Concrete benefits of taking your fitness-business online.

The advantages of taking your fitness-training business online

A fitness business online? You’re right to be skeptical. But hear us out: We’ve got more for you than kooky video-call classes. You see, you don’t have to go all the way online with your business; going part of the way can be immensely powerful. You could keep the classes and the workouts face-to-face while everything else involved in the business gets managed through a  digital platform.

In this way you could:

Easily personalize your customer service 

When you have a digital platform you can use it to manage and register your customers. From there, it isn’t a big step to use the online space to build an admin dashboard, to collect, quantify and manage your customer’s data. What classes are they attending? How often are they coming in? When was the last time you spoke with them personally? 

The platform could expand on that by letting staff attach comments to customers so that it becomes easy to track issues and other observations. Is there something urgent that needs to be tackled or is it somebody’s birthday? Then the platform can alert you and you can take immediate action. Need to send an update/notification to all students? You got it.

As computers are much better with data than we are, we can use the platform to sort it based on your parameters. (Who came in the most recently? Who hasn’t come in for a while? Who has comments marked as important? Who are all attending one of your classes?) In that way you’ll be much better informed and find it much easier to offer personalized customer service. 

Boost customer retention 

A more personalized customer service will immediately boost retention. After all, we all like to feel we matter. But why stop there? As you’re collecting data in a central place, it becomes easier to manage it and spot trends. 

For example, is somebody starting to show up less often and do they seem less engaged? With that information, you can then take action. Maybe a personal message will be enough. Maybe you can make them a special offer. 

This kind of attention means there’s a much greater chance they’ll stick around longer; paying their membership fees as they do.

Streamline and speed up administration 

A digital platform is also a great tool for administration that will let you manage communication, staff responsibilities, classes and a whole lot more from one central location. 

Consider classes. With the right framework, you could schedule classes on the platform, set the teacher and the number of spaces available. Then, with the click of a button, inform everybody who needs to know of the date and time 

You could include a one-click registration system for your registered customers; which would immediately let you know which classes and teachers are more popular so you can schedule more of them. 

You could even turn it into a selling aid by letting potential customers browse available classes but only take part when they’ve registered and paid.

Integrate other services 

Did I mention payment? Oh yes. Because it’s not that hard to integrate payment services right into the platform. This lets customers pay the moment they want to register instead of having to first come to a physical location. That will significantly lower the barrier to entry for your customers.

Other services you could integrate are:

1. Video,
   ‍so people can see what’s going on or even participate from home 
2. A messaging service,
   making communication and admin even faster, and managing all contacts and channels accessible one place
3. Newsletters,
   so that your audience knows what you’re offering and thereby find it easier to participate
   

And really, those are just a few of the opportunities.The truth is, fitness, just like many other businesses you might not traditionally think of, can benefit immensely from going online. 

Would you like to know how your specific company might benefit? Get in touch and we’ll gladly give you some examples.