Unlocking The Potential Of Win-Back Marketing

In the competitive market of the boutique fitness business, attracting new clients is crucial for long-term success, but so is retaining clients. It’s not uncommon for people to drift away for various reasons.

This is where win-back marketing comes into play. 

Win-back marketing refers to the strategies and actions taken by fitpreneurs to re-engage and regain the trust and loyalty of former clients. In this blog post we will explore several win-back marketing strategies and decipher possible pros and cons for each strategy, and then lay out the actions underneath each strategy.

First, what exactly is win-back marketing?

It’s a targeted approach that aims to reignite the interest of lapsed clients who have previously engaged with your business, but have not made a purchase or interacted for a certain period.

By identifying these dormant clients and implementing specific strategies, businesses can reconnect with them and encourage repeat purchases or renewed engagement.

Before we get to specific strategies let’s outline the goals for win-back marketing.

The Goals of Win-Back Marketing

There are several potential advantages to implementing win-back marketing strategies:

Rebuilding Customer Relationships:

The primary advantage of win-back marketing is the opportunity to rebuild relationships with former client. By reaching out to them and addressing their concerns, you have a chance to rectify any issues and demonstrate your commitment to their satisfaction. Learning what went wrong, means adjustments can be made to avoid the same problem in the future.

Cost-Effective: 

There’s an old saying, “It’s cheaper to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones.” Win-back marketing is a cost-effective strategy because you already have a relationship with your disengaged clients. For little or no cost you can launch targeted campaigns using Email and SMS Marketing channels to deliver personalized invitations, offers and promotions designed to win them back.

Gain Customer Insights:

WIn-back marketing campaigns present the perfect opportunity to learn why a client might have left. To know the truth, no matter what the reason, gives you valuable insights about client preferences, overlooked pain points, and any lapses in customer service. In short, the boutique fitness business that understands why a client becomes inactive, can take responsibility for making adjustments to their services that can prevent losing a customer for the same reason in the future.

Competitive advantage:

Actively pursuing win-back strategies can set a fitness studio apart from competitors who focus solely on acquiring new clients. The business that demonstrates a commitment to re-establishing relationships and addressing client concerns, Is the business that creates a competitive advantage for itself in the market.

The Best Win-Back Marketing Strategies for Boutique Fitness Businesses

Win-back marketing strategies are aimed at re-engaging with clients who have stopped using your services. Here are some win-back marketing strategies specifically tailored for a boutique fitness business:

Win-back marketing Via Personalized Email Campaigns:

Send personalized emails to previous customers, addressing them by their names and highlighting the benefits of returning to your fitness business.

These emails can offer:

•  Incentives
• Discounted memberships
• Exclusive classes
• Personalized sessions

The benefits of personalized email campaigns are easy to decipher and include

• Showing your clients that you are thinking about them (who doesn’t love that).
• Bringing your fitness studio to the top of their mind, so that when they have that “I need to get in shape” thought. Your business is the first place they think of.
• Reminds clients of a time when they felt great.
• Shows your clients that they are special!

Win-back marketing Via Personalized Re-engagement Calls:

Identify a segment of previous clients who were once highly engaged or long-term members, and reach out to them with personalized phone calls. Ask them questions that show you care about their fitness and their health.

In this conversation remember to:

• Discuss their fitness goals
• Where they may be succeeding in fitness today. Be sure to congratulate them if they have found a new way to keep moving.
• Ask about any past injuries that might be leading to pain points in the present
• Be frank. Make sure that they didn’t leave because of dissatisfaction with a part of your business, and if you find that they did, let them know that you really appreciate the feedback and will make appropriate changes.
• Be conversational. We all learn to love our clients and the relationship that is built over the years is special and catching up with a client like an old friend will make them feel special too.

This personal touch can make a significant impact and remind them of the positive experiences they had with your business. And If they become long term clients once again they will be sure to increase your average client value

Win-back marketing Via Feedback and Surveys:

Send out surveys to former customers to gather feedback and understand why they stopped using your services.

Use this information to address:

• Address discovered Issues and concerns
• Improve your offerings
• Create new classes or services based on suggestions

This will show former clients that you value their opinions. And it will provide a platform for them to voice their feedback and suggestions directly. If they are able to communicate their dissatisfaction with you then they are less likely to tell the community at large.

Remember, consistency and personalization are key in win-back marketing strategies. Tailor your approach based on your target audience’s preferences, communicate the value you offer, and make it easy for them to return.

Win-back marketing Via Social Media Engagement:

Leverage your social media platforms to influence previous customers.

You can share information about other customers that have returned to your fitness business. This helps the client you want to win-back see themselves in your social media.

These posts can include:

• Share success stories
• Before-and-after transformations
• Testimonials
• You can use TBT and flashback Fridays to highlight the clients you want to win-back

Win-back marketing Via Special Promotions and Offers:

Create special promotions and offers exclusively for returning customers.

You could offer:

• A “Welcome Back” package
• Discounted membership rate for a limited time
• Offer a free welcome back class to individual people

The goal of these offers is to make your clients feel valued and missed, and you show this with your actions by providing an enticing reason to return.

Actions For Successful Win-Back Marketing

Now, let’s examine some of the actions that can be taken if you’ve decided to go ahead with win-back marketing.

1. 1Personalization: Always address a client’s concern or pain point, when you learn of it, by responding to them personally. This demonstrates that you value their individual needs and are committed to rectifying any previous shortcomings.
2. 2Incentives and Benefits: Offer exclusive incentives, discounts or benefits to entice former clients back. Highlight any improvements or new features you have implemented since their departure to showcase your commitment to continuous growth and enhancement.
3. 3Multi-Channel Approach: Utilize various marketing channels to reach out to former clients. This can include personalized emails, a personal phone call or even direct mail.
4. 4Feedback and Customer Support: Provide avenues for clients to voice their concerns or feedback. Promptly address any issues showing your dedication to their satisfaction and resolving any past grievances.

In A Nutshell

Win-back marketing can be a powerful strategy for fitness businesses looking to revitalize relationships with lapsed customers. By implementing personalized and targeted actions, leveraging client data and maintaining a client-centric approach, businesses can increase their chances of successfully reconnecting with lapsed clients, fostering loyalty, and driving growth in the long run.

Local online marketing success in today’s marketplace requires taking responsibility for meeting the requirements necessary to compete against others seeking the same customers. 

One of the very foundations for success for local businesses begins with your Google my business profile. Later on in this article, you’ll find a case study video that demonstrates how to use Google my business data to set a baseline and measure your local online marketing success moving forward.

Gaining new customers from the Internet requires 2 things to happen;

• being found
• being chosen

Tip 1 For Local Online Marketing Success

Local Directory Submission Services

This first tip gives your business a boost in being found. Claim and optimize the top 50+ local listings for your business. The smartest way to do this, is to use a Local Directory Submission Service that programmatically submits to all of the top 50 local listings at once.

This makes it easy to guarantee that a single source of information, your Google my business listing for example, is then duplicated in all locations.

Our local directory submission service is the perfect example.

Doing it yourself Is not a practical choice because it would require the set up, and management of;

• More than 50, directory services
• 5 or more data aggregators
• Connection to more than 80 GPS Mapping accelerators.

Your time is valuable so use the service since getting set up with one only takes about 15 min.

If you’re curious about the state of your online visibility, enter your business name and zip code in this form to get a full report.

Get Found Online!

Enter a Business Name and Zip Code

Tip 2 for Local Online Marketing Success

Cultivate the best online reputation with a focus on Google reviews

This tip supports the “being chosen” part of the equation. For most of this century, online reviews have been a key deciding factor for consumers, looking to make a choice in a competitive marketplace. Businesses are almost never the only provider in the average market. That’s why taking necessary steps to ask your satisfied customers for online reviews is the key.

make your goal having more reviews of the highest score 

To be chosen more often than your competitors, you can’t skip this step. 

The good news is that It’s not difficult to get there.  Once you do get there, you will need to keep your foot on the gas and don’t allow any competitor the opportunity to overtake you!.

You can use services for this, but I recommend not overthinking it. 

Start by taking the link, from your Google my business portal that allows your customer to go right to the place where they start writing their review in a single click. 

Google My Business Makes it easy to get reviews 

Add that to your e-mail signature, and any ongoing e-mail communications that you have with your customers, and in no time at all you’re likely to have the best online reputation in the marketplace.

Tip 3 For Local Online Marketing Success

Impress search engines, with lightning fast web hosting

In 2010 Google confirmed that their search algorithm would start taking speed into account when racking in search results. Here’s a quote from that announcement.

“Like us, our users place a lot of value and speed – that’s why we decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.”

That change focused only computer page load speeds. Google followed up In early 2018 and added mobile page speed as a ranking signal in ttheir mobile search results as well.

speed is king for local online marketing success

You get what you pay for in web hosting. That means that budget web hosting is a big mistake if you want search engines to take your website seriously.

I recently rescued a clients website from really bad hosting at Site5, after their site went down and the engineers at the data center we’re unresponsive in requests for a recovery support.

I had been advising this client for years that they should move, and this was the event that help them finally make the decision. Less than a day later, the site was live and after expressing extreme gratitude, the senior director from the company said to me, 

”Is it possible that our site is 10 times faster than it used to be?” I said, “yes it was hard not to notice wasn’t it!”

Just do it people. Here’s the one I recommend, especially if your website uses WordPress as its content management system.

 WPX.NET

Full disclosure: We are an affiliate, but not just because they give us a small commission. Most of our client sites are hosted there and all but 1 of ours are, including the one you’re on now.

They are the best of the best, with the fastest support in the world.

How to Use Google My Business to Measure Your Success

This is a must watch video, there’s a transcript below if you want to skip around. The case study in this video, does all three things mentioned above, and in less than five months they experienced significant gains in all 7 Measurable categories. Take a look.

The bottom line is that, for local businesses these things always work, no matter what business you’re in.

Below the video and the transcript are 2 more case studies, 1 for a Pilates studio, the other for an Acupuncture practice. 

A Case Study following those 3 tips

00:00:07

One of the most important aspects of digital marketing is developing the ability tomeasure results. That’s truly the key to managing expectations, your own, your teams as well as your clients expectations.

Now, there’s an old saying that you have to know where you started and whereyou want to go if you have any hope of measuring your progress between those two points getting where you want to be. Now for local businesses Google my business insights represent the very front lines of the if, the when and the where people are finding that business when searching for services.

And of course, the point of marketing is o make those numbers go up steadily over time and the only way to know that is to track it. So before doing any marketing at all,  it’s really important to create a record of that baseline that represents where the business was before you did anything.00:00:58

Watch how easy that is to do using Google my business insights.Step one is to log into your Google my business panel and to do that just make sure you’re signed into the Google account you use to manage your Google my business location or locations. Once you do that and you can verify that by hovering over the icon and I see I’m in my business account and now I click on the 9 squares where all the Google apps are all the time. It is 1 stop shopping for anything Google.

00:01:30

So I go in there I scroll down and I look for the my business tent.  It may not be in the same location for you. Sometimes it’s up here sometimes down here, but wherever itis, it’s gonna look exactly like that. Click on that icon.00:01:44And whether you have one location or many locations, the next thing you’re going to do is simply put a checkbox in the location you want the insights for. Watch what happens click and the actions menu comes up. I open the actions menu and I choose insights. I’m gonna just leave it at Discovery insight because I want all the information. So I click next. Now it defaults to 7 days, but I want to do a last year to this year comparison. So for this client, I’m gonna go to customize range and I’m gonna start in January 1 and go through the 14th. And I click.00:02:23Download the report. Now I’m going to go ahead and choose the same period of time from the prior year so I can see the difference for the same, term. So January 1 18 to May the 14th 2018. Change the 8. Oh, yeah, right. I just changed the year. So yes the same term five months ish the year before. I download that report.00:02:49So here’s my downloads folder and the two files we just downloaded.there’s CSV files. Now. I’m gonna really quickly just upload these into Google Drive and convert them to Google Sheets so I can show you what to do with this data in the next step. All right,00:03:04

So here we are in Google Drive. There’s the original CSV files and they’ve been converted into sheets. So I’m just going to get rid of the CSV files real quick. We don’t need those anymore. All right. So now we’re gonna do something real special. We’ve got a spreadsheet that automatically graphs out the percentage of change. So what we’re going to do is open up the first term which is January 1 through 5 14 2018, and I’m just going to copy the values. Just the numbers themselves right there and I’m gonna paste them into the 2018 row. Okay, so there’s a graphic representation of 2018. I go to the 2019 file and I do the same thing.00:03:54Copy and then paste the 2019 numbers and we get our percentages of change. And as we can see this client, I’ll just zoom in a little bit, has significant gains in all 10 data points from the Google my business insights. 00:04:11Here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna download this as a PDF file and I’m gonna have the team very quickly turn that into a case study just check the page breaks and annotate it a little bit so that it’s easier to tell at a glance what this data represents for ach of the data points. That’s only gonna take a minute. So while we’re working on that I’ll just pop over here with you and take a couple of minutes to explain what this client actually did to achieve those gains.00:04:35Believe it or not, there were only 3 things and all of them any business can do without hiring an agency.

Tip 100:04:44They optimized their local directories to make sure that their business was represented in a uniform and consistent way wherever a prospect could possibly find them.

Tip 2

They upgraded their web hosting because their page speed load timeswere way too slow. They went from about three and a half seconds of load time,  meaning, that’s how long you wait to see the page. To a second and a quarter or less depending on the time of the day. That’s critical to the visitor and Google makes note of that as well because their concern is user experience.

Tip 3

So the third thing that they did was they very quickly worked on building an onlinereputation so that they have the best review scores and the highest number of current reviews of any of the competing tree services in their market.

That’s it, those three things produce these results now, I do see the case00:05:35Study is in my folder. So let’s take a look at the data again. Now that you have some context of what they did to achieve them.Okay. So total searches in Google my business insights represents. The number of times customer found the business by searching in Google search or Google Maps up 16.82% Just a year later.

00:05:58Direct searches. That’s the number of times customers found the listing searchingfor the business name or their address in search or Maps. And up 4.82 percent on the heels of their efforts.00:06:12Discovery searches. That is the number of times a customer found the listing bysearching by keyword a product a category or a service in Google search. Up 18.41% heels of their effort.00:06:29Total views represents the number of times the listing was viewed on Google search or Maps. It’s an aggregate of two numbers and that’s up 1.55% for the following year.00:06:41Search views that is the number of times customers found the listing by searching for the business name in search. And that increase is 0.15%. A small amount ofincrease there but still increased nonetheless. 00:06:54Here’s what really matters, the maps views. Local businesses live and die getting into the maps more often. And that’s the number of times that this business was viewed in that 3 pack and that increase for the term is 19.68% almost 20% increase on the heels of those efforts that we talked about.00:07:13So total actions. It’s an aggregate of website visits, directions and calls. Increase for the period is 51.08%. And let’s see website actions share of total actions, increase for the period was 43.66% That’s how many more times people visited the websitefrom that Google listing instead of 536 in 2018, for five months it was 770. There’s where that experience of the increased hosting really made a difference right there. 00:07:48 

Directions, how many people asked for directions from the Google my business listing. It went from 69 to 71. It’s only 2.9% increase but when you think about this business, they come to the customer. People don’t typically go there. They might go there and get some mulch in the back of the truck. But for the most part a tree service goes to the customer, so there’s a gain here, but it’s not significant because it doesn’t really apply to this kind of business.00:08:16Phone call actions. This is the one that makes your mind blow up given the kind of effort that they put in. They went a 118,8% percent increase in the number of calls during the same period a year later 133 calls in 2018 January through April turned into 291 calls the same term the following year.

Additional Case Studies

You are a business owner. You have found the best web designer. He/she has made your page, and when you review the website in the toolbar you see the word blog.

You pause for a moment. You’ve read blogs. You’ve even learned from blogs. But never in your life have you identified as a blogger. You’ve heard that blog posts help the world find your amazing business, but how in the world are you going to think of something to write about on a regular basis? Where are you going to get these ideas? What about time? Who has the time to put together these essays?

I have been there. I own a Pilates studio, and the first time I saw the word blog on our website, I had the same sense of panic. But then I realized something. I loved talking about Pilates, and even more I loved getting geeky about Pilates. If a client asked me about the knee joint, I could go on for hours with fascination about the intricacies of knees. And it only took me a little while for me to understand that this geekiness is what google needed from me to recognize my expertise and authority in the local Pilates market. Time was still a problem. I was teaching pilates after all, but over the course of a year, I found a few formulas to make the writing a little easier:

1

Joints

Pick a joint, describe it’s anatomy, then pick three to five favorite exercises for this joint, and tell your audience why you love them. Then snap a couple of pictures of these exercise and you’ve got yourself a blog post

2

Clients

Case study – You know those wonderful sessions where you feel the magic of Pilates and see your client’s body changing before your very eyes. Document it with your words and a picture and you’ve got a case study blog post.

• What was the goal of the session?
• How did your thinking create a workout?
• What was the result?
• What was the magic?

3

Challenge

Pick a hard Pilates exercise and challenge every client to accomplish this exercise as best they can. Take Pictures, Videos and tell a story for each client’s accomplishment and you have a studio challenge blog post.

4

Lifestyle

We all understand that Pilates will change a person’s lifestyle. We are healthier and happier when moving our bodies. Outline how might one can take the concepts of Pilates to other parts of their lives. Give tips and tricks to bring the magic of Pilates to everything you do

5

Sports

Pick a sport and write about the ways that Pilates will help improve the athlete that plays that sport.  Golf, Horse Back Riding, Skiing, Swimming, Tennis and Dance are all great examples.

6

Anatomy

Pick an exercise and get nerdy. Write about the muscles, bones, and joints involved.  This posts will appeal to the clients who like a deeper understanding

These 6 topic ideas can lead to countless blog posts and these posts will help with the content creation. But if you’re still undecided about the value of blogging to your marketing strategy, take a look at these 7 statistics.

7 Statistics on Why You Should Be Blogging

• Among those who use e-mail marketing, companies that blog get twice as much traffic from their email than those who don’t. (Source: HubSpot)
• Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors. (Source: Simple Marketing Now)
• 82% of marketers who blog get positive ROI. (Source: HubSpot)
• Top three ways bloggers drive traffic to their posts: Social Media Marketing; Search Engine Optimization; Email Marketing. (Source: Orbit Media)
• You have a 434% higher chance of being ranked highly on search engines if you feature a blog as part of your website (Source: Tech Client)​
• Blogs have been rated as the 5th most trusted source for accurate online information. (Source: Searching Engine People)
• 94% of people who share posts do so because they think it might be helpful to others. (Source: Ad Pushup)

Leave your comments below if you found this helpful, and feel free to leave a link to your Pilates blog.

Whether you are just starting out, or you are trying to grow your Pilates studio word of mouth marketing is key.  Waiting for your clients to refer their friends or family is only one way for word of mouth referrals. Read on for more.

Ten years ago I was a Pilates Instructor who worked at a studio.  I had spent my professional life being as nerdy as possible about the human body and functional movement.  I was addicted to continuing education and had developed a strong practice and reputation as an expert Pilates Instructor. Then came the opportunity to buy the studio with my colleague and best friend.  What could be better?

I knew plenty about how to teach Pilates, I didn’t know anything about business.

For example, my business partner and I wrote a business plan in which we used the word “doable” (looking back at that I questioned whether our banker actually read our business plan)…but with some perseverance and a whole lot of googling we eventually became the proud business owners of a pilates studio with a new name and a new website.  AND the first thing we learned as new business owners was that google was listing our website about six pages down…So basically we had just purchased a studio that had a clientele who found the studio via the web, and then changed the website and branding of the studio, which caused the studio to lose all of its google cred…

This led us to a big, “now what??”… 

We had to figure out how else to market the business while we were learning how to help the google algorithms find us.  We had to assess what we had besides our soon to be but not quite yet very effective website that was found on page 6.

Solution 1: use my reputation in the community

I was already known as an excellent Pilates instructor in my community. We quickly learned we could use that reputation to grow referral sources for new business.It is a wonderful thing to learn that your excellent listening skills are a great marketing tool!

Remember

Marketing isn’t about selling your services. It’s about showing potential customers how you can help them.

​

How can you help them transform?

I had a good reputation in the community as a Pilates Instructor because my clients liked me and my work and my work excelled because I was a good listener and observer of the folks I taught.  I was especially good at this part because I was using every tactic I could to avoid talking about myself.

Surprisingly, it just so happens that when you learn the name and goings on of every family member of a client (even if it is only to avoid letting them learn about the goings on in your life), that client might start sending those family members to you when they are in need. The client feels heard and respected, and then says to her friend, “You just have to see this person who helped me.”

Imagine this conversation:

Pilates Instructor: How’s your husband doing these days?

Client: Oh goodness…He is struggling with some intense back pain.  It’s all he talks about.

Pilates Instructor:  hmmm does he sit a lot at work…I wonder if he should find a way to open the front of his hips.

Client:  Wait… do you think you could help him?

Pilates Instructor:  It depends on what’s going on, but often when folks sit at a computer a lot the posture leads to some back pain…

Client:  Do you have gift certificates?

Pilates Instructor: Of course!

While waiting for folks to find us on google we created a great referral incentive for our current clients.

There is space in the pilates session to learn about the families of the clients. I can’t tell you how many times I have delighted clients by knowing the names of their grand kids and remembering the events of those lives.

Solution 2: Creating referral relationships with physicians in my network

​When finding referral partners:

• Find people that see the world similarly to you.
• Make connections, find common ground and develop assets.
• Then offer them a free session.

It’s a slow game with a gigantic return on investment.

I had a friend who happened to be transitioning from ER Medicine to Sports Medicine. We were acquaintances. Then luckily enough there was a two year period where I would walk across the street carrying some anatomy book or another and have lunch at the cafe with what my business partner called my lunch buddies.

Picture a  bustling cafe with a large round table where people are working/eating in parallel with reading material or screens.

On one of these days I looked up and saw this friend that I knew as an ER doc. As we were catching up, I found out that he was becoming a sports medicine doc.  He saw my Anatomy Trains book and we had a geek out session. (Nerds unite to save the world) For the next two years we would end up at the round table once or even twice a week and we built a friendship grounded in collegiality.

When my business partner and I bought the studio I offered my friend a free session. Now 10 years later he is the studio’s largest referral source!

PS  I found our web designer and health insurance agent at the round table too…Never eat lunch alone is real, but it can also happen with parallel lunch at a community table in a cafe.

take away

A friendship that starts over a common interest over lunch is likely to develop into a referral partnership.

Solution 3: Networking at the chamber of commerce

Third, the chamber of commerce is your friend. That’s right, go to the events and every lunch that you can.

The first time My business partner and I went to a chamber arrive at five it was a lesson in awkward small talk…We’d play games. We’d say to each other, “Let’s split up and meet back together with five business cards. This was a little fruitless. At least, I am not sure we did anything with those business cards. But we were determined and we showed up every time.

Then we started making headway. We were building relationships again. We were adding touches to the folks out there. Every person at the chamber knew us as the Pilates gals. We weren’t selling pilates to the folks at the chamber, but we were making sure that we were at the top of mind when a chamber member’s loved one said, “You should try Pilates.”

Remember

It is a basic marketing principle that it takes seven touches before someone will internalize and/or act upon your call to action. 

What can you do to build your Word of Mouth marketing

1. Make lists – Who do you know and how do you know them.  Who are you eating lunch with? What organizations can you be a part of?
2. Learn and Remember the names of your clients friends family, and anything else they talk about.  Keep asking questions!
3. Keep going to the chamber networking events…Don’t sell Pilates but be prepared to answer any question that a person might have about their own body.