Club Management Software isn’t just a way to keep track of your existing members, used correctly it can bring in swathes of new members.
For independent gym and fitness club owners, the local community that they operate within is their most valuable asset. The challenge has always been how to effectively reach and engage the potential members who live and work just minutes from the door. We have worked with thousands of independent gyms over our 25 years in the industry and sadly we’ve heard variations on the phrase ‘I walk past every day and I never knew it was so nice’ far too many times.
And that is often the issue, familiarity breeds contempt and it is about getting those people familiar with the outside of your facility familiar with the inside instead!
In the last ten years, club management software has moved beyond a simple administrative service, now they can provide a suite of tools designed specifically to attract your local market. By engaging with technology built for the fitness industry, you can transform your gym into a visible, accessible and vibrant facility for your area.
Ashbourne Membership Management and our software wasn’t just built for the fitness industry, but by it. As not only membership management providers but gym owners, our software and hardware has been crafted to appeal to the real independent gym and fitness club owners working in the industry each and every day.
Referral Programmes
Motivate Your Membership and Utilise a Powerful Resource
As an independent gym owner looking to bring in new members, one of your best resources is your pre-existing members. Not only because your membership base forms the basis of your community, but because they can recommend your service genuinely, as the people who have truly benefitted from it.
A structured referral programme driven by membership management software can help turn your members’ satisfaction into a fantastic recruitment tool. Referral schemes have always existed, but in the past they have been time-intensive, relying on manual work and the trust-system. This often meant they were prone to abuse, hard-feelings and lengthy verification processes.
When an independent gym uses membership management software that allows for referrals, a good portion of the membership admin can be automated.
Many club management software programmes automate this process entirely:
- Create custom referral offers within the membership management software, such as a month free or a percentage off membership.
- Automatically generate and distribute unique referral codes to members via email or a member app with no manual administration.
- Codes generated this way will be easy to track. The club membership management software can be used to see which codes are being used and by which members.
- Once the conditions of the referral scheme are met (such as a new member joining the gym and paying for the first month), the rewards will automatically trigger.
A referral system powered by membership management software will not only incentivise word of mouth promotion from existing members, it will also provide data showing which of your existing members are signing up the most new memberships and most engaged with the referral programme
In order to motivate referrals, competitions can be held or thresholds engaged with outside of the membership management software. This can be done in tiers (For every 5 or 10 referred) or just a top referrer prize at the end of the month/quarter.
Automated Marketing
Further Energise and Engage Your Local Area and Community
Staying at the forefront of potential members’ minds (even the members that are walking past your gym frequently) requires consistent communication across multiple different formats.
Generically written emails delivered each week in a formulaic and predictable fashion are easily ignored by potential new gym members. Structure is good, but it is important that structure doesn’t become stagnant predictability.
While automation might not sound like the best way to ward off formulaic marketing, the automated marketing tools within your club membership management software can enable you to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, based on their specific actions or status within the software.
Generic emails delivered once a week aren’t personal, but the right message delivered to the right group of people at the right time based on their membership parameters within your membership management system? That can make all the difference.
You can set up automated campaigns to do the following:
- Send a series of welcome emails to new members who have signed up for a free trial
- Re-engage members whose contracts are nearing expiry with a personalised offer.
- Offer additional benefits to members who have not been using their membership and are in-danger of cancelling.
- Deliver birthday messages and other events with a complimentary class pass.
- Deliver offers based on the classes and services the members have been utilising.
This level of personalised communication builds relationships at the right moment, makes your members feel like your gym is paying attention to their needs and helps lay the foundation to convert these new leads and wavering members into loyal stalwarts at your gym.
Convert Interest with Seamless Online Sign-up
A potential member’s online journey from interest to sign-up must be effortless. The best sign-ups are the ones that members barely even remember. If your gym website is difficult to navigate, you risk losing your leads business before you ever had it.
It is important to ask the following questions regarding your website and web presence before being satisfied that it is not detracting from your conversion rate of leads to gym memberships.
- Is your gym’s website optimised for local search terms?
- Do your social media channels showcase your club’s community and atmosphere?
- Can a visitor easily find your membership options and pricing?
- Is the final and most vital step of the membership process, the sign-up and payment, completely seamless?
Club management software that is fully integrated with your independent gym’s website can provide a secure, branded portal where leads can browse memberships, select options and complete their sign-up with ease. Removing any barriers to entry at the moment of sign-up directly converts your website’s traffic into new memberships for your independent gym.
Offer Personalisation and Variety with Integrated Tools
Today’s prospective gym members expect their independent gyms to have services tailored to their goals. A “one size fits all” approach is no longer sufficient. Ashbourne’s CRM system and integrated partner solutions provide the foundation for a personalised member experience.
Using the tools available in many gym membership management software suits, your staff will be able to:
- Record member goals and preferences during their initial consultation.
- Track attendance patterns to see which classes or equipment they use most.
- Monitor progress towards personal milestones.
- Send automated, personalised communications such as class recommendations based on their interests or a check-in if their attendance drops.
This data driven approach demonstrates that you value each member as an individual, significantly boosting retention and positive word of mouth to draw more members in from the local area.
Enhance Member Experience to Secure Long-Term Loyalty
The member experience begins long before the first workout and continues with every interaction. A positive, personalised and seamless experience encourages retention and turns people from simply members that visit your gym into enthusiastic fans that recommend your gym and its services to friends and family alike.
Powerful club management software can take a lot of the tedium out of the member experience, leaving the impression of a sleek, well run fitness facility.
- The ability to offer online membership sign-ups and class bookings that are accessible twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
- Provide a branded members app for easy account management, booking and communication on their phones.
- Link up hardware like turnstiles and fingerprint scanners with your membership management software for an easy and secure check-in process.
- Automate billing and membership renewals to prevent unnecessary admin issues.
Once all the key features that your members regularly interact with become integrated and effortless, the experience will feel that much more sleek, controlled and professional.
It is important to reinforce the value of your members’ investment every time they walk through your doors. When running referral projects you aren’t just asking them to keep refreshing their membership each month, but asking them to refer your services to their friends, family and colleagues. So give them a good reason to!
Conclusion
If you are an independent gym or fitness club owner looking for a tried and tested way to not only locate but retain more members for your fitness business, the solution might be on your screen right now.
Here at Ashbourne Membership Management, we’ve been helping gym and club owners streamline their operations, boost member retention and reduce workloads for over 25 years.
We’ve done this by creating ingenuous software, informed by our own experiences in the fitness industry, to simplify and enhance how your club is run. With a suite of tools that will automate member referrals, personalise marketing communication and provide real-time insights into your members, their habits and preferences.
From effortless online sign-ups and payment processing to integrated access control and CRM, our systems help you focus on what matters most. Growing your community and improving your facility, while we handle the technology, payment collection and member management.
With free training, easy to follow onboarding guides and ongoing support from our in-house support team throughout your entire partnership with Ashbourne, it will be the beginning of a partnership with a company you can trust to deliver day after day and week after week.
We have helped thousands of gyms take their operations to the next level, whether it is launching a targeted referral programme or gaining insights from our BI Dashboards to fine-tune your local strategy, we are here to ensure your success.
So contact our demo team here, and they will lay out how you can implement what we have discussed with a personal and professional touch. Like these gyms before you, the transition to a more professional and automated era for your facility may be only a phone call away.
