The Essential Automations You Need to Drive Sales and Retain Clients

Lopez-Summit-1080x675
 

Mike (00:02):

Hey Mateo, how’s it going?

Mateo (00:02):

It’s going well, Mike. How are you?

Mateo (00:05):

I’m good. Oh, you’re texting me. What are your goals for next year? We’re talking right here, right now. You know, you could just ask me, but just so you know, I’m looking to increase my—I just got an email from you. Dude. Hey man, it’s Mateo. Did you enjoy my free marketing course? Have you cloned yourself Mateo or what’s going on here?

Mateo (00:29):

No, actually Mike, those are automated messages. Those are marketing automated messages and I’m actually not doing anything right now. I’m sitting here talking to you on this podcast. Those are me, but not me.

Mike (00:43):

So you’re basically Siri, you basically have a Siri unit that’s like a Mateo unit that just does this stuff in your spare time.

Mateo (00:50):

Yes, yes, I have. I’ve cloned myself.

Mike (00:53):

I bet that saves you a ton of time to do podcasts and other interesting things that you like to do.

Mateo (00:58):

Yes, it saves me tons of time.

Mike (01:00):

  1. And I’m going to guess the gym owners could probably use some automations to save themselves a ton of time and make some money. Have you seen that in your experiences?

Mateo (01:08):

In my worldly travels, yes I have.

Mike (01:13):

And you have time for these travels because you’re using automation.

Mateo (01:15):

Exactly. It’s messaging that goes out while I sleep. It’s amazing.

Mike (01:19):

Well, let’s discuss it. That’s the topic of Two-Brain Radio. I’m Mike Warkentin here with Mateo Lopez, our marketing expert. We’re gonna talk about automations that can save you time, we’ll tell you how to do it, what you need to know, what you need and where you can get them. We’ll be back right after this. To add $5,000 in monthly revenue to your gym, just book a call at twobrainbusiness.com. You can talk to one of our certified mentors and he or she will tell you how to add 5k in recurring monthly revenue. All right, we are back with Mateo Lopez. We’re going to save you a ton of time so you can use your phone for Candy Crush, Fortnite, whatever you enjoy as opposed to constantly texting leads, messaging, leads, emailing, doing all that other stuff. So the first question, I’ll just toss it right at you Mateo. For those who don’t know, what are marketing automations, how do they work? What’s the deal?

Mateo (02:09):

Well, you know, this can get really complicated in terms of the scale at which you’re automating your communications to clients, to your staff, to yourself. But you know, basically, let’s say every time someone inquires for more info on your website, ideally you’re messaging that person, responding very quickly and say, Hey, I saw that you were interested. How can I help you learn more, solve this problem that you’re trying to solve? Marketing automation is just all that messaging is happening automatically. Without you having to actually message every single person who is inquiring about you, your program or your service.

Mike (02:53):

Now we’ve talked before on the show about response time is a huge deal. People don’t want to wait a day. They don’t want to wait 24 hours. They don’t even want to wait 24 minutes. They want responses almost instantaneously. And with the modern consumer, you can make a huge impact just by responding immediately with a text message that pops up right away. As you and I both know, if you’re doing that yourself, it sucks because you’re getting text messages middle of the night, it’s brutal. You’re getting them weird times, you’re just about to go do something important and bing you get a lead and you might drop the ball or you might miss what you were going to do. So marketing automations can then step in and solve a lot of problems for you.

Mateo (03:29):

Yeah, and the other thing too is like not everyone who inquires is, you know, gonna respond right away or is actually, you know, maybe they’re just tire kickers. So you’re also saving yourself some time by not communicating with them personally. To those who aren’t interested, those are just tire kickers. Right? Let the robots do it for you and let them filter out the qualified leads for you. I mean, that’ another huge way that you can save yourself time and more money.

Mike (04:01):

So you mentioned one of the things that these automations do. They filter people out so they, they qualify leads so to speak. Some of the other stuff I’ve got here, in sequences that you can set up, you can nurture leads, you can have people book appointments off of confirmations, and if they cancel, help them rebook or you can use these sequences also to build value and educate. So we’re talking for existing clients. You can use that to sell new services to existing clients or to clients that are on a mailing list that might not know about these services. You could also use them to alert staff of cancellations. So someone’s cancelled a membership. You might have a chance to reach out and save that. So there’s a retention aspect. And then you’ve also got ways to reengage old clients. So I just read a ton of cool stuff that these automations can do. And I’m going to ask you, like when I read that list to you, does it make your eyes light up? Like maybe there’s some ways that you can make some money with all that.

Mateo (04:53):

I mean, yeah, all of that is, if it’s on the prospect side, you know, all, all of those things where you’re giving away value, sending messages out, you know, giving your prospects little nuggets or information that can help them. All that’s gonna work to help you build that know, like, and trust factor. And keep your prospects engaged and eventually if you nurture them enough, they’ll take the next step and buy from you. So that’s huge. And yeah, with your current client base, you’re gonna do a lot of your—a lot of that relationship-building in person, in classes or you know, in their personal training sessions, you’re going to do a lot of that when they’re in the gym. But they’re only in the gym one hour out of the day. Right. So with some of the automated messaging that you can build out and these client nurture campaigns, you can continue to engage with them and offer them feedback, support, info about the gym, info about fitness, info about nutrition automatically, you know, at various intervals, during the week, during the month to keep them engaged and to show that you’re still giving them value even if they’re not in the gym.

Mike (06:19):

Our communication system at the gym, CrossFit 204, was very sophisticated, it was scrawling a note on the upper right hand corner of the whiteboard so that people, when they were looking at the workout and crapping their pants, they would hopefully see that and know that there was wine and WOD going on and we should come and bring a friend. It never worked. We started using email newsletter stuff, email communications. Literally every time we send something to the mailing list, we make money because people actually know, they see the stuff that they didn’t know about and they want to do it. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to come to the wine and WOD before, they just didn’t know about it. So that’s just one personal experience that we’ve had with, and that’s not automated, but at the same time, that is the value of communication where you can automate stuff and keep telling people, for example, Hey, we have nutrition services. A current client might not know that you have nutrition services and you think that, of course everyone knows that, but some don’t. Simply telling your mailing list that you have nutrition services and they’ll help you accomplish your goals will get new clients. So, and that can all be automated.

Mateo (07:18):

Yeah. Or like you sign up a new member, you tell them about nutrition in the beginning and they, they’re not interested in that, they just want to do personal training to start and that’s fine. But then you can send them information periodically about your nutrition program. You can share client stories and success stories with them. Give them some nutrition tips, and you can do that and you can automate that. And over time, you know, you’re just reminding them that this is out there and when they’re ready, they’ll pull the trigger on it, but you’re keeping it front of mind for them, right? So, I mean, yeah, there’s infinite ways in which you can build out nurture campaigns and communication pipelines for your clients. I mean, you can segment it and get as complicated as you want or keep it as simple as you want, right?

Mateo (08:07):

You can segment your lists into new clients, clients in the gym from post 90 days to the year mark. Long-term clients or clients who have bought PT, clients who haven’t bought PT, clients who bought nutrition, clients who haven’t bought nutrition. And then you can do the same thing for your prospects. People who are interested in your front end offer, your six week program. People are interested in personal training. People are interested in your ebook that you gave out on your Instagram a month ago. You know, you can segment this as much as you want and therefore tailor your communication and customize it to these groups as much as you want or you can, you can keep it simple, right? Just a list of people who haven’t bought and who are my prospects and then a list of people have bought and just talk to those two groups of people, you know, according to the information that they need. And that’s fine too. But the more the point there is, you can build this out and make it as big as you want or keep it as simple as you want, but at its core, you do want to communicate with your prospects and your clients regularly. And automation can help you do that.

Mike (09:18):

In the second half of this show coming up in about 10 minutes, we’re going to tell you what we think are the essential sequences that you need to have. So we’ll go through them. We’ll give you some tips for what you want to put in those sequences. We’ll list that out in just a little bit. The first thing, you know, the first thing we’ll talk about is quick refresher. How are we getting leads on onto these lists, right? Give me the quick details of how we’re actually going to get this contact information that’s going to fill out these lists and how we’re going to keep track of how it comes in?

Mateo (09:48):

I guess let’s say you just opened your gym, right? You just opened your gym. Yeah, you probably don’t have to have a very sophisticated automated communication platform, right? But let’s say you open your gym, you’ve got someone who inquires, they’re either finding out about you by Googling local fitness facility in your area. Maybe they saw a post on Facebook, maybe they saw a sponsored post on Facebook, something you put a little bit of money behind. They heard about you somehow they found your website or a landing page of some sort and they’re going to inquire for more info, right? So they’re opting in. And there’s tons of ways you can get people to opt in. You can say, Hey, book an intro. You can say, Hey, download this free guide on, you know, six pack abs in six weeks. Download this coupon for a free InBody scan. There’s tons of ways you can get people to inquire and give and have them give you their contact info, right? But at some point they will, there’s going to be a transaction there. You’re going to offer up something to them. They’re going to want it. So they’ll give you their contact info.

Mike (11:06):

So you need a call to action or a secondary call to action as it’s known. You need something on your site or on a landing page that says, Hey, click this. And when they click that, they have to give you their contact information potentially to get to the next phase where you give away either an ebook or you maybe reveal your prices or they whatever. So they’re trading something for something or they’re giving you their contact information to get to the next step.

Mateo (11:32):

Here’s a cool thing. You want it, give me your info, I’ll send it to you or I’ll send you the details or send you even more the next step.

Mike (11:40):

Yeah. And that can be done in one of those landing page builders that are out there, third party kind of thing. Or you can, if you have the skills and knowledge, you can do it on your own site. But the whole point is that whatever you use, you need to get this contact info from where it comes in into your automated mailing list manager. Correct?

Mateo (11:59):

Right. You need a form. All right. It can be a pop up, it can be on the site, but you need a form where someone can fill out their info, their contact details and then submit it to you right.

Mike (12:10):

Now the system that you use, cause you talked about all these different mailing lists that you can segment and create and so forth, you should be able to see where these contacts, like how they came in, right? Your system needs to be able to tell you what happened?

Mateo (12:21):

So after someone submits the form, that needs to go somewhere, ideally somewhere where you can see it, right? You don’t want it to, and I’ve done this, I’ve built out landing pages or website forums and forgot to connect them to something. And that means that the lead just submitted their info and it went into outer space basically. So you want to make sure that that info is being captured and stored somewhere that you can see it and use it. Right? There are a lot of different CRM out there that can help you do this. We’ll talk about my favorite at the end of the show. But there’s plenty of form builders or CRMs that will take that info, store it somewhere. And yeah, if you’re just starting off, we’re going back to that example.

Mateo (13:18):

If you’re just starting out, you know, if you just opened up your gym, yeah, you could just have a simple Google form on your website, someone puts in their info, it gets sent to your Gmail and then you can email that person, or text them or call them up. If you want to automate it, which is what we’ve been talking about today, you can definitely do that as well, right? So it’s not so manual. You’re not like having to search, OK, someone submitted the form, I have to go find where it’s stored and then I got to pull it up and then I got to call them or message them or text them or email them and hopefully they reply. Right? There’s systems out there, platforms out there that will take that information store for you and then send them the messages that you want to send to them automatically.

Mike (14:05):

Yeah. And there are different systems, like I use, you can trigger some automations just with gym management software, some of them have that ability. And you can even—I’m gonna confess it. I don’t know that it works perfectly, but the software that we use for gym management is supposedly communicating with MailChimp or one of the other platforms that you can use. I think it works, but I’m not a hundred percent confident in that. Then we’ve also got, I use the system that you taught me how to do in your marketing course where I’m using an outside landing page builder. I’m funneling that with Zapier and I’m using Google sheets to keep track of things and so forth and whatnot, and also Acuity. All of that, it totally works. However, I just listed four or five different steps in programs and there’s a cost attached to each one. So when I add them all up, I’m probably looking at, I don’t know, 300, 400 or something like that. And they don’t always play nice.

Mateo (14:54):

Yeah, no, for sure. You can build something yourself from scratch. And I actually have a on a couple of marketing courses I teach people how to do that. You know, you can duct tape something together where you’ll capture info from your site or a landing page, it’ll one, notify you and your staff two, it’ll store it somewhere so you can reference it later when you want to manually follow up and then three it’ll push it into whatever piece of software you’re using to automatically send a newsletter or lead nurture email campaigns or whatever it is. Right? Like you said, MailChimp or whatever it is. Yeah, you can duct tape this stuff together. There’s also all in one solutions, but again, some of those like, you know, some of them are very expensive and complex and maybe they have a lot of capabilities, but maybe you don’t need all those features. You know, something like infusion soft for example, something that’s a really robust and it can do a lot of things for you, but you need to take a separate course or hire someone just to teach you how to use it. There’s costs associated with just the material, you know, software, the tools and there’s costs associated with the time spent to actually learn how to connect them all and put them all together and make it all work and talk to each other.

Mike (16:16):

The end of the show, we’ll give you an idea of something that you can use to make all this happen. But let’s just assume that our listeners have everything figured out. They’ve got the systems in place. We’ll talk about the actual mechanics. We’ll talk about the mailing or the sequences that we want to do, the essentials and we’ll talk about what should go in each one. We’ll do that right after this. Two-Brain Business has created the Growth ToolKit to wealth. Chris Cooper developed this thing. It is based on data. It is literally the stuff the best gyms in the world are doing. No guesswork, just action, results. Your first step is to complete a 12-week sprint where we’re going to build the foundation of your business. Your second step is to work with a mentor to use the Growth ToolKit to build your business and generate tons of momentum.

Mike (16:57):

For more info on that visit twbrainbusiness.com to book a free call with a mentor. Now I’m back with Mateo Lopez marketing expert. We are going to talk about the essential sequences that you need to have for marketing and communication and this stuff. We’ll go through them point by point here. We’ll kind of give you a few tips for each one. These are the ones that we recommend gym owners use because they’re going to warm leads, communicate with clients and they’re going to generate interest and also revenue if you do it right. So the first one I’ll give you is just the simplest one. The goal we have every time someone’s on our website is have them book an appointment. So the first sequence is you need to have something that comes up that encourages people to book an appointment, a call to action button or whatever, they click it. Then you want their contact information and something that your partner John told me is that you want them to have to submit contact before they get to the scheduling page because if they get cold feet and don’t schedule, you might be left empty handed. So to get to that page, they have to enter contact information. When they do book an appointment or when they enter that contact info, what should happen in this appointment booking sequence?

Mateo (18:05):

Yes. So yeah, a lot of people will just have like book an intro and then go straight to the scheduling page or software. I like to gate that stuff. I like to, like you said, have them submit their contact info first and then pick the time afterwards. And the reason is just, yeah, as you said, some people might get cold feet, some people might say, yeah, I’m interested. They get halfway and they’re like, you know what, now I actually have to pick a time. I actually have to pick a day, it’s a big commitment. And then they jump ship. But now at least you have their contact info so you can follow up with them manually or with automations. Right. But let’s say they take the big action step here and they book an appointment.

Mateo (18:50):

You should have appointment reminders. You should have some kind of automated messaging that reminds the person that—or first confirms it. Hey, we got your time booked here. We’ll see you at the gym. This is the address. If you get lost, here’s our phone number, give us a call. And then, you should have messages that follow up with them, basically until they walk into the gym, say, hey, see it’s coming up tomorrow. Really excited to see you. My name is Mike, this is me and my dog. We’ll be waiting for you at the gym. And then, Hey, your appointment’s coming up in a few hours, don’t forget about us cause we haven’t forgotten about you. Things like that, right? It doesn’t have to be massive.

Mateo (19:36):

But, yeah, if you use any kind of appointment booking, scheduling piece of software, most of these have those kinds of reminder things built in. But you want to make sure that you have those reminders going out and it’s a really, yeah, if you’re booking like five appointments and you’re doing it on, you know, your Google calendar and and then you’re having to remind all five of these people manually or without any kind of automation, that can get pretty tedious. So that’s an easy first simple way. Like, let’s automate that. Let’s at least just automate the appointment reminders.

Mike (20:14):

And that’s a short campaign. Generally. Like, we often would try to prevent people from booking an appointment three weeks in advance because they’re probably not going to come. So you would like, you’d want them to book that appointment in the next, you know, even that day would be best. But then three or four days, whatever, send them two or three reminders, confirmation. It’s a short, blunt campaign, just saying, we are just thrilled that you’re coming. Here’s where we’re at, here’s how you contact us. And then just reminder, reminder done. What happens if this person has booked an appointment to the next sequence here is they either cancel or they don’t show up?

Mateo (20:48):

So you want to make sure you note that down. Obviously if you’re sitting there waiting for them and you’re looking at your watch and it’s been five minutes, 10 minutes, yeah, don’t be afraid to call them up. That’s where you do want to take some actual action there and manually message them or call them. But let’s say they don’t show, it’s been 15 minutes. You should be able to notate that somewhere in whatever platform you’re using.

Mateo (21:19):

You should be able to notate that in whatever platform you’re using. And that should trigger some kind of a sequence. It’s like, Hey, sorry we missed you. Sorry you had to take a rain check. Don’t worry. Like you haven’t hurt our feelings that bad. Just like rebook. All you have to do is click here, something like that, and that you can use that same sequence. It only needs to be a couple emails or a couple of text messages long. You can use that same one for if they no-show you right, it’s essentially the same. Or if they cancel, if they cancel or if they no show. It’s a very similar sequence. Like, Hey, yeah, sorry I missed you. Sorry. You can’t make it in today. I’ve got more time tomorrow. Click here to rebook or call me at this number right now and I’ll get you set or whatever it is.

Mike (22:05):

Yeah. This is short, abrupt stuff where like the iron is still hot, so you’re trying to strike pretty fast and hopefully get this person to book because he or she did book and just didn’t come or canceled. So we’re going to try and just poke them, you know, Hey, come, come. We’re still here. We’re still interested. We’re still interested. And then eventually that is going to get shuffled off into another sequence, which we’ll talk about later on because you can’t keep nagging them for that appointment forever, but for two or three days when that iron is still hot, you might want to keep pushing out them and then see what happens and see if you can get that person back. And what you said is great. Like don’t hesitate to pick up the phone and actually call the person yourself if you’ve got, cause you’re sitting there, they missed the appointment anyway.

Mateo (22:43):

Yeah, no, 100%. So let’s say they actually do show up and they’re sitting down in front of you and ideally you’re going to close them, right? Ideally you’re going to sell a membership or sell a package. In rare cases they’ll turn you down, which is fine. We’re trying to get a yes or no at that point. The worst one is a maybe or I got to think about it, right? Ideally you’re getting an answer yes or no, but let’s say they sneak out of there saying, all right, I just gotta check a couple things. I gotta find my credit card or I need to talk with my dog and make sure that he’s OK with it. You know, whatever it is. You should have some kind of post-appointment follow-up.

Mateo (23:36):

That can also be manual, right? You can just say, you know, you can assign this to one of your staff members, you can do it yourself if you’re doing the sale and maybe it’s a cold messages that are going to deal with the most common objections or maybe the most common fears that people have. Something we did was, you know, we’d send a followup email that said, you know, is it worth it? Is it worth the price or something like that. It’s like, we know this is more expensive than your normal gym membership and this is why. And then we kind of, we’d lay down our justification for and explain the value, right. Or it can be like, is CrossFit really scary?

Mateo (24:17):

No, don’t worry. It’s not, it’s safe. Look at all these grandpas doing it and then you use all the crossfit.com photos of old people going to the Games. But yeah, you should have some kind of post-appointment nurture to try and make sure that you get them to actually give you an answer. Either way, whether it’s a yes or no.

Mike (24:36):

And this is again, this is probably, at least early on in the sequences this is more abrupt where you’re just saying, you know, Hey, we talked, you know, do you have questions? Contact me. Can we go over something else? Like what can we do to solve any problems? And then if it trails off a little bit, you get a little bit more detail later on. That’s cool. But again, this sequence isn’t going to go forever, correct?

Mateo (24:58):

No, correct. This is one or two messages just to say, Hey, so what’d you think? You’re ready to make the next step. And so you can do this yourself, but again, it makes life easier if you can click a box on your calendar or their appointment schedule or fill out a post appointment form and then it sends, you have a system that automatically sends those follow-up messages for you.

Mike (25:29):

Alexa, nag my lead. Right. Just make it happen. Let’s talk about another one, let’s talk about an active lead sequence. What is that? Who qualifies as active lead and what do we want to tell this person?

Mateo (25:40):

Yeah, so you kinda, I would say new leads. Or warm leads or hot leads or new leads.

Mateo (25:49):

So these are people who have opted in, who have inquired but who didn’t actually book an appointment. Right? So, that’s the sequence. Yeah, we’re close. And that’s the sequence. Basically the goal of that sequence, the goal of the messaging there, going back to the guy who just opened his gym who doesn’t have any members. Let’s say he’s got someone who opts in or fills out a form on his website. The job of that person is to call, message, text, email that lead as many times as possible in order to get them, make contact with them and then talk to them and get them to actually book an intro. Right? Now if you can automate that, it’s great because you can send as many messages as you as you need to.

Mateo (26:37):

You don’t have to worry about following up manually. I mean you should still follow up manually yourself. I still think I’m getting people on the phone is the best way to build a relationship, get leads to know, like, and trust you. And build rapport. It makes the sale easier. So you should always try and get someone on the phone, and we can talk about how you can automate some of those tasks. But let’s say you’re coaching class cause you just opened your gym and you’re just starting out. If you can have some kind of automation that will send out messages to these new leads right away via email or text, that’s gonna help you a ton because it’s gonna ensure that you’re not letting your leads fall through the cracks.

Mike (27:25):

So this is something like thanks for your interest in our gym. Just want to make sure that, you know you can get ahold of me at any time. We are all about building relationships with people and you can contact me at this email address anytime. I will respond to any email, if you prefer phone or text, I am here. And if you’re a face to face person like me, book an appointment here right now, click this link. You know, we’re talking stuff like that.

Mateo (27:46):

Yeah. Or the messaging can be tailored to the pipeline, right? If they inquired because they opted in for keto cookbook that you had posted on your Instagram, say, Hey, saw you’re interested in the keto cookbook, here it is delivered to your inbox. By the way, what had you interested? And they’re like, Oh, I was interested cause I’m trying to lose weight. Oh really? And then boom, you’ve got the conversation started. Well, OK, what have you tried in the past to lose some weight? How much weight are you trying to lose? Oh, you’ve tried, like all these things, they haven’t worked. Why don’t you come and book an appointment? Talk to me, bet we can solve that problem for you. Right. So that’s kinda how it works. So you can tailor the messaging, you know, to the pipeline to the way in which the lead came into your CRM or however they opted in, whatever their point of entry was, you can customize the messaging to that point of entry. But if they’re just opting in on your site, yeah, the goal there is to get them to book an appointment. So you should say, Hey, saw you’re interested in our gym. This is my phone number is my email. If you’re ready to chat, book an appointment right now. What had you interested? Talk to me about it, what’s going on in your life?

Mike (29:10):

And this thing can go like this active lead campaign, again, these people are close. This thing can go up to like, you know, three weeks kind of thing, right? Like you’re probably going to front load this thing where, you know, they were close, so you want to hit them as, you know, maybe even twice a day for the first couple of days or something like that. But then this thing can go for, you know, 16, 20 days and you start to get into some longer emails at that point where maybe you’re telling them a little bit more about your gym or just trying to build, you know, you’re trying to find something that interests them. So this thing can go for a while, right?

Mateo (29:36):

Yeah, definitely. 100% so yeah, the messaging is going to be a little bit more intense in the beginning cause you’re really trying to get them to book right away. Like you said, strike while the iron is hot. Your chances of qualifying a lead basically decrease exponentially as time goes on past the point of opt in. So yeah, you’re really trying to get them to book as soon as possible. And then yeah, you can continue to message them periodically but then you’re moving to more of like a once a week and then a once a month type of deal.

Mike (30:08):

So let’s talk about that. So that that becomes when they’re, after your active lead thing runs its course, you’re going to dump them in into a long-term nurture sequence and that thing is going to go for, you know, quite some time. It’s probably have a bunch of emails in it. What would you want to put in a longterm nurture sequence?

Mateo (30:23):

Yeah. So you have your new lead sequence, which is what we’ve been talking about. Trying to get them to book. It’s a lot of messages in the first few days there. And then moving to once a week and then after the 30-day mark, you’re really moving them into long term nurture and that’s going to be a message once or twice a month. This can go for a year. I know you’ve written out, for Two-Brain clients, you’ve written out a year’s worth of emails and text messages that go out to these leads. You’re a better copywriter than me, but you definitely want to know things like, hey, been thinking about ya.

Mateo (31:07):

Hey, I miss ya. Here’s a little tip I got for ya about fitness.

Mike (31:11):

I like that idea of that tip. And I like, cause like in the long term nurture thing, I think what you’re kind of trying to do is you’re trying to educate because something stopped this person from coming to see you and you don’t know what it is. You’re kind of just shooting in the dark. But as a gym owner, you probably know some of the stuff and it’s like price, so you haven’t established value. Fear, I’m not fit enough to do functional fitness or CrossFit or it’s, you know, they just don’t understand. It’s like, they think if I walked into a CrossFit gym, I’m automatically going to get massive traps and I don’t want them, will I get bulky all the old school stuff so you can get exactly these different things, right?

Mateo (31:44):

If I weight train, will I get bulky? Is CrossFit dangerous? And you kind of just address the most common objections and fears. But in some kind of like educational bloggy type of email, right type of post. And then if you can engage them with like a quick question for you, you know, what do you think of this idea I’m throwing out at you?

Mike (32:08):

And a big win here is a response. Right? Like if someone reads this, first win is if someone sees your name in the inbox. I think the second win is when someone actually opens it. A third win is a click to anything you’ve linked to a and a fourth win is like a response to you, like saying Hey, thanks for the email. I have another question. And then the fifth big win I think is like if they book an appointment.

Mateo (32:28):

Exactly. Yeah. Like Hey, are you more of a strength trainer or do you like more endurance stuff? Oh, I’ve like been a runner my whole life. Oh really? Did you know that strength training is the best way to make sure you stay injury free when you’re training for a marathon.

Mike (32:45):

Any response here is a huge deal. And like you might not get one for a while but eventually, who knows? Maybe that 270-day email get someone to come to your gym and you know what’s the old adage is that you need like seven or 11 different marketing contacts before people take action. I mean, what you’re doing is adding up those contacts, right?

Mateo (33:08):

Yeah. Consistency is key. Something that I just thought of, my buddy Jack Wheeler over at 360 fitness, he does a lot of lead magnets, a lot of eBooks. And so he’ll deliver those, he’ll do a couple of nurture things and then like a week or two later he’ll be like, Hey, what’d you think of the book? And it gives them time to actually read it or engage with it. Obviously not everyone’s going to engage with those pieces of those little infoproducts, but yeah, the, Oh, like I actually really liked it, or Oh, I didn’t like it. At least they’re responding. Right. And if they’re responding, that gives you a window to start that conversation.

Mike (33:40):

If you didn’t like the keto cookbook, maybe you’ll like the paleo cookbook. I got that too. So let’s talk about this. So those are your long term things, and like that those chickens may come home to roost at some point. You’re not sure. Talk about, let’s go to a new client. So someone, let’s say you close them out.

Mateo (33:59):

Yeah. Let’s say they show up for that appointment. They listened to your reminder, your appointment reminder emails and texts, and they showed up and then you sold them, right? So, those first, really the first two weeks, well, first 90 days, but really the first two weeks, you know, is critical, right? You want to make sure that that person is enjoying their experience at your gym. Joining a new gym can be scary and intimidating. So you wanna make sure they’re enjoying their experience. And you want to make sure that you’re keeping the lines of communication open and you’re engaging them. Like we talked about before, you’re only gonna see them for an hour in class. If they’re first starting out, maybe they’re doing three times a week. So, you know, it’s not a ton of opportunity for you—

Mateo (34:43):

There’s opportunity but not like a ton for you to communicate with them and strengthen that relationship and nurture that new client. So a way to do that is with automated messaging, texting and email saying, Hey, you know, you can do this manually, right? You can have a person on staff, just keep track of where everyone’s at. OK, it’s this person’s first week. I’ll send them a first week, you know, congratulatory email. Oh, it’s this person’s, they’re at the two-week mark. I should ask if they have any questions or if they’re feeling sore or whatever. Like you could do that manually, but it would be way easier and better, but you could automate this and let the robots do it for you.

Mike (35:24):

And then they launch the nuclear missiles and the matrix happens. But we won’t get to that part just yet. We’re saving time now, so forget about that.

Mateo (35:32):

I was on the plane yesterday. I just watched the newest Terminator movie. And it was OK. I understand why it got like, I think like a 62 on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s like, all right, no one hated it, but it was like, yeah, it’s one of those things where it was, you had all the right ingredients. I think you just waited too long to make this reunion thing happen.

Mike (35:56):

And it all started though with Arnold just doing some automated text messaging for a gym and then he became a sentient being and took over the whole thing.

Mateo (36:04):

It did look like he hit the gym for this movie, but the reason I bring this up is they renamed Skynet in this movie. They renamed it, it’s a new timeline. So it’s not Skynet anymore. Sarah Connor’s is talking about it and the person in the future’s like, ah, I don’t know what Skynet is. They call it Legion, where I’m from. And I was just like why rename this to Legion? Why? It doesn’t make any sense. But yeah, before Skynet, you can still automate your text messages. I don’t think we’ll get there in our lifetime. Yeah, I am a little worried about Tik Tok. That stuff I’m pretty sure is just spyware. I’m almost a hundred percent sure it’s spyware. But if you’re scared of Skynet, or Legion, you could manually keep track of all of your new clients and track where their progress and then send them a little love letters and congratulatory emails based on like, you made it through your first class or your seventh class or your 10th class.

Mateo (37:05):

If you’re not scared of Skynet, you could automate it and let the robots do it for you.

Mike (37:10):

Yeah, I embrace the robot overlords wholeheartedly. But like you said, this thing can go for let’s say like 90 days, a hundred days. This is like the prime habit forming time. So we want this person to feel welcome. You want this person to understand, you want to educate and brand, show your mission, your vision, let them know how you can, how they can find help if they need it. You want to solve problems. Like if someone’s going to quit in the first 30 days, you need to find a way to find those problems ahead of time and then fix them. Right? Can’t figure out how to book in for a class. Oh, handy-dandy automation says book in here.

Mateo (37:44):

You use the app to book the class or whatever.

Mike (37:46):

All of it. Workout tracking, bright spots. Classic Two-Brain stuff. Booking goal review sessions. You’re nagging these people to come and see us. Celebrate your bright spots. Let’s book some new goals. Talk about new services that’ll help you get to your goals. So this thing is really like kind of the first indoctrination. It’s almost like a boot camp where it’s like we’re telling you everything you need to know and we’re telling you how much we love you every five days or so for about a hundred days. And we’re making sure you know where everything is, what we’re all about.

Mateo (38:14):

Yeah. 100%. And that’s the other thing too, it’s like, yeah, you can automate, if you know you want people to book an athlete check in every 90 days, you know, you can have that set in the automated timer, because yeah, like I’ve said this a couple of times on here, every month when they get that auto pay email coming up, you know, that’s a point of sale. Like you have to resell them every month. You don’t have to do it in person necessarily. You don’t have to sit them down and do a no sweat every month. But you have to be in some way checking in and making sure people are making progress. And you have to—they’re a flight risk every single one of those months. So you have to always be making sure that you’re delivering an awesome service to them and helping them get results consistently every month.

Mateo (39:07):

But after that first, you know, 90 day period or so where the communication frequency is going to be a little bit higher. It’s gonna be a little bit more intense. You can transition them to a longer term client nurture for the more established clients because they’ve been around, they know, like and trust you a little bit more at this point. You probably don’t need to blow up their inbox every week or so. So you can reduce the frequency, send them a message once or twice a month, but do that for years because hopefully they’re gonna stay for years.

Mike (39:40):

And this stuff, with the established client, this is really where, I mean you have to write this stuff only one time, but it goes out to all your clients and it does establish value where they’re getting communication with you, they are getting things from you information. When I wrote some established clients stuff, I would get into more like topics that people would have an interest in after about three, six, eight months of CrossFit or whatever. So it’s like when they come in, they just need to know where the bathroom is and where they put their bag. Right. After three or six months, they’ve probably got supplement questions, nutrition questions, knee sleeves questions, wrist wraps, Oh, should I do a squat program? All the more technical stuff.

Mateo (40:17):

Yeah. Or like I’ve been doing three times a week. Should I start doing four or five? And like, you know, you can start talking about those things and talking about them so that when they do book that athlete check in with you, they’re already starting to think about it. They already know a little bit of the context that they need to start making those decisions with you.

Mike (40:33):

Yeah, new services can could definitely go in there. If someone just signs up for a group, maybe they want some personal training in addition, nutrition services. You can start educating someone when they come in and let’s say they just came in to you know, to work out, now you start telling them how nutrition is the second half of that equation, they’re going to get better results because if they do this, Hey we have a nutrition service and so on and so forth. When they come to that goal review session, which you are asking them to book every 90 days or so, they know about your services, they at least understand that you do offer nutrition and then you have a chance, you’re essentially warming leads for resale essentially.

Mateo (41:10):

100% exactly right.

Mike (41:12):

Yeah, and this thing can go on for, you know, I think the one that I wrote was, I don’t know, 500 or 600 days or something like that. Like it goes on for quite some time. And the goal of course is retention forever, after probably, you know, two years, you probably don’t need to write, you know, your 10-year email. There’s probably a small investment on that. You’re probably looking at more personal contact after that. But an established client sequence can go for about two years, something like that. And you’re talking like every 30 days or something like that. So they’re always getting contact from you, but not to the point of spam and annoyance. Let’s talk about this one. Despite all your best efforts, you’ve done all this cool stuff. You’ve said all these things, someone cancels. What automation do we want there? How do we want that one to roll?

Mateo (41:55):

Yeah. So, like you said, ideally we want everyone to stay forever, but not everyone will, right? Some people are gonna cancel for whatever reason. So what we like to do as a best practice is we want them to fill out a cancellation form first. Especially if you’re a business is a little bit larger. Maybe you have an admin or a customer service rep or a CSM. You know, maybe you’re not reading every email that comes in your inbox anymore for the gym. So, someone requests like, Hey, I think I want to cancel my membership. It goes to your admin. The admin can then send them a cancellation form, right? And the cancellation form will then prompt the member to provide a little bit more about info about like, you know, the reason for canceling, if they were satisfied with the service or not or whatever it was.

Mateo (42:52):

Now ideally you have some kind of automation that then pings you, the gym owner or your coach or your one of your senior coaches, says, Hey, this person just filled out the cancellation form. That gives you an opportunity to intercept them. Schedule an exit interview if possible. And then you know, you have an opportunity there to see if you can get them to stay or if not, make sure that you two are leaving amicably and satisfied and say, Hey, look, I know you’re leaving. I know you’re moving. Would you mind still leaving us a good review or whatever it is, right. You have an opportunity there to get some closure. So make sure that they’re leaving satisfied, right?

Mike (43:33):

Yeah. So this is like a very short sequence. It involves like a notification to staff and probably email the client that asks them to either come in or reminds them of the different things that they’re missing, but very warm and friendly. Obviously leaving the door open for a re-engagement, which is the next and the last thing that we’re going to talk about here, let’s talk about this person has now canceled. You’ve tried your best to save him or her. Couldn’t, but now you still have contact information and a long term established relationship. So now how do we try to get this person back with automation?

Mateo (44:05):

Yeah. This is another one where you want to keep the information or the communication constant but you don’t want to blow up their inbox. Right? But you want to keep it constant. And this is one where yeah, you should have something that lasts years for this thing. You know, you should have I guess whatever 12 times five is you want to have as at least that many emails set up and on timers and ready to go out to these people.

Mike (44:37):

  1. So, in this reactivation sequence, there is an email that we use that has probably drawn in more old clients than any other and Two-Brain gyms across the world have used this thing and it almost always brings back old clients. It is a 10 word email, super simple. We’ll give it to you right here in Mateo. What is the 10 word email that brings clients back in?

Mateo (45:00):

I think it’s, Hey Mike, would you still like to get fit this year? Something like that. I think that might be nine words. That’s it. But would you still like to get fit this year? I think that’s only nine, but I think there’s a 10th one somewhere floating around there.

Mike (45:18):

Yeah. Well we’ll call it the nine or 10 word email. But either way, the point behind this is that people send this thing out and it often goes out in January when people are kind of more prone to start a fitness program. But we’ve seen gym owners send this thing out and it works. And it’s super simple. It doesn’t have to be this lengthy, endless thing. That email generally gets clients to respond. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they just start talking and you can then find out what they need. But that email has 100% been effective across the Two-Brain communities. So if you want to try that with your clients, I’d highly encourage it.

Mateo (45:55):

But that’s the idea. You’re messaging them periodically post cancellation and then you insert that question right a few months after. And then you nurture them some more. Give them some more tips or just info about what’s going on at the gym. Cool events that you may have put on, cool programs you may have added. And then again, you ask another question. It’s a spin on that 10 word email. You know, would you like to get fit this year? You know, how’s it going with your fitness or how’s it going with this goal or that goal? It’s a spin off that question, but that’s the same basic idea. It’s like, Hey, since you left, how’s it been going over there?

Mike (46:44):

The thing I like about it is that it sounds so legitimate. Like it sounds like it was written by a person. You open it up, you have two options. You either respond or you ignore it. Those are the only two things you can do. There’s no like endless reading or different, you know, confusion. It’s like a pointed direct question that sounds like it was asked by a real person. And I think that’s why it gets a good response. Like you said, some of the other stuff that you can do and some of the sequences that I’ve written, I’ve sent people workouts and said, Hey, you know, I know you’re not the gym right now, but I want to make sure that you’re still, you know, doing stuff. Here’s our link to our travel workouts page. Here are five workouts and if you want a personal one, email me back and I’ll give you a personal one, you know, on whatever you need to do today.

Mike (47:24):

I’ve done things where I’ll send them, you know, cool videos or interesting things. Hey, have you seen this cool video on YouTube about this fitness thing? Just try to do anything to get them to, you know, remember that you’re around, remember that you’re kind of fun and interesting and maybe get them to respond. So that’s kind of the goal there. And again, you’re looking at, you have an established relationship with these people, so you can definitely run the sequence, but I’d advise you, you know, reach out with some personal details from time to time. There’s no reason you can’t, you know, shut down Skynet for a little bit and just call these people and say, Hey, I was just thinking about you the other day I was looking at our PR log and I saw you had a 400-pound deadlift in March of 2019.

Mike (48:07):

What’s your deadlift at right now? Just checking in. Something like that. Maybe it works. I don’t know.

Mateo (48:11):

I think that’s awesome. I think that’s great, Mike. I’m going to do that. Yeah, that was amazing.

Mike (48:20):

So that’s the whole thing there is we’ve got lots of different sequences and so you’re collecting contact info from either leads or clients. You’re going to use your sequences, you only have build them once. They can be, I’m not going to lie to you. It’s a lot of work. I think some of the ones that I wrote recently topped out at I think what, 90 pages of writing and about 23,000 words for all this stuff that we’re doing that filled all these different categories. It was ton of work. And then on top of that you have to build all the different, you know, triggers and automations and all the systems connect, everything test to make sure it works. It can be done, but it could also be tiresome. Mateo, tell me about the solution that exists if people don’t feel like building all this stuff themselves.

Mateo (49:00):

Yeah. If you don’t want to buy a bunch of different logins for, you know, editing your website, editing the forms on your website, your landing page builder, some kind of thing that can connect your landing pages or your forms or your site to your Facebook ads or rather your CRM, right, your newsletter software. And then also a different login for your appointment scheduling. If you don’t want to do all of that, deal with all the logins and the deal with setting up all those different platforms and make sure they talk together and paying for all those subscriptions, my favorite platform and solution for marketing automation is Gym Lead Machine. That’s my favorite one.

Mike (49:48):

So tell me, Mateo, what is Gym Lead Machine?

Mateo (49:55):

Since you asked, now that we’ve brought it up, so Gym Lead Machine is actually a company that I am a part of and we’re a website and EMR, marketing automation all in one solution basically, geared towards Two-Brain clients. So not only will we host and design and build your website, but also we’ll make sure that the forms on your website are connected and talk to and seamlessly capture client inquiries and booked appointments and push them to a dashboard where you can track all of your leads and send all of your messaging from all in one place. It comes prebuilt with all the automated sequences that we just talked about. And includes in those sequences, like the actual emails and the texts, the messaging, all that stuff, we worked with you to create, isn’t that right Mike?

Mike (50:54):

Yeah, I did write, like I said, it was 90 pages or 23,000 words of stuff there. So all the sequences that we just mentioned, I did write those things and they are going into the Gym Lead Machine sequences to be triggered. And let’s be honest, the real reason here is like you, you worked in gyms for a long time. I worked in gyms for a long time. We’ve dealt with all these different systems and things that it’s a ton of work. Like I can write this stuff cause I’m a writer and you can build this stuff cause you’re a marketing guy. But for the gym owner who maybe doesn’t want to do that stuff, there needs to be a solution. And the other thing is that your product is going to be cost saving. Am I right? I mean we’re looking at, all the different platforms that I need to buy to connect all this stuff, what is the average client gonna save at Gym Lead Machine?

Mateo (51:41):

Yeah, I mean, typically if you pay someone to build a website, you know, it’s going to be at least, you know, could be as expensive as two grand, right? Just to build the thing. Or if you’re doing like a payment plan, right? You have a monthly payment over the course of five years to pay that down. Maybe it’s like 200 bucks a month just to host your site and pay down the developer who designed it for you and set it up right? And then you’ve got whatever your CRM is, let’s say, even if it’s MailChimp, right? That’s still expensive. A lot of those are more expensive. Other ones out there, some of them are more, have more of a niche solution for gym owners are even more expensive for automated nurturing and messaging for leads and for clients. And then on top of that, you got to pay for your scheduler.

Mateo (52:24):

And a lot of times it’s either Acuity schedule, once, whatever it is, and then you’ve got to pay for way connect everything. And if you’re paying for a separate landing page builder, like lead pages or Instapage or click funnels, you know, that that can, that can add up.

Mike (52:39):

It’s $100 just for the landing pages usually.

Mateo (52:41):

Yeah, exactly. Some of those landing page builders are just a hundred bucks by itself. So yeah, this is something where we wanted to have a solution where all of these problems are solved and we can save people, you know, in some cases close to five grand a year in just software and services, fees and subscriptions for all these different pieces of software that you need just to market to your clients.

Mike (53:11):

Now that said, we did give away all the secrets already. So if you are so inclined, you can listen to this podcast and write all that stuff.

Mateo (53:17):

You could write it out, you can build it out. You can go in and add each email template to a sequence and set the timer. You can definitely do it yourself, but this will save you, you know, hundreds of hours of work there.

Mike (53:30):

The secret sauce is left on the table for you. But if you’d prefer to have it served to you and automated with our version of Gym Lead Machine Skynet, we can make that happen for you. Where can people check out more about this if they are so inclined?

Mateo (53:45):

Yeah, go to gymleadmachine.com. Check out the demo video. I’m in there. You’ll see my face popping around and then book a time to talk to us and you can learn more and we’ll show you what it’s all about.

Mike (53:57):

Excellent. This is Two-Brain Radio. Please remember to subscribe. If you have a comment or rating, that would be awesome if you guys would leave that for us. We would love to hear that. I’m Mike Warkentin, I’m you’re media expert with Mateo Lopez, he’s your marketing expert. Two-Brain Radio publishes three times a week. Chris Cooper is around on Thursdays with the best of the business world. Sean Woodland is around on Wednesdays with the best of the fitness community. If you’re a gym owner who needs some help growing your business, Two-Brain mentors can show you the exact steps to add 5k in monthly recurring revenue. Book a call on twobrainbusiness.com to find out more. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time on Two-Brain Radio.

Thanks for listening!

Thanks for listening! Run a Profitable Gym airs twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. Be sure to subscribe for tips, tactics and insight from Chris Coooper, as well as interviews with the world’s top gym owners.

To share your thoughts:

To help out the show:

  • Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help, and we read each one.
  • Subscribe on iTunes.
Like
Tweet

Leave a Reply

One more thing!

Did you know gym owners can earn $100,000 a year with no more than 150 clients? We wrote a guide showing you exactly how.