chance to purchase when they’re ready.
For this, we have set an arbituary endpoint for the promotion, which is 3 days after they receive the promotion and then their code deactivates. This is simply to give us a set period to get an idea if our ad is successful, so we can make changes without wasting money, but also creates some pressure to purchase before time runs out.
Here Are The Results From Our 2 Tests
We have now run this exact set up twice. Once with a single traditional promotion offering, along with a simple pop up that asks each visitor to enter their email.
And another with our powerful new email collection tool.
The difference in numbers should be strike you right away.
Test results from traditional email collection
191 leads
£743.91 spent
£3.89 per lead
27 sales
£27.55 per purchase (12 month membership)
VS
Test results from powerful new email collection tool
351 leads
£336.73 spent
£0.95 per lead
34 sales
£9.90 per purchase (12 month membership)
But why the difference when it was effectively the same ad twice?
The logic here is simple.
By ensuring that more people gave us their email after clicking the ad, we could ensure we did more follow up emails and therefore, more people signed up.
Our new email collection method allowed us to collect almost 2x the emails for a quarter of the price.
From that point, we were able to sell members for under a third of the cost, making our money back on the first month of a 12 month membership.
Email remaketing and therefore better email collection is at the heart of this success.
With more followups, we were able to get people purchasing who would have completely passed us by if we hadn’t secured a way to contact them on the first round. And that allows us to not only secure a sale in the short term, but over the course of a lifetime, we can continue to send them numerous promotions and deals, until we catch them at the right moment.
Increasing your emails positively affects every aspect of your marketing.
So what was our special email collection tool? Let us show you!
The Random Discount Wheel
This is an incredible tool that drastically increases your email sign ups.
While a high performing sign up form should have a sign up rate of around 2% – 5% of everyone who sees it, the discount wheel on average has a sign up rate of between 25% – 30%. You can already see why it’s had such a positive affect on our facebook ad spend.
How it works is simple:
- When people land on a page, they will be shown the discount wheel
- You can select a range of promotional discount codes
- You can then select the probability of certain promotions popping up (high probability for the simple ones, zero probability for the really good ones)
- All the viewer has to do is enter their email and then they receive a code
New and interesting ways of collecting emails like the discount wheel spark people’s interest and get them entering their email. Even though the proposition is the same – simply a special discount – the presentation makes it fresh and exciting.
We never even changed our promotion. The 75% off your first month was the best promotion on there, but with the random chance, it excited people to now enter their emails to give it a try.
This is always something to bear in mind. Sometimes it’s the presentation and interest which needs to change, not the offer.
Keep reading to the end of the blog as we have links to multiple wheels that will work with different website types.
The Email Followup Funnel
The next way to make the most from each wheel sign up, is to have some followup emails.
Not everyone who gets a discount is ready to buy there and then, and many people simply don’t bother checking their emails, or lose their promotional code… point being, you can never tell what you’re customer is doing, so you need to make sure they know about it.
In our strategy, we send out 3 emails across the following 3 days from when they fill in the form.
You can click the link to download our email text as a template for your own club:
The First Email – Sent immediately. Confirms that their code is available for the next 15 minutes
The Second Email – Sent 1 day later. Let’s the member know that you’ve kept their code available for the next day if they want to still sign up. The email contains the most common code that the customer can spin.
The Third Email – Sent 1 day later. Gives the member the best promotion available on the wheel as a final incentive (this gesture can be framed however fits your brand style best).
When are people most likely to sign up?
Based on our data, a majority of sign ups occur immediately after spinning the wheel and receiving the first email.
However, the addition of followup emails allows your advert to be more than a single hit. Your gym stays in the customers mind, so you can still convert customers who aren’t the kind of people to make impulse purchases and need a few days to consider purchases.
The best reason to use a set time period to send emails (3 days), is that you can then determine that by the third day, if you haven’t had a sale, then you’re likely not going to have one. While someone might sign up later down the line, when you’re spending money on Facebook ads, you want quick results, so if you aren’t making sales by day 3, it’s time to change something.
A Simple Overview of This Strategy And Why It Works!
To make things nice and clear for the overall marketing funnel, here it is laid out visually, so you can see every step of the process.
Please feel free to download this if you want to review it later.
And here is where you can download every step of it!
You are welcome to download all the copy and assets we used during our latest campaign to use as a template to run your own campaigns. After all, if it ain’t broke, then why fix it.
Our website landing page with wheel – See here
Our Facebook ad image and copy – Download here
Our full email funnel – Download here
Our e-book on how to create a Facebook ad – Download here
The best discount wheels for different website types (ask your website admin if you’re not sure) – WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace
Ashbourne Can Help With Your Gym’s Marketing & More
Ashbourne helps its partner clubs stay ahead in the market by doing something that no other health club manager does… running its own clubs.
By managing our own clubs and testing every one of our services under real world conditions, we can maintain the best club management service out there, whether it’s handling your direct debits, payment collections, your gym’s check in security or your marketing.
Ashbourne has a service to help make every aspect of this marketing funnel, and many others, possible. By joining Ashbourne, we can help build you a fast and responsive site, offer you advice on your Facebook advertising and give you a powerful CRM to automate your emails and control your leads.
If you want to supercharge your club’s marketing and make your business stronger than it’s ever been, then we’d love to have a chat and show you around the system, so you can see your business’s bright future with Ashbourne behind you every step of the way.