Technology has, over the years, helped make managing all businesses more efficient and in a lot of cases, more profitable. The fitness industry is no different, with a lot of gyms and fitness studios realizing the importance of investing in CRM solutions.
For the uninitiated, CRM is an abbreviation for customer relationship management. CRM tools are designed to help you manage every aspect of your gym’s relationship with its members.
Here’s a detailed guide to CRMs for the fitness industry, so you know why your gym needs a CRM, and what to look for while choosing one.
What is a CRM system?
Simply put, a CRM system of software is a tool that is designed to make the way any business handles its relationship with its customers more efficient. This includes both existing customers as well as prospective customers, making CRMs an invaluable tool for sales and marketing teams as well.
CRMs contain important customer data, including but not limited to, their names, addresses, relationship with your brand, spending habits, and other lifestyle information.
This data can be used for multiple purposes, including communication, creating customer engagement opportunities, sales, retention, and more.
Why do you need a gym CRM?
Do you really need to invest in a gym CRM? Yes, you should, and here are some of the reasons why every fitness studio or gym needs a CRM.
To Keep data organized
CRMs automatically sort and organize data, making it easy for you to go back to customer details, including their last interactions with your gym and their preferences.
For example, if a customer wants to change their workout plan, all you have to do is enter their name and you get to know exactly what their current fitness routine is, what their goals are, and what their billing cycle is like. You’d be better qualified and informed to advise them.
To Communicate easily
One of the keys to great customer engagement is to be able to communicate easily with your gym members.
Whether you want to send them push notifications as payment reminders or even send them your fortnightly newsletter via email, a good CRM will allow you to customize these communications and send them with just the click of a button.
To Increase sales
A good CRM will help boost your revenue by giving you helpful insights into your sales pipeline. You will be able to analyze your sales data from a single dashboard and automate key tasks in your sales process.
The CRM will also help you streamline your entire sales mechanism and define a step-by-step process for your sales team to follow. This organized approach to the way your team handles their pipeline will help increase the number of closures they achieve, increasing your revenue as a result.
Better lead management
A lot of CRMs have a feature called Sales Funnel Visualization, which allows you to track and tweak every step of a customer’s journey, from a lead to a member.
It gives you invaluable insights into key areas, such as which part of the funnel sees the most dropouts, allowing you to analyze the reasons and tweak processes to address these flaws.
Effective customer retention
While new customers may bring in new revenue, the bread and butter are put on your table by your gym’s older customers. This makes customer retention an extremely important but often neglected aspect of running a fitness studio.
Fortunately, a lot of new CRMs give you access to a lot of valuable information to help you retain customers, including customer support automation, sentiment analysis, behavior tracking, and more.
With this information, you can analyze the reasons for gym members dropping out, and in a lot of cases, convince them to reconsider their decision.
Easy categorization
A good CRM will allow you to categorize your members according to preferences and other factors, such as their sex, spending habits, demographic location, age, and fitness goals.
All of this information can help you customize your approach toward communicating with them and building customer engagement.
For example, some customers may prefer to get only email notifications instead of phone messages. A CRM will allow you to create a list based on this preference and make sure these customers get only email communications.
How to choose the right Gym CRM
Now that you know why your gym needs a CRM, let’s make it easier for you to choose one. Here’s what you need to look for while investing in a gym CRM.
Specific to your business vertical
To begin with, don’t invest in a generic CRM solution. There are brands like Bookee that specialize in creating solutions for the fitness industry. Choose a CRM that has been designed with the fitness industry in mind.
Easy to use
Any technology you invest in should be easy for your team to learn, use on a daily basis, and intuitive. Be sure to pick a CRM that doesn’t need a tech wizard to figure it out.
Easy segmentation
The CRM you choose should allow you to tag customers and segregate them based on factors like purchase history, membership profiles, appointments, activity logs, and more. This will allow you to use filters to pull up customer information more quickly.
Lead management
Your gym CRM should allow you to track the life cycle of every lead, including reminders about cold leads, following up on warm leads, changing lead statuses automatically, tracking lead ownership to avoid conflict internally, and avoiding duplication.
Automation
Ideally, your CRM should allow for some level of communication automation. For example, things like database management as well as sending out push notifications and email reminders related to the billing cycle of your members should be automated.
Reporting
Your CRM should be able to generate intelligent reports using all the data it collates. For example, you should be able to track if the amount you’ve spent on marketing is justified by the new revenue generated.
Join the Bookee family and get more than just CRM
There’s a reason why Bookee is among the most complete tools for managing a fitness business. Our features include all the CRM capabilities we’ve discussed and go beyond to include website and app integration, POS capabilities, scheduling, merchandising, and much more.
Book a demo with a Bookee specialist today to see how Bookee can help your fitness studio flourish.
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