Q: “What is the standard closing rate of sales in the fitness industry?”

A: Closing rates will be different for different sales staff and different clubs. My best sales person closes 73 percent of all prospects. New sales staff with little experience can be lucky to close 30 percent. The average for all staff across all clubs is 53%. Clubs with highly trained sales staff and low staff turnover will maintain closing rates of over 70 percent.

Of course, you also need to look at total monthly sales. A sales person that does very little prospecting and only sees highly qualified walk-ins will tend to have a higher closing rate than a sales person who is actively involved in prospecting. In other words, selling 50 percent of 100 prospects is better than 80 percent of 20 walk-ins.

Also, clubs sometimes pick their closing rates out of the sky. The only way you can get accurate closing rates is if you have a 100 percent fail-safe system of recording all tours, walk-ins, and guests. I once looked at a club claiming 85 percent closing rates but they were not including guest passes. They were getting approximately 140 people on guest passes every month. When these were included their closing rates were only 36 percent.

A: A membership consultant’s “hit rate” will never be as good as it could be as long as it is referred to as just that… a “hit rate”. Members aren’t units, points or numbers, they’re people and each has a story and a reason for coming to us and the best consultants assume every single guest has a need to fill and consequently has come to join. We change people lives every day through fitness and as consultants our job is to remove all barriers and causes for hesitation, more often than not in people who have already gone through several stages of consideration before visiting a club.

It’s a competitive world and true to say not everyone who visits will join your club. Many factors will influence their final decision, so the ultimate percentage of those who join can vary from club to club, however globally I can say we at Face2Face aim to average in the high 60’s. I see many clubs claim much higher but often investigation reveals not all guests are counted as “prospects,” skewing their true conversion and indeed limiting their success.

Paul Brown

Fitness Life Marketing…Finished Up with 100 new members at Rhodes Club Fitness

Gold’s Gym Over 700 New Members with Fitness Life Marketing

Golds Gym Has Helped Over 100 New Members Lose Weight Using The “Ameri-Shape” Plan !

 

Tips to Attracting New Customers with Direct Mail

 

Fitness Marketing ……The best use for direct mail, especially in fitness, is to get current customers to keep coming back and spending more.  That said, businesses need a marketing strategy for attracting new customers. Here are 4 great tips to making direct mail work:

The Smaller Your Trade Area, The More Direct Mail Works. Typically direct mail works on a smaller scale than traditional media like TV, Radio or Print. My instinct is that the number is about 20,000 households.   You can enter the geography that corresponds to your trade area, then the demographics of your targeted customer.    A few things to keep in mind: Don’t over estimate your geography; the longer the travel time, the less likely people are to shop your business. Don’t over estimate your demographics; be honest about the likelihood of attracting people in age, income or gender groups that normally don’t shop your business.

Provide An Offer, But Also An Event. After the mailing list, the offer is the biggest driver of direct mail success. You always want a great offer to get customers to respond, but you also don’t want to look like a chronic discounter.  Overall discounting lessens the perceived quality of your product or service. To counter balance the perception of discounting, you should try to wrap your offer in an event. Events can simply include holidays like Christmas or Labor Day, community events like Crazy Days or Open House, or trade events .  The best events can be the ones you develop yourself like a guest celebrity appearance, a charity event, or a themed community event. The more you can wrap your sale or offer into an event, the less you need to discount, and the more you protect your core pricing and perceived product quality.

It Takes 7 Impressions to Make a Sale.  The rule of thumb in marketing is that on average a new customer will have been exposed to you brand 7 times. There is also research that shows that the more a person sees your brand, the more that person thinks favorably about your brand. So frequency matters. If you don’t “touch” your targeted customer continually over time, your marketing won’t reach it’s maximum effectiveness.  With direct mail as well as other media, you should have a plan in place to touch the same people multiple times throughout the year. A good rule of thumb for direct mail is 4 times per year. Other impressions can come from other types of media, but also word-of-mouth, drive-bys of a retail location, or public relations campaigns. Lastly, avoid using too many media types. If you try direct mail, then print, then radio, you will tend to make single impressions on many people, but not frequent impressions on the same people; you never get to the 7 impressions.

Test for an Ongoing Marketing System. The goal with any marketing is to develop “marketing systems” that you can put into your annual marketing budget and use over and over again. A marketing system is one that has been proven to have good results and an acceptable return on investment. To get there you need to measure and test. Direct mail is usually the easiest of the media types to test; you mail out and measure the response. A few things to keep in mind: To be statistically relevant the test needs to be large enough. A rule of thumb is to mail at least 10,000 pieces, 15,000 is better. Not all new customers will bring in the offer on a direct mail piece; some people don’t like bringing in coupons and some simply forget. Finally, remember that frequency matters. If you can get a reasonable response with a first test, subsequent mailings will only get better. Kurt Post Card Builder

Call Fitness Life Marketing 1-888-541-0714  for help designing a great marketing camapign for your club.

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