Why CRM Matters For Your Fitness Club

It’s not uncommon to come across a gym that is stuck following up leads and performing sales and marketing tasks manually. Sure, sales targets might be being met (most months) and your current processes might be getting the job done but given the overwhelming evidence that shows gym sales teams who have a CRM outperform those that don’t, it’s incredible how many fitness clubs are yet to make the leap.

So, what is a CRM?

A CRM, or Customer Relationship Management system, is software that is designed to help you manage your relationships and communicate with customers. It’s a central place where the information about your leads and customers is stored, improving your ability to communicate with them and solving many business problems that would otherwise require a lot of tedious, manual labour. According to Hubspot, organisations who use a CRM report a 29 per cent increase in sales and a 34 per cent increase in sales team productivity.

Gym CRM software, created specifically for the fitness industry go one further and give clubs a competitive edge a generalised CRM does not. This is because they’re designed with industry-specific features that will ultimately increase your conversion rates and improve the experience for your leads, such as direct SMS or the ability to run specialised reports.

In 2019 alone, overall CRM use among businesses increased from 56 per cent to 74 per cent. So, to avoid being left behind using Excel or Google Sheets to track your leads, here are some ways a CRM like GymLeads can help you hit your sales targets and take your customer experience to the next level.

Streamlining your SMS communications

A Nucleus Research report finds that 65 per cent of sales reps that use a mobile CRM achieve their sales quotas, compared to only 22 per cent of those who use non-mobile CRMs. And, as anyone in sales and marketing for the fitness industry knows, the importance of being able to directly SMS leads shouldn’t be underestimated.

Being able to SMS leads is proven to increase conversion, in the most part because people are more likely to open an SMS than an email. However, directly keeping track of each lead’s behaviour, then sending them a manual SMS is incredibly time-consuming and means you have the potential to lack consistency in what you’re saying and the timing of when you contact them. This is where bulk SMS software comes in handy for fitness centres.

Through your CRM, you can set up triggered SMSes based on a lead’s behaviour. For example, when a lead signs up for a free trial, you could set up a rule that triggers an SMS encouraging them to book it in, which will be automatically sent to them immediately (or at a time of your choosing). This increases the chance of conversion because it means the message the lead receives is both timely and highly relevant.

A CRM also allows you to set up templates, so that even if you want to send a manual SMS to a group of leads, you can simply select the relevant message and do a bulk send, even personalising it with a field that populates their individual names into the message. Compared to individually texting leads or copying and pasting a bunch of SMSes and sending them manually, templated bulk sends save a huge amount of time, demonstrated by Forester’s research, which shows that 50% of sales teams improved their productivity by using a mobile CRM.

The benefits of improved reporting

Reporting on lead conversion rates can be a bit of a nightmare, but gym CRM software will allow you to easily set up and run specific reports based on the needs of your business. Accurate reporting allows you to easily judge what is working or not working with your lead nurture processes, refine them and then train your sales teams to improve.

A specific gym CRM software has specialised reports that give you information such as a comparison of conversion rates between leads who have called, booked in for a trial or simply walked-in to the gym to enquire. Or another example is a trials report, where you can compare the success of different types of trials and which one will encourage a lead to convert fastest.

How automation will save you time and improve the customer experience

Automation is all about reducing the amount of repetitive, manual tasks you perform by using a CRM that performs these processes for you. So, instead of keeping track of and emailing hundreds (or even thousands!) of different leads each day individually, you can set up rules in your CRM that will automatically do this for you. This could be anything from an auto-responder message thanking a lead for their enquiry, to a lead nurture journey with engaging and informative content about why joining your fitness club will change their life.

Aside from ensuring your communications remain consistent and are optimised based on how they are performing, you’ll also avoid having to train new staff on lead nurture processes, meaning your gym sales and marketing software will save yourself many precious hours of time.

Summary

Ultimately, if you’re looking to grow your membership base and provide your leads and customers with the highest level of service possible (without too many headaches for you!), a specialised gym CRM software system like GymLeads is the only way to go.

Are you a gym owner looking to take your conversion rates to the next level? GymLeads CRM system is an automated sales and marketing pipeline, designed specifically for the fitness industry. Our expertly designed, intuitive software helps you capture, convert and communicate to your leads and members in the simplest way possible.