The Fit Club Mailout
How a Simple Mailout Helped The Fit Club Redditch Fight Winter Attrition
The Fit Club Redditch talks about how we used an old trick backed up by Ashbourne’s tech to drive membership sign-ups.
Winter when you run an independent gym is a strange time of year. As Christmas gets closer, attendance and engagement understandably start to suffer as members get busy, ill, or both. In turn, this usually leads to an uptick in cancellations.
Here at The Fit Club we are a 2000 member club and during the final quarter of the year for the last 5 years we have, on average, seen a net loss of 300 members, or about 100 members each month of that final quarter.
It is a trend we were keen to combat as we entered the final quarter of last year.
While we know that the January bounce-back will always bring people back, we here at The Fit Club Redditch weren’t content to just wait out that October to December period and the attrition we knew it would bring. With new gyms opening up in our area, we decided now wasn’t the time to sit back and do nothing.
We wanted November to be defined by a bigger, more concerted marketing push.
Our Mailout Campaign
We decided on a simple, direct leaflet. Full colour, high quality, featuring only key information and great photos of our members. Crucially, it included a unique text code for our website and a QR code, offering a significant discount on a first month’s membership.
These codes were unique to the leaflets, meaning that we could tell instantly whether each individual sign-up had come from our leaflets, or one of our other marketing channels such as influencers or online ads. This meant we knew we could tell with near 100% certainty how much of an effect our mailout was going to be.
Given how well it went (more on that below), it is something we would definitely recommend to other gyms and fitness clubs.
We partnered with www.leafletdrop.co.uk to print our leaflet designs and handle the distribution. For £3,400, they got our message into the letterboxes of nearly 40,000 homes in Redditch throughout November.
And we felt the impact almost immediately. Since November, we’ve seen a significant boost not just in enquiries, but in the general buzz around our business. In a crowded market, those leaflets helped us stand out. They reminded everyone in the area where we were. In the centre of town, independent, established and open for business.
Tracking the Result with Confidence and Precision
But awareness is one thing, but sales were needed to justify the expense. We needed to know if the money spent on the mailout was genuinely driving sign-ups.
This is where Ashbourne’s affiliate link system was an invaluable tool for us.
Before we even approved the leaflet design, we knew we could track how it would perform with 100% accuracy.
Ashbourne set up a unique affiliate link just for this campaign. Every person who signed up using our leaflet’s code was instantly identifiable in our membership management system.
We could see in real-time exactly how many leads our £3,400 mailout was generating. It completely removed the guesswork and allowed us to measure the true return on our investment.
The result? Our November mailout has directly generated £1,200 in new membership sales already, with interest still coming in. At this rate, the entire campaign will have paid for itself within four months. Every new member after that will be pure gain for us.
In turn, this has been a massive help in reducing that final quarter’s net member attrition rate we talked about at the start of the article.
We were so pleased with the service from Leafletdrop that we’ve arranged a discount for any other independent gyms looking to try something similar to what we did.
You can use the code AM10 for 10% off your first drop with them. We don’t see any money or get any benefit from this, we just want to pass on a good deal to other gyms and fitness clubs.
Sometimes it is important to revisit the tried and tested methods of promoting your gym. Using Ashbourne’s system we were able to prove that our leaflet drop helped turn a traditionally quiet period into one of our most proactive and successful campaigns of the year.
It is something we’d thoroughly recommend to any independent gym or fitness club that wants to try something different! And with a system like Ashbourne’s affiliate link to keep track of who is joining, you will know exactly how effective a mailout was in your area.