As a fitness business owner, time is one of your most valuable resources. That’s why automation is such a life saver.
It’s the most efficient way to work smarter, not harder, and still get your brand in front of the right people for your studio. Here are 4 ways to automate your fitness business for killer success.
1. Email Drips: Only Sweat Is A Better “Drip” For Your Fitness Business
Email is the perfect starting point to reach your fitness customers. And you can make it almost entirely automated, which makes email ideal for any fitness business owner.
Choose a CRM with the ability to build email campaigns (like HubSpot or MailChimp) and segment your audience into different lists depending on what they’re interested in, their age, whether they’re a current customers or prospect, etc.
This lets you precisely target your email marketing to the customers you want to see it.
So, if your fitness business offers both boot camp classes and 1-on-1 personal training, you can send each customer group relevant tips and workouts specific to the service they’ve signed up for. All because you’ve segmented them based on their interests.
You can even use this to upsell customers from one list to your other relevant services.
Automated emails allow you to respond to fitness leads and customers immediately, regardless of what else you’re doing.
Let’s say someone signs up for a membership while you’re on the floor training a client—or at 1 a.m. while you’re catching up on some much-needed sleep—they’ll get an email welcoming them to your studio right then and there.
This also helps keep you top of mind with your leads and fitness customers. 80% of sales are made between the 5th and 12th contact, so an email drip is a killer way to bring in more customers.
2. MindBody or Zen Planner: Automatically Organized
Most fitness business owners dream of packed classes and waiting lists. But, unless students see that a class is full, those waiting lists cause frustration for customers.
That’s where a management software like MindBody or Zen Planner comes in.
This software allows your fitness customers to create their own profile, add or drop classes, upgrade their membership level, or change their billing information… right from their own computer or mobile phone.
To top it off, MindBody boosts fitness studios’ average sales by 23%. It also cuts down on the staff a gym needs on duty.
You give students the ability to schedule themselves for classes online, which frees up both your phone lines and your staff so you can focus on providing customers who are already in the gym with a great experience.
3. Social Posting: The Easy Way For Your Fitness Business To Be Everywhere All At Once
You already know how important social media is to your fitness business. But, posting frequently enough to make an impact takes more time than most owners want to spend or even delegate. That’s where social media automation comes in.
Hootsuite and Buffer are 2 of the most popular tools to write and schedule posts in advance.
You can add multiple accounts like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, and Instagram, and each has a free plan for most single-location gyms and studios.
Scheduling a post through Hootsuite is simple. It allows you to shorten links, tag other profiles and pages, and add hashtags and images.
You can choose to post immediately or schedule it for a future date and time. So not only can you work in batches to produce your social media posts, but you can also schedule them for the time they’ll get the best audience.
4. Landing Pages: Generating Leads While You Sleep
A killer landing page plays a huge role in the automated process of lead generation for your fitness business. Studies have shown that when ads route leads to a landing page instead of a website, conversions increase 115%.
ClickFunnels is an awesome tool to create clean landing pages and beautiful opt-in forms.
It integrates with tons of different CRMs to collect and store the contact info your customers and leads submit; making it way easier to build an email drip campaign like the one I mentioned above.
You don’t have to be a web designer to create or install one for your fitness business. Best of all, adding a 2-step opt-in form yields 30% more form submissions than a single-step form.
Running a fitness business takes a ton of skill and efficiency, but any entrepreneur knows that there are ways to simplify this process.
Automation is a huge one. If you use the tools in this article, you’ll take back one of the most valuable resources we could all use more of: Time.
