Birthday recognition engagement - your untapped organic growth lever for your fitness community

There are many approaches to boosting member lifetime value with gestures that create a big impact. However, the art of building lifelong relationships with your customers stems from the little things. Birthday recognition falls in the category of "the little things that go a long way".

Take for example simple birthday recognition wishes. We’re never too old for a birthday celebration; they remind us how far we’ve come and that life is worth living. The social media era has driven the demand for event-based human interaction, including in-person fitness now that Covid has largely passed. Is making birthday-centric events at your studio a way for you to boost organic growth amongst your member base? For every one member who throws a mini-event, can you get them to invite 4 people, thus creating 4+ referral leads?

These small gestures are an expression of appreciation and understanding. They are a growth strategy in customer service. For a fitness business or business focused on helping people cultivate healthy lifestyles, showing care is always a big plus. 

Customers will always be impressed by and remember businesses that know when to celebrate their birthday because this shows that the business cares about each customer from a more personal aspect than just physical care.

Community member birthday recognition: making macro relationships personal

Fitness businesses have to engage with many different customers constantly, so how do you send birthday wishes to each individual on the right day? And how can you ensure that all will work smoothly, accurately, and without confusion? 

An automation setup is the answer.

A successful automation setup will help your community ember see your business as on that goes the extra mile, inevitably establish a lasting relationship with customers, and boost your sales.

How could automation be beneficial in practice? Glad you asked. This form of member appreciation has a few key benefits:

• An automation setup, like automated SMS and email, is part of customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation. It’s a fast, efficient, and inexpensive approach to your customers on their birthdays. 
• Effective approaches like this help to maintain existing customers’ satisfaction and win new customers' trust. In this way, automations save marketing costs while keeping other jobs smooth.
• Businesses enhance brand recognition by adding a personal touch to birthday greetings emails.
• You earn the chance to have your members invite their friends into your community. It's significantly less daunting to join a community when a person already knows someone in it. Think of birthdays as a communication opportunity where you get the gift of community members referring new members.

Custom communications to create member lifetime value

Businesses need a unique branding style to stand out. This might include using colors, fonts, and logos that you want to be associated with your brand. However, the most important branding you can employ is a sense of specialty. Once customers see the difference in how you deliver value, that attention will turn into habitual expectations and company culture.

Helping to celebrate special days or other personal events, birthday recognition for example, shows that your operation is modern and puts the customers first. Sending automated emails to your customers ensures you don't forget and also represents a systematic and professional working process, leading to a positive business image in customers' eyes.

Everyone appreciates being acknowledged, especially on their birthday. You can use client data to create ways to make them feel great. A little digital card with their name attached to a special offering designed for their preferences would be perfect. Think about it: if it makes you happy, it makes your customers happy, and happy customers almost always return.

Connecting a special offer to good wishes and giving your clients something extra is well within the realm of executable marketing ideas. Think about synergies with other businesses, like a free coupon for a dinner in a neighboring business. With their celebratory email; they get a little something extra on any special day.

Birthday recognition email engagement gets results

No matter what you offer, personalization can satisfy your customers, make them happy, and create member lifetime value. This boosts engagement, which is the secret to garnering loyalty among customers. Center your gym's digital marketing strategy around engagement to get better results.

An engaged customer is a brand ambassador. Satisfied customers tend to talk about your business positively to their friends. Thanks to automated processes, your company can now efficiently utilize its limited budgets to create a successful customer experience that generates recommendations.

Making it work with your fitness marketing automation software

Here's how to put think about putting together an automation workflow:

1. Decide on a customer demographic to target: new customers, existing customers, customers who have disengaged, etc.

2. Create an automation using your marketing automation software : quickly explain the steps of building an automation using a list or similar.

3. Monitor the automation for engagement and adjust.

4. Watch for results and opportunities to upsell.

Get inspired; let marketing automation software build specifically for fitness help your business!

Wondering what is the right solution for your business? Look for an end-to-end solution, one that offers a native integration with your booking and billing software. Why is this important? As you build out your revenue-generation engine, you'll want the data from core customer activity, like attendance, payments and scheduling frequency, to be easily transferred into your marketing automation software. Customer activity, or lack thereof and communicating with them appropriately, are the keys to making your investment pay off.

Each customer will receive an email whenever you want them to, as part of the marketing automation system. The message is customized based on the customer's information, such as last name, first name, previous transactions, or favorite items.

While they demonstrate to your clients that you care (and you do), birthday recognition automations like this may also provide you with many insights into their behaviors based on how they interact with your message.

Hapana's CRM will also assist you in finding and interacting with fresh customers. Because many potential consumers use social media, Hapana uses a CRM with a social media integration solution

Social CRM makes reaching out to potential clients and gaining traction easier. Contact Hapana to see how your fitness business can seek this competitive advantage.