Get Clients in the Door With Introductory Offers

As a fitness studio owner, you know that the key to a successful business lies in not only gaining clients, but also retaining them. This is why you rely on customers to regularly sign up, pay for, and attend classes via monthly membership fees or through the purchase of class passes. Being truly successful lies not only in getting new clients in the door, but also encouraging them to continue patronizing your studio.

Does that sound daunting? It doesn’t have to be! Successful fitness studios have found that offering special introductory discounts or other similar offers to new clients helps to generate a solid and loyal customer base. Here are some tips on how your business can use introductory offers to win (and keep!) new clients:

Deciding on an Offer: What Should It Be?

Figuring out what exactly your introductory offer should consist of might sound a little tricky. However, if you think about the way that your business works and how it relies on recurring membership packages, you’ll find that it makes perfect sense to offer new clients a special deal on those monthly packages. The best approach that a fitness studio can take is to offer new clients a discount on their first month of membership (or monthly class pass).

One of the primary benefits of offering a discount on the first month of membership is that clients have already signed up with their credit cards and are set up for recurring monthly payments in your WellnessLiving system. This makes it more likely that they will stay on with your studio, and means that you can avoid awkward renewal calls with clients in order to retain them. Setting up those recurring payments at the time the client takes advantage of your introductory offer makes them more likely to commit to your business – and makes the discount well worth your while.

Deciding on an Offer: How Many and for How Long?

You’ll want to make sure that you are only running one introductory offer at a time. Why? If you try to run multiple offers at once, new customers will not only choose the cheapest offer, but it can work to devalue your studio. Another important factor to consider is how frequently you provide discounts. Constantly having special offers available means potential clients won’t have an incentive to sign up – if your membership is always being discounted, why not just sign up at a later time when they’re “sure?”

What’s the problem with that? Well, most people won’t ever get around to it! Scheduling your introductory promotions to occur on an infrequent basis creates a sense of urgency for potential customers and makes it more likely that they will pull the purchase trigger.

Another way to create that sense of urgency is to run your offer for a limited time. If customers know that the offer isn’t going to hang around forever, they won’t want to miss out on a great deal. So how long should that offer run? You want to make sure that you leave clients time to sign up, but not leave them too much time – we recommend between one and two months. Anything more than that and you risk losing that vital sense of urgency that encourages potential clients to take advantage of your deal.

Choosing a Price Point

This can sometimes be the trickiest part. Many studio owners are tempted to offer free classes or packages. After all – people love getting free stuff! Right? While offering free products may work for more traditional business models, the package and membership structuring that a fitness studio relies on doesn’t work well with offering freebies.

Why is this? Offering free classes or packages makes it less likely that people will show up! It’s already too easy to skip on a work out it’s not part of your routine, but when you haven’t invested anything into it monetarily, there’s no consequence for missing at all. Clients are more likely to make a commitment to fitness classes and studio membership if they want to get their money’s worth, and once they’ve developed a routine it’s much easier to keep them coming back.

Offering a certain percentage off for their first month’s membership fee or for a class package makes it more likely you will retain the new clients you gain much more so than offering freebies will. The discount is just to get them in the door so that they can see for themselves the value of your studio.

Get and Keep New Clients

Introductory offers are a great way to introduce your business to new clients and turn them into repeat customers. WellnessLiving can help you create and automate awesome introductory offers that will help you grow your studio and keep clients coming back for more!

If you’re interested in finding more about how WellnessLiving can help streamline your business operations while saving you money every month in unnecessary software and credit card fees, click here to get your free demo or call us at 1-888-668-7728 today.