Digital Marketing
Digitizing a gym, or a swimming pool, means putting the user experience at the center of the service offered, providing the customer with tools that can streamline processes and have a high degree of autonomy.
In digitization, accesses are automated, when the customer buys an online subscription and pays by credit card, when he books a Personal Training session or a Pilates lesson or a swimming course it takes place directly from a smartphone.
Automation does not completely replace front office work, but intervenes in some steps that can be made more fluid and functional and resources can be used for tasks with a higher human value.
In this way it is possible not only to cope with any regulatory restrictions and guarantee a greater degree of health safety, but also to meet the new needs on the market, as well as save time and money.
Today's customer has changed, he has learned to familiarize himself with digital tools and services and has understood how well these facilities fit in with everyday life. While he is a customer who, on the one hand, pays greater attention to health safety, on the other hand he has lost some confidence in practicing sports to preserve mental and physical health. The customer has discovered an online world that is not bound to specific times and places and therefore requires a highly customizable offer. For this reason it is essential for sports companies to reinvent themselves how to align themselves with the new market.
The automation of fitness centers, gyms and swimming pools responds to this need: automating means releasing the reception from repeated automatic operations that the customer now expects to be able to carry out independently.
Carry the reception of the swimming pool or gym in the member's pocket: online services.
Much of the automation of a fitness center takes place online, through dedicated apps. A complete application aimed at the customer of a sports center allows you to join the gym / swimming pool, purchase and pay for a subscription.
With digital payments it is also possible to manage renewals, rather than the balance of installments. Thanks to the most advanced tools, it is also possible to provide subscriptions that automatically renew every month. A great convenience that allows you to obtain a recurring and constant collection.
Digital automation also concerns the management of reservations and appointments. Always remaining within the application of the fitness center / swimming pool, surely one of the services offered by the tool will be the possibility of booking, canceling or moving an appointment, participation in a lesson or simply your presence in the weight room, avoiding unnecessary waiting. and / or overcrowding.
For the gym or swimming pool, the App. it also becomes an information and marketing channel: through this tool it is possible to send notifications to the entire customer base or to a limited selection of users (for example, to all subscribers to a particular course).
Communication can also be bidirectional if there is a chat in the App or the possibility of launching surveys. Very useful function, especially in phases like this of market change, to capture new trends.
Email marketing campaigns: Digital marketing projects, targeted email marketing.
The 10 salient points from email marketing and the use of emails by the users who receive them.
1. Segment the mailing list
A mailing list is made up of a set of email addresses of which some specific information about the owner is often known. If the emails come from a well-designed lead generation campaign, perhaps you know the name and surname of the user, the city in which they live, their age, gender, etc. These data allow to segment the mailing list on the basis of specific groups of users to whom it is possible to send different and more targeted contents and proposals.
Emails that reach all users of an email marketing campaign without distinction lose effectiveness, because obviously they will only be of interest to a small part of the subscribers to the mailing list. In general, email marketing campaigns that take advantage of mailing list segmentation increase the open rate of emails.
2. Check the quality of the mailing list emails
Most of the user data owned by companies is unreliable or out of date. A rather disturbing figure, which concerns at least 60% of the marketing departments of companies. Having more precise information about the users to whom messages are sent is essential if you want to improve the result of marketing campaigns. Without this information it is impossible to make good segmentation of the mailing list and therefore the outcome of email marketing campaigns is compromised.
There are many ways to get deeper insights into your customers and leads. Sometimes the same email marketing software allows you to insert questionnaires and surveys in emails and above all they detect and record the actions of users regarding the messages sent. A user who regularly opens messages on a certain topic is probably also interested in receiving relevant products, while perhaps every time he receives emails on another topic he immediately trashes them without even opening them, showing disinterest. The current software is able to associate each user's choices and use them to enrich the information on his account and therefore to better target the contents to be sent over time.
3. Use marketing automation
When you have a very large mailing list, it is difficult to send well-differentiated mailings based on the various segments into which users have been divided without using specific technological tools. The best software offers email marketing automation technologies that allow you to schedule mailings dynamically, defining email plans to be sent automatically to all users who have performed a certain action, have reacted in a certain way to the emails received in previously, they fall into a certain segment of interests or characteristics, etc. To clarify this type of campaign, we suggest reading our article which explains in detail how email marketing automation works.
4. Beware of the mobile web!
Users open at least 63% of emails received with a mobile or tablet. In these devices, however, the formatting of the emails is different from how it appears on a computer screen. For this reason, we must pay the utmost attention to creating perfectly responsive formatting, that is, also optimized to be viewed on mobile devices.
Fortunately, most email marketing software today is able to provide pre-configured templates to be viewed on smartphones and tablets. However, it is always advisable to carry out preliminary tests to verify that the aesthetic and communicative effect obtained on the small screen of a mobile phone is satisfactory.
5. Personalize the emails
Each user likes to perceive that whoever sends an email is speaking specifically to him and not to all the public without distinction. One of the fundamental rules in creating truly effective emails is personalization, which helps reduce the distance between the recipient of the email and the company. “Good morning Francesca, today is your birthday and to celebrate we want to give you an exclusive gift! If you buy any product on our site today, we will give you an object of your choice worth 10 euros ". Such a message hits the mark and highlights the attention that the company pays to each of its customers as a person and not just as a number on a mailing list.
In general, personalized emails allow you to increase by 6 times the purchase conversions that non-personalized emails are able to generate. But there is one aspect to pay attention to: what is the quality of the information you have about users on the mailing list? For example, are the names we associated with each email address reliable? Otherwise it may happen that you send a message that begins with "Hello Rossi, today is your birthday ...", which obviously in addition to making those who receive it turn up their noses also shows that in reality the company is only using unverified data in unintelligent way. If the user data is not correct, it is better not to personalize the emails too much, otherwise it can have a boomerang effect.
6. Beware of calls to action
When you send a message to a user, you have to explicitly tell them what you want them to do. This happens in the call to action (CTA), which must be present in every email. From the company's point of view, the CTA is often the primary reason why the email is being sent. "Buy the product", "register for the Swimming Course", "take advantage of the discount", "register for the event", etc. are some possible examples of CTA.
The problem is that there is often a tendency to abuse CTA, ending up with too many of them in the same message. There are cases where this can make sense, such as when presenting a list of products that are currently on sale. But in most cases it is best to enter no more than one or two CTAs per email, because as many user behavior analyzes have found, emails with a single CTA greatly increase click-through rates. WordStream even notes that the increase is 371% compared to messages that contain too many calls to action.
7. Always insert a link to the unsubscribe
The legislation for sending marketing emails provides that the message must contain a link that allows the user to unsubscribe automatically (the so-called "unsubscribe"). The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) makes it mandatory for those who send emails to immediately unsubscribe from a mailing list by a user who requests it.
Sending emails without unsubscribe as well as being incorrect and disrespectful to users is also dangerous, because some users could report the company to the Privacy Guarantor.
8. Choose the words of the email carefully to avoid being considered spam
Almost all email box providers now offer spam filters that identify, based on particular algorithms, which messages are advertising or annoying and which ones have a good content value. This happens based on a number of different parameters, one of which is precisely the detection of keywords typical of spam emails. These words must be avoided or otherwise used with great caution.
Although obviously it is not certain that the inclusion of these words will immediately cause the email to be classified as spam and it being understood that there are other factors to consider, here are the terms that should be used as little as possible.
Offer indicators: free, offer, promotion, gift, loan, etc..
Urgency indicators: limited time, hurry up, now, etc.
Call to action explicitly linked to orders or money: ask for a quote, buy now, order now, etc.
Trivial phrases: you will not believe your eyes, the secret that nobody wants to let you know, etc.
9. Avoid sending emails to accounts that have not subscribed to the mailing list knowinglye
Companies often buy unskilled email lists from agencies that often have few qualms. This is almost always a mistake, because first of all the users have not authorized the company to send them emails, with the effect that the unsubscribe rate will be very high and this will make the email service providers suspicious that they may assign to future emails. send spam qualification. Furthermore, a user who has not expressed an explicit interest will almost always find the messages sent not very stimulating and will tend not to open them, making the mailings useless and penalizing the campaign. Too low an open rate is also an important factor in classifying emails sent as spam.
The best solution is to invest in valid lead generation campaigns, with which you can obtain well-profiled email addresses and, above all, of potential customers who are really interested in the company's services and products.
10. Pay maximum attention to the text of the email subject
35% of people who receive an email decide to open it only based on what they find written in the subject. If this is interesting and knows how to intrigue or involve, then the chances of the email being opened become very high. Otherwise, the opening rate is drastically reduced even if the email may contain valuable content.
A good subject should be incisive and able to convey the contents of the email and why they are of interest to the recipient of the email. There are specific techniques on how to create effective objects, which can be applied to increase the open rate of an email marketing campaign.
Last point: choose a Marketing company, whose email marketing platform is the most suitable for the needs of your Sports Center.