As a business owner, your brand website should raise awareness around your services and drive potential members through your studio’s doors. One of the most underrated yet highly effective tools you can utilize on your website is the widget as part of your gym digital marketing strategy. A widget is an icon/application you can add to your site or mobile app that appears in the form of social links, calendars, search fields, contact forms, etc. Widgets provide a wealth of information for your customers and encourage visitors to stay longer on your website. Besides improving the user experience, widgets also help increase the conversion rate of your site. If you aren’t offering your clients a variety of ways to discover your business and services online, you may be missing out on a significant opportunity for growth. Here are a few widgets to consider for your website:
1 - Appointment widget
About 97% of people discover local businesses online. Appointment widgets allow you to display an exhaustive list of your classes/services together in one place, facilitating access to your studio’s offerings. Members can seamlessly view, reserve, and purchase classes all from your website. OneFitStop’s appointment booking feature allows you to easily create, repeat, reschedule (drag and drop), edit or cancel classes or sessions from your calendar. You can even book a client into multiple sessions for a period of time. Additionally, you have the ability to color code sessions to differentiate classes, appointments, instructors or locations. OneFitStop also offers an auto-deduct tool. This allows you to deduct session credits from a client’s membership or package when adding to an appointment, class, or workshop. Easily keep your clients engaged with automated push notifications if they are absent for a specified period. Additionally, you can enable waitlists for full classes, and these will automatically add members to the class when a spot opens. Even better? You can sync your calendar to Outlook, Google, or Apple calendars!
2 - Social media widget
A key component of having an effective website is providing a premium yet seamless experience for your visitors. One of the best ways to get more leads to discover your business is by leveraging your existing website visitors. Encourage your frequent visitors to share your web pages or blog content with their friends, family, co-workers, and peers via social media. Keep in mind, most people usually won’t go out of their way to share your content unless you make it easy for them. That’s where a social media sharing widget like AddThis would prove helpful for your brand. You can connect to more than 200 social networks and all share buttons are mobile-friendly and fully customizable. After you’ve successfully installed your social media widget, your visitors will be able to share your content on social media with just one click. This will help bolster brand awareness and drive more traffic to your website. A share is comparable to a brand endorsement, so make sure the content you’re pushing out is worthy of it.
3 - Chat widget
According to FurstPerson, 77% of customers won’t make a purchase on a website if no live chat option exists. A real-time chat feature is an ideal way to draw visitors back to your website as well. Emarketer reports 63% of customers were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat support. Potential members shopping around for local studios online may need to have their questions answered before committing to your business. If a fitness studios cannot swing a full-time customer service representative or chat assistant, they can opt to deploy a chatbot. In this case, the chatbot can answer most of the frequently asked questions from customers!
4 - Newsletter signup widget
Email marketing is arguably the most important and cost-effective tool for both customer acquisition and retention for your fitness business. However, the truth is over 70% of your website visitors will never return to your website. Womp, womp. But there is hope! You can install a newsletter/subscription pop-up plugin that enables you to automatically collect emails from your website visitors. Ultimately, lead generation is the end game of any robust marketing campaign. Your visitors who sign up for a free class trial or subscribe to your newsletter are prospective members. Therefore, they need to be nurtured through a proper sales funnel. A lead generation widget ensures this task of capturing the information of these prospective members is easy-peasy!By employing quality and informative widgets, you can effectively attract more visitors and improve your conversion rates. Use OneFitStop’s premium studio management software to scale your fitness business. Try us out for free!