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Any club owner will agree that a lot goes into successfully running their business.
For fitness club owners, the list is long and includes everything from managing payments and billing to keeping members engaged and managing staff. With so many different jobs to do, many owners rely on various fitness club management solutions to help keep their businesses organized and running smoothly.
You may have to piece together different software solutions to meet your needs today, but over time using multiple providers can negatively impact your club. Let’s look at how using one interconnected solution benefits your club and what’s at risk if you avoid it.
What is an Interconnected Solution?
An interconnected solution is a set of software tools that connects all of your club processes into one integrated management solution. It reduces redundancies and streamlines your day-to-day by allowing you to manage your members, processes, and data in one system.
While many software providers focus on specific aspects of club management, few solve for a club’s full set of needs. Many solutions are limited to a specific type of job – customer relationship management, scheduling, billing – leaving you to cobble together tools using multiple providers.
What you end up with is a piecemeal solution that ultimately hinders your staff, rather than helps them. Your staff has to work within multiple systems, risking redundancies and driving up your margin for error.
An interconnected solution removes that headache by giving your staff one solution to manage.
How Does Avoiding Integration Impact Your Club?
Piecemeal solutions can get the job done today, but their inefficiencies have long-term consequences for your fitness club.
Inefficiencies Risk Your Member Relationships
To grow your club, you need to focus on acquiring more and more members. Keeping up with the sheer number of new members your club brings in every month is a daunting task. Staying on top of every aspect of their membership is even more difficult, but it’s a crucial part of meeting your members’ needs.
81% of fitness club members expect personalization as a standard of service. It’s hard to offer the level of service they expect if you’re bouncing between software providers to get a full picture of who they are and how they use your club.
You can create one source of truth for your member data by using an interconnected solution to link your lead generation, member engagement, and digital portals in one system.
An interconnected solution allows you to generate leads, follow up, and automate your sales tasks in one place so your members have a better sales experience. Storing their data in one insular platform also decreases the likelihood of a security breach, making your members safer.
With an integrated web portal and native mobile app, your members will have a convenient way to manage all aspects of their accounts. They can pay their monthly bill, sign up for classes, and update their contact information all from one easy-to-use location that updates in real-time. That level of availability and customization goes a long way with members looking for a personalized experience.
Wasted Time Risks Your Revenue
Your management software shouldn’t be a time sink for your staff. Having to sign in to multiple platforms just to get the tools you need for daily tasks compounds their work. Each platform has a different design, different set of rules, and requires onboarding.
The more time your staff spends on learning new platforms, the less time they have to act on opportunities in other areas of your business. Streamlining their tasks with an interconnected solution frees up their time so they can focus on building relationships, promoting programs, and cross-selling.
Establishing one interconnected solution may entail a larger initial investment, but it also serves long-term revenue goals, especially when it comes to payments and billing. Inefficient billing processes leave you open to more failed payments and terminations. 1 in 3 members terminate within 30 days of a decline, so small billing inefficiencies can significantly impact your bottom line.
When your staff is personally responsible for following up on each decline, the potential for human error puts those memberships at higher risk. Using an interconnected solution designed to complement your current operations streamlines your payment processing, making your cash flow more secure.
Stagnant Data Risks Your Growth
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to growing your club. Your members and your club experience are unique. The only way to find what works for your club is to collect performance data and use it to drive your strategy.
Collecting member data is key to running successful marketing campaigns. Without a clear view of who your members are and how they respond to your messaging, you can’t effectively segment your audience and speak to their needs. This leads to vague campaigns that make your members feel like you don’t understand them.
To build a comprehensive picture of who your members are, your engagement efforts and their club behavior should feed into the same software. You can use that information to send them targeted marketing messages, supporting better engagement and overall club growth.
Your software should also support extreme financial visibility if you want to fully understand how your club is performing. Without the most up-to-date performance data, you’ll be slow to react to market changes and will lag behind the competition.
When all of your processes are interconnected, you can generate dynamic financial reports that always reflect the current state of your club. Your software should make it easy to glean those insights at a glance so you can make quicker, smarter decisions.
Article originally published July 2021 and updated February 2023.
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