Personal Fitness Professional - January/February 2009 - (Page 14)

Part 1 — Building relationships with your customers and prospects using auto-responders By Rich Butkevic signed to overhaul your marketing and have you trampling the competition in no time. Hold on tight, because it’s going to be a wild ride. We’re going to jump head-ﬁrst into a topic that’s going to be the backbone for a lot of the other strategies we’ll discuss: building relationships with your customers and prospects. This is a big one, and I’m going to beat it to death the next several months, but let’s start with an understanding of what I’m talking about. T his is the ﬁrst article in the Fitness Marketing Makeover series, de- That’s a ﬁne order process for somebody selling water ﬁlters. The problem is that most trainers think that’s the same process that their customers will go through. Wrong! I was able to ﬁnd the ﬁlter I wanted right oﬀ the bat because: ¸ I knew precisely what I wanted. ¸ It was inexpensive enough that little or no research was needed. ¸ It’s an impersonal item or one I’ve purchased before. Your prospects (prospects are everyone who isn’t yet a customer) don’t have it so easy. They don’t know exactly what they want. They want to do some research and probably won’t make a snap decision like I did with my ﬁlter. They want to get to know you before making such a personal choice such as who their trainer will be. So we need to do things a little diﬀerently. But ﬁrst, let’s make sure we’re on the same page. The majority of your prospects will not be looking speciﬁcally for you. They’ll be looking for something more general, more conducive to research than an actual purchasing decision. They’ll search for “personal trainer in Chicago” or something similar, but they won’t just pick out the ﬁrst trainer they see as if they’re buying a water ﬁlter. They need more. This is good for you, because your competition is almost certainly ignoring this completely. When you go to most trainers’ websites, it tells a little about who they are, what they oﬀer, maybe some sexy photos of their abs to feed their egos, but that’s about it. Either the visitor takes action right that instant, or they leave, probably never to return. The marketing is designed to sell things that don’t require thought, like water ﬁlters, not personal training. We’re going to assume that your marketing is already making an oﬀer and giving a reason to respond right now, and has powerful copy, so we can quickly grab as many prospects as possible. But to think we’ll get them all right then or else they’re not interested at all is naïve and a big reason you’re leaving a boatload of money on the table. Some of your visitors are going to get a trainer soon, or else they wouldn’t be searching for one. They’re just not ready quite yet, so you need to let them “marinate” a little. And you need to be there when they are ready. Your Clients Are Not Water Filters It’s time to start building a pipeline of prospects you can turn into clients. I want you to take a deep breath, pause, and remember this moment because this can be a major turning point for your training business. There’s a big diﬀerence between our business and someone marketing, say, water ﬁlters for your refrigerator. Last week, the little orange light went on in my fridge telling me my ﬁlter was running low and that I needed a new one or I’d have to start throwing my money away on bottled water. I did what every other person does in 2008; I walked over to my computer, ﬁred up Google, typed in my water ﬁlter model, got back some results, went to the ﬁrst one and ordered two new ﬁlters. JAN-FEB2009 · WWW.FIT-PRO.COM Capture Client Contact Information You can do this a lot of diﬀerent ways, but we’ll use me as an example: I like to give away really good free reports because I can produce them once and leverage it 14 http://WWW.FIT-PRO.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Personal Fitness Professional - January/February 2009

Personal Fitness Professional - January/February 2009 Contents Letter from the Editor, Writers Ready to Rock the Podium What It Takes to Change Fitness Marketing Makeover Be Better Top Club Building a Base of Special Populations The Balancing Act Take Action! Nutrition Solutions Datebook Journey to Success New on the Market The Four P's Exercising Your Influence No More Pain in the Back!

Personal Fitness Professional - January/February 2009

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