How Data Driven Marketing Can Benefit Your Studio or Fitness Business

We are all familiar with the benefits of mass email or SMS marketing, but how do we efficiently send personalised messages to clients? Say for instance you are trying to only reach customers that have not been in the studio for 30 days. How could you manage that on a day to day basis? Would you update your email marketing every day with your booking tool? When would you find time to do that on top of all the other personalised messages like birthdays, new signups, student enrollment anniversaries, customer loyalty or performance incentives?

Data driven marketing has evolved into a strategy for optimising interactions based on customer data. It makes use of customer information to predict their needs, desires, and future behaviours. Such knowledge helps studios develop tailored marketing strategies that maximise return on investment (ROI), customer retention and even increases chances of acquisition. In this blog we will dive into data driven marketing and show you how your booking and management system can help with both retention and acquisition to drive up your members and market knowledge!

Data is the most reliable tool in a studio as it is based on past behaviour that has already occurred, in that it allows studios to create a holistic view on all of their clients, this is why studios are increasing their use of customer relationship management (CRM) practices. CRM is an integral tool as it synchronises your business processes by collecting and managing data from multiple sources on all of your clients, this cuts down your admin time and allows for studios to interact with their customers in a timely and costly manner with the most relevant message. Many studios have CRMs that are also their booking or reservation tool or mixture of multiple softwares that work together. This concerted effort is all in hopes of achieving the best possible relationship with your current members as we know that it is cheaper to retain then to acquire members.

So, how can it drive up customers?

Becoming familiar with your customer base

A CRM system gives studios insight on their clients relevant details such as previous consumption patterns, demographics and other important information. This allows you to centralise your customer data so that all the information you may need is at your disposal. Studios can start to predict their expectations, future purchases/wants of a customer or a group of customers based on their consumption patterns in the past. The more data you have, the more accurate your predictions will get as you will get to understand the decision-making process your customers take before making purchases. In this sense data driven marketing is dynamic as studios can use it to adapt their marketing, managing, sales and even customer service approaches to better suit their customers with the knowledge they have retrieved through it. For example, your marketing department is able to identify specific content that will attract customers most and your sales department can approach clients with better knowledge of how to convert them into recurring customers!.

Segment and Target customers

Once you have collected the information through the booking and management tools, you are then able to start to group customers based on common data characteristics. Segmenting customers allows for more targeted approaches and interactions that are consistent and relevant to the customers. Companies can allocate specific resources to a segmented group of customers which can give potential of cross/up-selling, for example, A group of customers that are running out of credits in their passes can be targeted with a renewal email that could even contain a discount!. Besides that you can learn which means of communication will suit each segmented group better and will receive the most interaction.

Build customer engagement

When you have the components above set up, you can start interacting more with your customers to build long lasting relationships with them. By understanding and segmenting your clients you have arranged in your CRM framework, you can approach them with targeted content. This will allow for messages that resonate most with a specific group to reach them, which will prompt greater commitment. This can improve your chances of conversion from a pre-sale to a sale. Incorporating a more engaging experience can build your customer loyalty and you can then start to source out and improve your acquisition practices by using the knowledge that you have gained from your current customer base!

Employing CRM strategies through the use of data driven marketing has proven to be a game changer for many studios, if you have not already, experiment with our solution as it could be the key differentiator in your business’s performance!