Promotion campaigns: enriching the brand, raking in sales and simplifying processes... Can it be?
Promotional campaigns can be difficult to get right. Understanding how your promotion reflects your brand, how measurability is key, and that facilitating a straightforward customer experience and a manageable back end process are essential to your promotion campaign journey.
Don't keep it quiet!
It's all well and good setting up a promotion, but it's futile if nobody knows about it. Campaign Manager means you can shout about it via email and text, whilst upholding your company branding with editable images, colours, fonts and layouts. Campaign Manager also means you have the necessary measurability with metrics such as real-time reporting on deliveries, bounce rates and open rates to help you to understand your recipient's behaviour. Campaign Manager will also schedule your texts and emails in advance, so you can put together your campaign, arrange times and dates for broadcast, and then kick back and watch the results roll in.
Campaign Manager is a free package with the ClubWise system and has proven to be a tool our customers rely upon for smart, effective marketing. Comments from our current users like: "Campaign Manager is essential" and "ClubWise is our communication!" sum it up! You can learn plenty more about the features of Campaign Manager and how it can benefit your business here
(You can also learn more about the best times to send emails and why you should use your SMS marketing power carefully in our last workout).
Simplicity
Make the process simple for your prospects, and for yourself. Can they easily take advantage of a promotion? And can you easily administrate the process behind it? If the answer is no to either one, the balance needs to be addressed.
By simplifying processes for the member, staff and manager, ClubWise provides the freedom to focus on what matters most: your members. Each step of the promotion campaign process is supported, from the setting up, to communicating the offer using campaign manager, to the back end admin and finance management and finally to the measurement of success. Unlike most direct debit collectors, the integration of highly intelligent software enables the two areas to talk to each other seamlessly, and infinitely simplify the process.
Promotion Management
The ClubWise promotion management tool enables clubs to set their offers on membership products and joining fees. Let's take a summer promotion for example, call it "Slim Down for Summer". This promotion will run between the start of June and the end of August and will allow new members to "Take a month off this summer!" and receive a month free membership when they sign up for a 12 month contract. All you need to do is set up a promotion code of your choice, set the time period the offer is valid for and then apply the promotion parameters. These promotion codes can then be used over the counter or when joining online. ClubWise will automatically undertake all of the back office administration for any reduction or elimination to one or more membership products, whether it's monthly Direct Debit fees, joining fees, pro-rata fees or fees for a set period.
Setting up campaigns based on seasons or upcoming events is a great way of engaging your prospects. It's the one thing (besides the club) that your prospects will be able to identify with, and in turn form a friendly impression of your business. Just a few off the top of my head are Halloween (There's nothing scarier than muffin tops!), Christmas (Don't be the turkey this Christmas!), Valentines Day (Fall in Love with Fitness!) ...you get the idea. Seasons, national holidays, big events, are all an excuse to run a themed promotion and to get carried away with the puns! And it couldn't be easier with customisable emails and texts via Campaign Manager.
The Benefits
The beauty of ClubWise is that you can have more than one promotion code attached to any membership product. This means that you can use many advertising channels to promote your "Slim Down for Summer" campaign (email, text, newspaper ads, flyers, social media etc) and attach a different code to the same discount. The benefit of this is Measurability. Thanks to the promotions dashboard, you can a) see how many people have joined using promotion codes and b) which codes they used. This enables you to see where your marketing efforts have been most successful, and amend your tactics accordingly.
Make sure the promotion is right for your business...
Sounds easy, but you need to take into consideration more factors than "Can we afford to reduce this membership or joining fee?".
The first thing to think about is branding. Think about the type of club you run. The kind of promotions you run are effectively an extension of your brand messaging. A budget model club will already be promoting low low prices and simple functionality. However, a high end, elite luxury club will not be focussed on slashing prices to obtain memberships but on exquisite facilities and an appealing atmosphere. Where a reduced monthly DD fee will cut the mustard with the budget club prospects, the motivators for the high-end club prospects will be very different.
There is also the age old debate about joining fees and their correlation with retention. Some say that by having a member pay a joining fee means they are more likely to stay at the club, perhaps because they feel they have more to lose (money-wise) if they don't stick at it. So is this something you want to eliminate completely to make the sale on the day? Food for thought...
If you would like more information on the ClubWise solution, and how it can help you manage your promotions more effectively, we'd love to hear from you! Contact us here