Top 4 Ideas for a Quick and Easy Gym Marketing Strategy

You know the story: Every year, thousands of people create fitness resolutions and then fail to follow through.

As a gym or fitness center owner, it’s your job to sell new memberships and retain those members. But are you really leveraging all of the tools and tactics that can help you automate this entire process? 

Automating the many day-to-day touchpoints with your members is an efficient way to keep them engaged — and keep your treadmills full. If you want to boost your numbers while saving time, keep reading to learn some of our favorite fast, easy, and affordable gym marketing ideas.

4 Gym Marketing Ideas You Can Automate

Regular communication with your members is essential to keeping them engaged. Staying in contact can make the difference between them using their membership on a regular basis or you becoming an unnecessary expense that gets purged later.

These five marketing ideas will help you start automating your communication so that you can increase engagement while reducing your cost and time investment. The set-it-and-forget-it component to these tips is a great way for marketing newbies to get in the game. 

1. Send Recurring Class or Training Reminders Via Text Message

One of the main reasons that people cancel their gym membership is because they are not using it. If you can encourage them to take advantage of regular fitness classes or small group training, then you keep them actively using their membership.

Simply sending a reminder to your members using mobile marketing can be a great way to help make sure that they show up to classes you know that they attend regularly. Reminders can also help to decrease your no-show rate for training sessions and small group classes. And while you have your clients' ear, use SMS or MMS (image or photo) messages to let them know about any special events like a demo, talk, community class or tasting. 

Text messages are more convenient for you and your customers plus numerous text message marketing statistics show how effective this kind of text marketing can be.

• 90% of all text messages are read within three minutes of being received.
• Text messages are opened and read almost five times more than email (98% vs. 20%).
• The average response time for a legitimate email is about 90 minutes, compared to 90 seconds for a text message.
• Consumers are more likely to open text messages before any other form of mobile communication.

Providers of text messaging for businesses like EZ Texting helps fitness clubs and trainers send event reminder text messages on a recurring basis. You don’t have to worry about remembering to send these reminders before each event since the software will take care of it for you.

Reminder messages can be scheduled to go out daily, weekly or monthly with all sorts of scheduling options. You can set it and forget it while seeing your membership retention and fitness class participation grow.

2. Send a Weekly Email Newsletter

Try sending out a weekly email newsletter. The best email newsletters keep contacts up to up-to-date on events, encourage contacts to stay on top of their fitness goals, and much more.

Done correctly and consistently, your newsletter will bring new clients into your gym and motivate others to maintain their membership.

As you’re creating your newsletter, consider the following:

• You should personalize your newsletter for your subscribers. Include your contact’s first name to greet and motivate them.
• Introduce your staff members and personal trainers. It's important that you forge a personal connection between your members and your team. A fitness journey is personal, and it's important that your members know who is there to support them.
• Give your members some motivation. You can include inspirational quotes or share member success stories. You can also include information about upcoming events and competitions, links to recent blog posts, and links to videos on social media that you’ve published.

Your automation option will vary depending on which platform you use for email marketing. The most basic platforms will allow you to build your email and then schedule it to be sent to the subscribers of your choice at a future date and time.

More advanced platforms can be programmed to send your newsletters at a predetermined date and time and can automatically pull in things like upcoming events and recent blog articles. Advanced email platforms can even send the emails at optimal times per subscriber based on their past interaction history.

For example, Bob tends to open emails at 5 pm on Fridays while Sue opens more of your emails at 10 am on Thursdays. The email software will look at their engagement history and will send your message to Sue at 10 am on Thursday. Then, it will wait and send it to Bob at 5 pm on Friday.

3. Reward Members for Referrals

Fitness businesses experience a natural member turnover of at least 20% per year. In areas that have more competition from other studios or from bootcamps, CrossFit, Zumba, yoga and other activities, member churn can be as high as 50%.

A solid referral program is a great way to increase your members and compensate for that churn. By encouraging word-of-mouth marketing, you're investing in low-cost, high ROI, fitness marketing strategies.

If you want to automate your referral program, then consider using something like Sweat Angels.

Every time somebody checks in at your gym on Facebook, your gym makes a donation to the charity of their choice. As your community is checking in on Facebook to support the charity, they are also sharing your gym location with all of their friends.

Thousands of people can learn about your gym while you're also building a charitable reputation for your brand. They even provide the signage and digital marketing materials for you.

4. Offer a Free Training Day Once Per Month

Set aside one day in each month to offer a free training day. This is a great opportunity to introduce members to additional value-added services that they may not be aware of or have just been too shy to try.

A free training day gives them an opportunity to try out the training programs that your gym offers without having to make a commitment immediately.

Once you have established your free training day program, it will function mostly on autopilot. Make sure that you include notices about the Training Day program along with your other marketing. Post signs up inside of your fitness center, include a note in your email newsletter, and send a text message out to your subscribers.

Your members will see the announcements and put it on their calendars to attend.

Save More Time with Proven SMS Campaigns

Gyms and fitness centers can leverage text message marketing throughout the year to help keep members engaged and focused on reaching their fitness goals.

At EZ Texting, we have ample opportunities to work with a variety of successful businesses in the fitness industry. We help them launch a series of effective text message marketing campaigns. Our team has learned what types of messages get results and which ones don’t. We combined some of our best strategies down into a single, powerful, playbook.

The plays in this playbook can be customized to work for personal trainers, boot camps, boxing gyms, martial arts studios, pilates, spinning, MMA, Crossfit, Yoga, and more. We will show you how to build and deploy a wide variety of messages. You will learn how to attract new members, increase member engagement, and get more membership renewals.

Grab all of our insights plus 17 copy and paste templates by downloading your own copy of our Text Messaging Playbook for Fitness Centers & Gyms.