Saturday, April 27, 2013
When a person chooses a gym, they hope to build a trusting relationship. Many people find themselves as a victim of a salesman’s pitch and as a result, are unhappy with their gym. As a fitness institution, you can minimize the amount of dissatisfied members by personally connecting with them through SMS Text Marketing and still remain profitable.

You already know it, cell phones are everywhere and they are probably heavily used inside your facilities. Text messages have a 95% open rate so that means your members will likely read the text messages sent to them by you. The best part about CallFire’s marketing solutions is that our platform allows you to personalize your text blasts so that your members really feel a connection to your gym. It is quick, it gets to the point, and it’s efficient.

What can you do with SMS Marketing?

-Notify your members when their bill is approaching

-Schedule text reminders if your member has signed up for a class

-Send out text messages to members who have not been to the gym after a certain amount of time

-Give nutritional tips via SMS

-Forward interesting and beneficial diet links to your members

Perhaps you already jumped onto the Text Marketing trend and are still looking to increase efficiency. If you feel that your past due notices are not effective through texts, you can use CallFire’s Voice Broadcasting campaign. This feature will keep reminding your members by an automated phone call (you can use your own voice too!) to pay their fees. Let’s just say, you may get your money quicker than you have before (while doing less work to get it).

If you find your gym lacking in member sign ups (even after you posted ads with scantily-clad toned men and women), don’t panic. CallFire’s Call Tracking can show you which of your ads are just not working. The sooner you know, the quicker you can reduce costs from an ineffective ad and put your resources into the ones that bring in more business.

Another option for improving customer satisfaction is to send out surveys. With the use of CallFire's IVR, you can setup surveys asking gym members to rate their instructors or to rate the class difficulty which may increase your retention rate. Another strategy you can approach with IVR is to allow members to sign up for a class when they call your facility's number. For example, a person may call in and be asked to Press 1 to sign up for yoga, 2 to sign up for pilates, 3 to sign up for barre and so forth. This will save time and prevent confusion for both the caller and your phone representative.

All of these cost-friendly features will prove to be profitable and will increase efficiency, but they must be used in accordance to the law. Just make sure you have included an opt-in option within your contracts. To boost up your consent list, consider a fun promotion through a mass SMS text messaging service by offering incentives for opt-ins. Choose something catchy and beneficial for your customers such as a free class or a discount for a personal training session.

Save money, make your clients looks good, and build relationships so that they can spread the word and bring in more bodies for you to sculpt.