Welcome to The Experience Series! We are here to give the health and wellness industry a platform to learn and share strategies for member experience. In this fifth episode, we’ll be discussing how:  

• Optimizing your customer experience is key to performance
• You need SEM, SEO, and comprehensive customer data to understand your business
• Whoever can get leads into the funnel is going to win

• Customers need a full 360 digital experience
• Delivering a full customer experience drives more leads
• Hyper targeting your media dollars optimizes your marketing  

Episode Transcription

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Nick Thornton: Hello, Daron. Hello, Nick. I’m so excited to start the podcast again today and do episode five. Daron, I guess we have to spend a little more time together, which is fun every few weeks. But more importantly, I have a little competition on the call today. We have another Nick joining us on the call today. I’m just really excited to introduce him to us.  

Nick, I’d love for you to share a little bit. He is the vice president of our digital agency here at our parent company. I really think he brings a lot of value, and I’d love for you, Nick, to introduce yourself to our audience.

Nick Lindauer: Thank you, Nick, for that introduction. I’ve been thoroughly confused when we’re on meetings together with too many Nicks in the room. Poor Daron today, but he’ll get through it.

Yeah, so I’ve joined Daxko just recently in the last three months. I’m excited to be part of this company, and I’m really excited to be working in the health and fitness category. I do have 20 years of experience in digital marketing. I’ve been in the space for quite some time, and I love helping clients and problem solving in the digital space.

Daron Allen: Well, beautiful. I’m going to call you Mr. Nick Lindauer if that’s all right. And I’ll call the other guy Thornton today, just so you know. I guess if I get confused at all, I’ll just say Nick and somebody answer. It should be pretty easy today, right?  

Optimizing Your Customer Experience is Key to Performance

Daron Allen: Well, Nick Lindauer [we’re] really excited to have you on our podcast today. We’re talking obviously about digital. We’re talking about driving people, getting them excited and interested.

So, one of my questions for you is: when you wake up every day, what is it that you’re thinking about when you wake up? What gets you going and gets you fired up and engaged in the day?  

Nick Lindauer: Well, those that know me know that I get up really, really early. When I get up early, I’m thinking about optimization. How can I improve my day? [How can I] improve what I’m doing today and what I’m delivering? Then, I usually start firing off email. After a run, I’ll stop and have a great thought.  

It started when I was a kid. I was obsessed with optimization. Now being in the digital space, optimization is the perfect marriage because every step of the way we’re working with our clients to optimize the customer experience from when they see the ad to the full [journey]. As we’re going through your digital registration, [we’re thinking about] how we’re getting them in the door at each of the facilities.

That optimization of that experience is key to performance. That’s what gets me going every day. How can we constantly improve?

Daron Allen: Well, that’s amazing. I love to hear that because obviously part of what we’re attempting to do throughout our entire company is create magic [and] create customer delight. For you to wake up every day and be thinking about how [you’re] going to optimize the solutions for our customers and for the clubs, that’s really exciting.

You Need SEM, SEO, and Comprehensive Customer Data to Understand Your Business

Daron Allen: Tell us just a little bit about the vision for agency [or] the goals of agency. What [is it] that you’re doing to drive outcomes for the clubs?

Nick Lindauer: So, coming into the agency, [it’s] been around for quite some time. Our goal is to deliver leads for clients and deliver a complete customer experience. We want leads coming in the top of the funnel, and then we want to help assist the client all the way through the funnel to make sure that customer experience each step of the way is as optimized as completely possible.

We can build a website. Every single landing page will help the ads. From the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, we want to help with the conversion.

Nick Thornton: You know, it’s interesting you bring that up, Nick. I know in our last few episodes [while] thinking through the stuff we talked about with Crunch and the other brands, it’s interesting [that] the digital space is so competitive.

I think oftentimes we think about the competition of agency as more of competing with other club groups, [when in] reality it’s competing with all the toher advertisements from every possible company in the world now in that space.

When you look at that and you talk about bringing leads and bringing more members, what are the things that you all really focus on to make sure that they’re really elevating a club’s online presence to the top of the queue?  

Nick Lindauer: Our specialties right now are in the SEM and SEO space. SEM is very particular. We can hyper target where we’re spending those advertising dollars and where we’re targeting the users.  

So, to be very particular in the club space, you’re probably only looking at a certain drive time. So, we’ll focus those media dollars on customers that are within that drive time or interested in that area so that you’re not wasting dollars. That’s an easy win that most clients don’t even start with. That’s a great way to improve your media performance right from the start.

Nick Thornton: Yeah, it was interesting at IHRSA this last year. I was talking to a group and I was pretty shocked based on the size of the club how much money they were spending.

They even told me they weren’t getting any outcomes from those [efforts]. They were getting [something] like 30 leads, but their spend was [high]. I won’t even tell you what it was, but it was multiple thousands of dollars. What was interesting is I found out they had somebody in the club that knew a little bit about digital [who] said, “I’ll do it!”

When you’re working with groups like that, what really distinguishes getting with a digital agency like yourself [which] drives that kind of outcome forward?

Nick Lindauer: I was actually just looking at a review today that another agency did, and— not to knock them—they had great overall umbrella insights.

But the difference that we deliver as an agency —[when you’re] working with Club Automation or working with Daxko — is we have access to the full customer journey. We can get in there and really help optimize that entire experience, not just the front end. So, an outside agency may only have access to that front end data and not really understand your entire business.

We’re very fortunate. That’s why I love the position that we’re in as an agency. We have access to that entire customer data experience, and nobody else does. That’s a huge win for our customers because we’re not an outside agency just looking and pointing and saying, “Hey, [you’re] responsible for it.” We know the person that’s responsible for it and we can go help fix it.  

Whoever Can Get Leads into the Funnel is Going to Win

Daron Allen: That’s amazing. I’m really excited, Nick, about this opportunity because I’ve been saying for many years that [whoever] generates and gets the leads is going to win, right? Whoever can get leads into the funnel is going to win.

Now that we have this 360-degree view, it’s not only getting them into the funnel. Now, like you said, if you have all this data as soon as they become a former member, especially in the environment we’re in today, it really completes that entire life cycle.  

[If they’re] a former member, we’re communicating. It’s not just the journey of lead to member to engagement. It’s now: they leave, they take a break, whatever it is. True 360-degree communication.

Nick Lindauer: Yeah, exactly. That’s why I’m very excited [about] working with VFP and the whole CRM experience. We can add creative that we’re showing on the front end all the way through the whole experience of the CRM, [including] what they’re seeing through every offer that’s happening on a monthly basis.

[We can] make sure that’s seamless. So, the experience that the customer sees from Facebook to Instagram to Google is the same thing they experience when they hit the website. It’s the same thing they experience when they walk through the door. It’s got to be seamless [because] that’s what customers expect a hundred percent of the time.  

Customers Need a Full 360 Digital Experience

Nick Thornton: Yeah, [that touches on] one of the things, Nick, that I started saying. You’re more of a digital expert, so I’d love your insights here, but I’ve really kept saying that the front door of a club is no longer their physical front door. It is their webpage. It is their digital—I don’t even know what you would call it— but their digital experience is their front door.

Does that resonate with you or would you even expand on that?  

Nick Lindauer: I would expand that for sure. It used to be the homepage, but now it’s your Facebook page. It’s your Instagram. How many Instagram followers do you have? It’s your Google reviews. It’s the full 360 digital experience.

You can’t tell where that customer’s either first going to interact with you or where they’re going to make the decision to convert and actually give you their information [to] become a lead. So, you have to have all of those channels working together because you have multiple front doors at this point in time.  

Nick Thornton: Yeah, it’s an interesting thing. It’s like all these different avenues seeking a thing. [It’s] the outcome that gets down to them actually walking through the physical door, but they may have interacted to your point 10, 12, or 13 times through other media before they even got there.

And Daron, what’s cool is VFP. I mean, how do you draw those different media points into a system that allows you as a club to actually manage that input?  

Daron Allen: Yeah, we have the ability with VFP obviously to trigger communication from any place anywhere within the ecosystem that lead comes in.

But I want to circle back to something Nick Lindauer said that I think the audience really needs to key in on, right? For so long I think our industry has talked about the word conversion or getting a conversion as a lead to becoming a member. That’s conversion. And Nick, you changed the thought. You changed the perspective.

Now the game is “How do I get a conversion to actually having a lead?” So, you are doing everything you can to entice, to engage, to drive engagement, to get people to come back, to know where they’re coming from, and then to actually get that information. That’s the initial conversion. That’s why what you’re doing is going to help win the game. There’s no question in my mind.  

Nick Lindauer: Yeah, it’s not about the impression. It’s not about the click. It’s not about the first interaction. It’s about getting them all the way through the funnel to a sale. You have to close the sale because that’s where the dollars pay off. You can spend a bunch of money driving clicks on a bunch of traffic, but if it doesn’t pay off and you’re not proving in performance, you have no business plan in the space.

Daron Allen: In the VFP world and in the club sales world, we always talk about this, especially when we have new clubs come in. We’ve got a data import or [clubs will say], “Hey, we had all these leads.” [We’ll say], “Look, if you don’t have a name and an email or a legitimate cell phone, that’s not a lead.”

If you can’t contact them, it’s not a lead. If you don’t know their name, it’s not really a lead. So you’re driving and filling that funnel, which is step one in winning.  

Nick Thornton: Also Daron, to our point, oftentimes it was getting that cell phone and email. Now a lot of groups just want to go straight from a Facebook page to signing up for membership.

Figuring out those different channels and actually executing them all efficiently has really been a challenge in the industry.

Delivering a Full Customer Experience Drives More Leads

Nick Thornton: So, Nick, to kind of bring us to some level of conclusion here, we’ve asked a question of everyone that’s been on this podcast with us. Daron and I are constantly talking about it.  

It’s this idea of a member experience or The Experience. When I say those words, (and I know we’ve talked about this) what does that mean to you? If you were to maybe consolidate that into a simplistic statement.

Nick Lindauer: I mean, we’ve hit it a couple of times. It’s the full experience from the first time that customer sees you, whether they see you on Facebook, Instagram, any of the digital channels, or they see your billboard, all the way through to the conversion experience. [It’s from] the sales experience to when they walk through the front door to when they check in at the register.

It’s the experience from the towels, the pictures they take, then the pictures they then upload and put on Facebook. [They’ll] tag their friends, and guess what? Once they do that, you now have 500 more potential leads once they do that. So, how can we help increase that as well and deliver that full experience?  

That’s the full customer experience.  

Hyper Targeting Your Media Dollars Optimizes Your Marketing

Nick Thornton: Yeah, absolutely. So, you’ve been doing this for many years and we wanted to just give you one chance to talk about a story where [you’ve made an impact]. I know we get up every day and you talk about [how] you do your runs and you reflect. Maybe [there’s] a story that you’re like, “Wow, that really had an impact.” I’d love for you to share that impact story with us if you could.  

Nick Lindauer: Yeah. I was going through my history of clients since it’s quite a large history. I was digging in the health and wellness category and I realized I worked at one of the major bootcamp chains. I won’t actually name the chain, but I worked for one of the chains as they were growing. They are probably the largest bootcamp chain in the nation right now.  

We took over their paid search and their SEO and website development. Obviously, they were spending a lot of money. They were driving a lot of bootcamp leads. What we were able to discern is—and this was a few years ago, so this was right as mobile was coming on board and desktop traffic was starting to decline—we saw that change happening.  

Mobile traffic started increasing. What we found out is in certain metros for them, mobile was outperforming desktop, so it made sense. [They needed to] shift their dollars to mobile devices.

That was the perfect strategy. That’s the strategy they had across the board. Basically, they were spending 70% of their dollars on mobile devices and 30% on desktop. That was great for the New York Metro that they were in. It didn’t work for Sacramento, California, which they were also in.  

So, we actually had to look at it by geo, by device type, and help them optimize their dollars to actually improve their performance. Once we did that, we actually saw about a 350% increase in leads across the board.  

Now, there were a bunch of metros. It took a lot of work, but it worked fantastically. That’s hyper targeting on your media dollars.  

Nick Thornton: Yeah. You really solved a really big challenge for them. For them to try to figure that out, it’s so hard for club groups to figure that out. At the same time, it’s putting another eye on it. What a great story [about] the impact that it has just for the health and wellness across the industry. What a tremendous opportunity for you guys to be able to do that. That’s great.

Nick Lindauer: I mean, it just goes to show. We had access to the data. [We were] able to get in there and look at the data and just start asking questions and pulling at threads. Why is this happening? Where is this happening?  

Having access to the data, the website, and the full registration funnel [is crucial]. Once you have that, you can unlock the keys to the kingdom.  

Nick Thornton: That's awesome.  

Daron Allen: Yeah, Nick, that is amazing. I really look forward to actually hearing some more stories about the impact that you and agency can make for the clubs. At the end of the day, the more people that we get engaged in health and fitness, that means we’re powering health and fitness throughout the world.  

Impacting more people, consumers, more people’s lives. So, [I’m] really looking forward to that. So, thanks.  

Thanks so much for being on today and diving in a little bit about what you’re doing. Just so everybody knows, I’m really excited about episode six. We’ve got episode six coming up. What we’re going to do in episode six is we’re going to put Mr. Nick Thornton under the spotlight here.  

Now, he’s got so much experience with sales systems, motivating sales people, building teams, building career paths for people, comp plans. So, [I’m] really excited about episode six and going in deeper with Nick on sales systems.  

So, Nick Lindauer, thanks for being on with us today. Nick Thornton, I’m excited about our next one as well.

Nick Lindauer: Thank you guys very much.  

Nick Thornton: Awesome, have a great day.

The Experience Series is produced by Kevin Mulligan, Nick Thornton, and Daron Allen. Sound production and story editing by Kevin Mulligan. Creative and graphic design by Jenny Miller. Special thanks to Kayla Canon and Marissa Meyers for logistical coordination.

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