An Overview of Email & SMS Marketing for Boutique Gyms
Boutique gyms utilize two of the best forms of cost-effective and reliable marketing tools available, through the email and SMS forms of marketing. This is to enhance the gym member relationships, enhance the retention of current members and generate ongoing revenue for the gym. Because most boutique gyms create a strong identity around their community, personalization and trust, the communication with their members must feel intentional and provide some value. When executed correctly, the email and SMS marketing strategies will allow the gym owner to remain in touch with their members in a way that creates long-term and loyal members.
The purpose of this guide is to break down the best practices boutique gym owners can use to enhance their communication strategies in both email and SMS.
The Increased Relevance of Email and SMS Marketing for Small Gym Models
Boutique gyms are quite different than “big box” fitness facilities. Boutique gyms build their model around creating intimate, relationship-driven experiences for growth, and they require regular, ongoing communication in order to sustain and maintain those relationships.
Email provides space to share longer, more informative content, including newsletters, announcements, educational content and program related updates. Email is highly accessible, and an inexpensive way of nurturing leads over the long-term.
SMS provides the immediacy of communication. Recipients usually open text messages within a few minutes of receiving them, making SMS the most effective communication medium for reminders, urgent updates, last-minute scheduling changes or promotional pushes that require immediate attention.
A well-rounded communication system that employs a combination of email and SMS is the best model for managing all stages of the member experience.
Successful Email Marketing Best Practices
Targeting Your Audience through Segmentation
Sending the same email campaign to all contacts leads to disengagement with email marketing materials. However, sending different email campaigns to different groups of people increases the likelihood of engagement. The best way to ensure engagements are to segment your audience based on their behaviors, sign-up history, and level of participation/engagement with your gym and each other. Examples of segments include prospective members, newly joined members, highly engaged members, and members who haven’t visited in several weeks.
Offer Valuable and Relevant Content
The more consistent members receive valuable or interesting content in their emails, the more likely they are to open them. Examples of the types of content you can offer include exercise assistance, healthy lifestyles, member spotlights, local community news, educational content related to fitness & wellness.
Leverage Automated Campaigns to Improve Retention
Automated marketing communications will help keep your gym’s members aware of what it means to be a part of your gym and what they can expect from you. Automated marketing campaigns can consist of welcoming campaigns, anniversary campaigns, class reminders, membership renewal notifications and reengagement campaigns for those that have been inactive for a period of time.
Ensure Your Email Look Clean and Mobile-Optimized
Having a clean, uncluttered layout with a short sentence length and easy-to-read call-to-action gives your emails the best chance of being read on mobile devices, which is how many of your members will be accessing their accounts.
Continually Monitor Your Email Marketing Performance and Make Improvements
When you continually monitor email open rates, click-through patterns, and unsubscribed member statistics, you can utilize the data to make necessary changes to your email marketing strategy and ultimately improve member engagement.
Best Practices for Effective SMS Marketing
- Require a clear opt-in from the recipient before sending a text message.
- Keep your text message brief and to one point.
- Use SMS to send quick reminders instead of long updates.
- Allow for replies if they enhance scheduling or communication with the recipient.
- Only send texts occasionally to avoid overwhelming the member base.
Using Email & SMS Together for a Complete Member Experience
When gyms use email and SMS together, they are able to provide members with a complete experience of communication.
A new member may get an email that explains the gym’s policies, programming, etc., and then receive a text asking them to schedule their first class. A member who has not been seen in a while may receive an email that educates them on some type of exercise with a quick text as a reminder of the options available to them, or simply some encouragement to return.
Having multiple methods of communication gives the impression that the gym is personal and cares about each member, while providing a sense of belonging and establishing the culture of the gym and community.
Mistakes That Should Be Avoided
Multiple messages sent will drain the audience and spam the audience. Unsegmented, one-size-fits-all messages will be less effective. Not utilizing performance metrics and reporting to improve engagement and communication will hinder growth. Based too heavily on selling will cause the loss of member trust. Avoiding these common mistakes will help boutique gyms build and maintain an effective and consistent communication plan.
RhinoFit: The Ultimate Solution for Email & SMS Marketing
RhinoFit stands out as the best platform for email and SMS marketing because boutique gyms have an increasing need to connect their communication tools directly with their scheduling, billing, attendance, and lead management systems, all of which are currently provided by RhinoFit through one integrated platform.
It includes both email and SMS tools that have been designed specifically for use within fitness businesses. The ability to segment your audience, automate sequences, send reminders and track attendance trends, as well as create personalized messages based on real-world behavior, will enable fitness businesses to have complete control over how they communicate with their members. As everything is integrated into RhinoFit, emails and text messages are seamlessly aligned with your reservations, membership, as well as payments.
Also, it provides a number of helpful templates including welcome sequences, renewal notifications, class updates, and reengagement campaigns. Additionally, RhinoFit allows for two-way communication as well as offering the ability for members to connect on a member message board which enhances their ability to connect with each other as a community.
RhinoFit also offers an all-in-one system which eliminates the need for the use of third-party marketing tools, which reduces the amount of manual effort to perform marketing activities. For fitness businesses that are seeking to grow their member base, retain members and effectively communicate with members, RhinoFit offers a complete and cost-effective solution specifically developed for fitness operations.