For many sports and fitness businesses, marketing promotions, discounts, and coupons are no foreign concept. Utilizing them successfully, however, tends to be a different story. Truly capturing the value of running promotions requires strategy, and businesses need to arm themselves with the tools to manage their promotional campaigns seamlessly.
We’re here to bring you the resources and know-how to run a successful promotion from start to finish, including what to include in your campaign messaging, tips to analyze post-campaign success, and the features to look for in sports and fitness software that will aid you in managing your promotions.
Before diving into the nitty gritty of how to run a promotion, we do want to highlight the importance of strategy in promotional campaigns. Your offerings are incredibly valuable, so be sure not to over discount and thus devalue your brand. You can have some fun with promotions by aligning them with holidays or ends or beginnings of seasons. While doing so, we suggest structuring your discounts in a way that creates a sense of urgency, incentivizing your clients, members, and future customers to buy.
Download our Guide to Running Effective Promotions and Post-Analysis Calculator
Why do gyms, studios, and sports training facilities benefit from using promotion codes in marketing campaigns?
They encourage and reward brand loyalty
Using discounts and promotions to reward your repeat clients and members can be that last step to ensuring that they are a strong advocate of your brand. By recognizing their loyalty to your business, you could provide the last nudge of encouragement the customer needs to become a return shopper. This increases the lifetime value of the client or member, which is valuable to any business.
They entice future customers to try out your offerings
Running introductory promotions on your classes, lessons, or events can be a great way to get consumers who were previously on-the-fence about becoming a client or member to see the value in your business offerings. This is a tried and true conversion opportunity.
They help offload excess retail stock
Do you still have last season’s batting gloves or extra branded tank tops stored away in your back office? For many businesses, this means that the product cost is already sunk, but by offering seasonal discounts or promotions, you can boost retail revenue and offload stock that would otherwise be wasting your resources.
How to Run a Promotion at Your Studio, Gym, or Sports Training Facility:
Since you’re reading this article, you’re already on the right track! It’s critical that before choosing the discounts to promote, you have an understanding of the type of promotions that work best for your clients and members.
This is where market research comes into play.
Check out the types of promotions being run by your competitors (and while you’re at it, make sure you download the competitor research guide to understand the advantages your competitors hold over your offerings). Are they frequently offering discounts on their classes, lessons, or sessions? Or are discounts on retail occurring more often? Do they publicize discounts and incentives to new members? Staying on top of competitor promotions will help you get a foundational understanding of what your prospective and current customers will resonate with, but in order to truly understand your specific market, we recommend running a few A/B tests to see what your base responds to.
Be transparent with your offer terms
It’s important that you communicate your discount terms clearly in your promotional marketing assets. Wherever you choose to advertise your promotion, ensure that your messaging and discount terms are very clear. Displaying your discount upfront from the beginning will ensure that your clients and members are able to complete their transaction smoothly and autonomously.
A few things to be sure to include in your promotion communications are:
- Clear, concise text describing offer and terms
- The value or discount
- Which products or offerings are included in the promotion
- Usage limits
- Expiration date
- Company name and address
Run a post-campaign analysis
Like any marketing campaign, promotions should be evaluated at the conclusion of the campaign period. Be sure to use a software that allows you to track metrics surrounding the success of your specific coupons and discounts to better understand and determine which promotions to run in the future.
4 Ways Upper Hand Helps Sports + Fitness Businesses Run Promotions
Gives businesses insight into which offerings to promote
Should you be promoting your memberships, retail, or all of the above? Insights into sales performance over time can help spot lagging sales and aid in mitigating risk of hurdles to sales down the line. Upper Hand’s sales reports let you spot purchasing trends and buying behaviors, giving you insights into what programs or categories need a boost, and how clients typically purchase. This will help you decide which items or offerings to put on promotion.
Enables staff to generate custom promo codes
Upper Hand’s promotion tools allow admins to create new promo codes that can apply to specific events, memberships, credit passes, retail items, all available offerings, and more. This kind of flexibility allows businesses to cater their promotions to whatever will resonate with their clients most — plus, with added customization in redemption and usage limits, one-time payments, or recurring payments, studios, gyms, and sports training facilities truly can offer whichever promotion makes the most sense for them.
Offers marketing tools that segment contacts
While a shotgun approach to marketing to your clients and members may work, most of the time you’ll spend too much time and extra resources trying to cater to everyone on your list. Upper Hand gives you the ability to create contact groups, so you can choose to target your promotions to specific, segmented populations.
Provides advanced email marketing capabilities
Now that you know what you’re promoting and you have your contact list, it’s time to market your promotions to your customers. Upper Hand lets you customize and schedule your messages so that when you’re ready to promote your offerings, doing so is seamless.
