Blog 29: E-Health Club Marketing

This is probably the most misunderstood and enormously overrated health club marketing medium of all. E-health club marketing is often presented as the best way to market your health club because it is the most effective and least expensive health club marketing medium available to health club owners. This couldn’t be the furthest from the truth.

Just as in any other form (medium) of health club marketing, the most important factor is your “list”. Some health clubs are just now (20 years later) building their email lists. Most health and fitness centers have a handful of emails and they are made up primarily of their current members. So most health club marketing done via email marketing is in essence marketing to your existing health club membership base and/or core members, hence, not capturing new business.

E-Marketing Pros:

• Affordable to free.
• Fast response from your targeted audience.
• Customer tracking ability is great.
• Gathering of customer’s data made easy.
• Ease and speed of delivery. Can send different emails whenever.
• Reaching a targeted audience by customizing email offers for customers based on demographics, interests, and/or geographical locations.
• Environment friendly; paper-free.

E-Marketing Cons:

• Security, privacy issues.
• Most clients nowadays have blocking software for different random ads.
• Dependability on technology.
• Most ads require customers to download and some of these ads are large in size.
• Cost can get to be high due to maintenance since technology is an evolving platform.
• Undelivered email rate is high.
• Worldwide competition through globalization.
• Emails are considered unimportant content and more likely being deleted by an audience.
• Some email ads are hard to read.
• E-marketing is not always times free.
• You will still rely on an offline customer database.

Health club e-marketing is extremely low cost once you have built a database of qualified recipients and the delivery of your message is almost absolutely free. But if you are not building (adding to) your list, you are just cannibalizing your existing health club members. Building an enormous list is time-consuming and will require an investment. NEVER buy an email list from anyone because it will cause you unmentionable problems with your IP (Internet Protocol) address, your ISP (Internet Service Providers, your Google ranking, could possibly get your website blocked, etc., etc., etc.

E-health club marketing is an “opt-in” form of health club marketing so you must build your list in-house. There are no shortcuts to this process no matter what anyone tries to tell you. Even some of the people that have been in the cyber health club marketing business for years will neglect to tell you the astronomical downsides to e-health club marketing just to get you to buy their email marketing campaigns.

If you learn to incorporate e-marketing into your health club marketing campaigns, you will grow your health club and your health and fitness career.

For more free tips on increasing your health club membership base through health club marketing, health club promotions, professional health club membership sales, and advancing your health and fitness career visit us today @ www.healthclubmarketingmmc.com or call 904-448-5727.