When it comes to marketing your club, making marginal improvements is not enough to stay competitive. You can get 5%, 10%, and  15% improvements in what you're doing by doing the same thing, only a little bit better. Meanwhile, some of your competition may be going for improvements in multiples. To attain 100%, 300%, and 500% improvements, you cannot do the same thing better. You have to do something fundamentally different and, in the process, your club will be transformed. One of the biggest opportunities for club owners to make these types of dramatic improvements is to market effectively using the Internet and related database management.
3 Helpful Tips
1.) A Database filled with the names of your members and prospects enable you to gather a wealth of information about each of them.
This information allows you to establish lasting relationships of mutual value. Obtaining this kind of information is one of the best strategies you can initiate. Database management allows you to fax, e-mail, cross-sell products, market profit centers, and create renewal and referral programs.
The goal is to assist in building a prospect profile for each lead by tracking various items such as exercise goals, health concerns, facility interests, objections, and the origin of the lead. It is also designed to provide information for telemarketers (or sales personnel) and mass mailings. It is imperative that all leads from all sources, especially lead boxes, to be logged into a contact management software, creating a database for telemarketing, direct mail campaigns, member parties, re-grand openings, and closeouts.
The Power of Email
 What better way to invite all your no-shows to one of the above events? The Internet provides the communication with e-mail. Its speed and convenience allow businesses to be of better service to their members and themselves. You can mail to multitudes with the ease and simplicity of mailing to one. Although, we are in the Information Age , we are also in the timesaving age, and e-mail has become a way of living in both ages at the same time.
To begin implementing basic database strategies, ask yourself these questions:
- Have I asked all members for their e-mail addresses?
- Have I placed as many lead boxes as possible with the information pad asking for an e-mail address?
- Did I have my web-address on the header?
- If they do not have an e-mail address, how can I help them get one?
- What incentives can I offer to members who supply me with their or a friend's e-mail address (e-mail member newsletters, prizes, vacation get aways, etc.)?
- Do I have a list of member's birth dates, parent's birth dates, mom's anniversary etc.? If mom for a class and it's her anniversary, why is it you don't have a red rose for her?
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2.) Even though the Internet seems to be about machines, it's really about people.
Simply put, the web is where people are learning to look for things they want. As they learned to use the Yellow Pages in the past, they're learning to use the Internet now to search for the best values in the world and in their communities.
For club owners, this represents an incredible opportunity to talk and e-mail to targeted prospects that single themselves out by visiting your website. (Display on Lead Box headers, Ad cards, VIP cards, and every piece of stationary imaginable.)
The Internet allows you to maintain control of your relationships, saves time for you and your members, and increases your ability to educate your members, resulting in less attrition, an increase in referrals, & numbers. It enables you to lower your costs of pleasing members while increasing your productivity. Fostering member satisfaction isn't a sometime event; it's an all-the-time habit, moreover, it apples to every member.
3.) Link, link, and link.
The minute you put out a lead box in your community or go online, you should be looking for opportunities for fusion marketing connecting with others. Fusion marketing describes that phenomenon of joining a frequent flyer program and learning that the airline has connected for marketing purposes with a hotel chain, a car rental firm, and probably a restaurant chain as well.
 Free links, traded links, and e-mailed links can make you marketing partners with business around the corner from you. You should have a lead box in every business in a five-mile radius that will allow you to place it there, with your web address on every header and link with every merchant in your community who is willing to do so.
The web has become so commonplace that your Website and your club can let your membership print a discount coupon to a local merchant with the touch of a button. This in itself will guarantee longevity of your lead box at a local merchant store, and at the same time create local fusion marketing, distinguishing you from your competitors.
Carpe Diem
The Internet and related database management of e-mail and other information are powerful and cost effective marketing tools. So what are you waiting for? Seize the day!
About Jimmy Mack
Go to about Jimmy Mack.
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Email the Next Great Marketing Weapon by Al Valente
Sorry, My Club is Sold Out: The 3R's of Business Development by Mike Chaet
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Tearing Down The Gym Walls by Neal Spruce
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