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3 Tips for Choosing Health Club Email Marketing Software
An extremely effective and inexpensive marketing activity for a health club is email marketing.
What’s surprising is few health clubs take full advantage of the power of email marketing.
When you think about it, as a health club owner or manager, you have a captive audience to whom you can communicate easily and inexpensively via email. If you put your mind to it, you could create email messages that your members and prospective members will appreciate. The good news for you is you also have a terrific opportunity to increase sales and attract new members.
But, you don’t want just any email software for your health club.
If you’re serious about incorporating email marketing into your health club marketing plan, then ensure you get the right email marketing software.
Consider the following 3 tips for choosing health club email marketing software:
TIP 1: Don’t use free email accounts such as Gmail or Hotmail and don’t use Outlook
I love Gmail and Outlook. But these email software services are not designed for email marketing, especially when you’re using email marketing to attract prospective members. Why? Because, if you’re building an email contact list of prospective members, then you should get software that has the double opt-in process.
The double opt-in process is a safeguard against being alleged an email spammer. The double opt-in process gives a new member of your list the opportunity to confirm they wish to be added to your email list.
Moreover, proper email software makes it easy to pre-load email messages (or e-newsletters) so that your list members receive messages at a pre-arranged time. For example, you can schedule an e-newsletter to go out every week or every other week.
The point is the right email software will have much more capability than Gmail or Outlook (or similar email software). You need the autoresponder and double opt-in features if you’re going to get serious about your health club email marketing.
TIP 2: Get Email software that integrates with your membership database
Your membership database is an asset. The trouble is many health clubs don’t fully leverage this asset other than collect membership dues. However, your membership is an opportunity to increase your sales and even attract new members.
However, you want software that integrates so you can easily email your members from within the database rather than have two databases – one for emailing and then your main membership database. Having one master list makes it much easier and is more efficient from which to work.
IMPORTANT RULE OF THUMB: Don’t always sell to your members. Send them a lot of useful information that they’ll appreciate. If all you send are sales messages, you’ll notice over time that fewer of your members will bother opening your email messages.
Your members are likely interested in health and fitness. Send informative messages about health and fitness. Then, intersperse your messages with some sales messages. Offer discounts and alert your members to deals and sales.
How can you attract new members with emailing your current members? Simple, offer referral incentives. Tell your members that if they refer someone, the referring member receives 1 to 3 months free (or any other valuable incentive).
Don’t forget about gift certificates. You can offer great packages in the form of gift certificates to your members who might then be interested in buying the gift certificates for friends and family.
TIP 3: Get Email software that integrates with your scheduling software
This is the most important tip when choosing email software if you offer personal training. Personal training can be extremely lucrative and an excellent profit center. I have yet to meet a health club owner who isn’t keen on selling more personal trainer packages.
One way to boost your personal training sales is to make it extremely easy for your members and non-members to book personal training slots. One easy way is an online scheduling system that accepts payment online. You get the money up front in an automated way and you made it easy for your client to book a personal training slot (or slots).
How does email marketing come into play with scheduling software? In two ways:
If a desired slot is booked, then the client can be added to a waiting list. With email software integration, if that desired time-slot opens up, an email message can be automatically sent to the wait-list. This will certainly reduce vacancies.
Scheduling software integrated with email means you can have appointment reminders sent automatically. Any automated way you can reduce no-shows is well worth the investment.
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Source by Peter Lawlor
