Are you using text messages to market your gym?
If not, you should seriously consider it. Here’s why.
It’s a powerful tool to grow your fitness business – from driving sales to boosting member retention and building a thriving community.
It’s a direct, personalized way to engage potential customers, nurture them into paying members, and increase the amount of time (and money) they spend on your business.
And it fits in perfectly with a modern, integrated marketing system that also uses email, social media, and “in real life” networking.
So, in this blog post, let’s take a closer look at how gym text message marketing can help your business at each step.
Converting Prospects to Clients
Here’s how to use gym text message marketing to move people from the “interested” list to the “paying members” roll.
1. Segment Your Prospects. Break them into separate lists so you can target them with specific messages based on interests, goals, and engagement levels. This makes each message more relevant to each participant.
2. Make Messages Relevant and Timely. Consider these types of ideas:
· Promotional offers with discounts or limited-time offers
· Free trials or demonstrations of your capabilities
· Educational content like workout tips and healthy recipes. These show your expertise and are valuable to prospects.
· Invitations to events. Offer tours, open houses, free days – or throw a “coffee klatch” at a local coffeeshop.
3. Personalize Your Communication. Texting on a platform like Naamly’s lets you address people by their names and reference their goals and interests. This makes prospects feel like you care about them and want to help.
4. Use Clear Calls to Action (CTAs). Every message should include a clear, compelling CTA, like a link to register for a free class, claim a special offer, or view your workout schedule and book appointments. This streamlines the process and leads to more conversions.
5. Follow Up on Leads. You can use a drip campaign to stay in touch and nurture prospects into converting when the time is right for them.
6. Assess How You’re Doing. You can see key data points like open rates, click through rates, and customer acquisition costs. That instant insight is priceless.
Stay Connected with Members
By leveraging the immediacy and personal touch of SMS (Short Message Service), gyms can connect with members in a way that surpasses traditional forms of communication like email or social media.
Gym text message marketing offers a direct, intimate channel to reach your gym members. Email remains a staple of marketing and business communications. But texting has several advantages over the more traditional email:
· It’s less likely to get lost in crowded inboxes, since most people get fewer texts than emails.
· It’s more likely to be seen right away.
· The average open rate is 98%, compared to 20% for emails.
· It also has a higher response rate – 45% to about 6%.
· Text messages tend to get read immediately; emails tend to pile up.
So, you have a higher chance of creating your desired effect with text messages than with emails.
That’s some of how text message marketing fills a gap with clients who don’t have or regularly use email.
But it also does the same for those who don’t rely on social media, or who use it only very selectively (like on channels you don’t use for marketing, or just for personal communications).
Just as soon as “everyone” has moved from Platform Yesterday to Platform Right Now, there’s a Platform Tomorrow coming along to replace it. Small businesses can have a hard time keeping up!
And an advantage of gym text message marketing to both of them is this: It’s instant communications.
You can instantly update everybody with an urgent message – like a weather closure, flash sale, changes to your class schedule, and more.
You retain the ability to personalize messages to increase impact; to segment members into groups; and to track the impact of your messages. You can offer discounts to certain members, based on the interest they’ve shown in the past.
Texting also allows you to send personalized messages to celebrate milestones like birthdays or hitting a new personal record. This raises client loyalty and helps people feel seen and appreciated.
What could be better than a friendly message of congratulations!
Building a Thriving Community
After using gym text message marketing to convert prospects and engage members, you’ll find how it can help you build a thriving community around your fitness business.
Building a real sense of community is key to long-term growth. You want to keep members happy and growing within your gym, and you might need to find new ways to keep them part of the family
So, use gym text message marketing to keep members informed, motivated, and updated so you can foster that powerful sense of belonging and loyalty.
With two-way texting, you take it a step further. Members are encouraged to ask questions, give feedback, and feel even more connected to your business.
So, if you’re thinking about adding a class or buying new equipment, you can get a sense for what your customers think. That might be helpful to you – and it definitely makes them feel vested in your success.
They can let you know why they’ve missed sessions, and your team can respond all with the same, up-to-date information. All this inspires confidence among clients – and lets your team express concern in a business-like manner.
To wrap this up, you can see how gym text message marketing gives you tremendous power to communicate with prospects and clients so you can grow your business.
Communications technology will continue to change. It’s important to stay on top of tools that reach a saturation point in the culture, as texting clearly has.
It grants you immediacy, personalization and engagement. What more could you ask for to boost your marketing to the next level?
Now, a word for anyone who worries that some people might feel annoyed if you send text messages.
There are two ways to avoid that.
First, always make it easy for them to “opt out” of receiving future messages. (And don’t worry when they do so! It’s fine.)
Second, don’t be annoying! That means don’t overload people with too many text messages, and don’t send spammy messages that just promote how great you are all the time.
Be useful, personalized and relevant, and you’ll have few complaints.
Naamly’s sophisticated suite of gym text message marketing makes all of this, and more, super-easy for you. It includes:
· Group messaging among trainers or clients
· Team client messaging to the entire business through a single number
· Predefined messages for welcomes or certain situations
· Trainer metrics to review messages and sales details.
If you’re looking for more valuable resources, we’d recommend you check out our Fitness Boost Bundle, completely free! Our bundle promises invaluable returns — a blueprint for a more profitable, sustainable business.