How To Sell a Web Visitor on your Gym
You’ve got your website up with some basic information about your gym and people are starting to find you, but this is not the time to close the laptop and call it good. Setting up your website is only half the battle.
When it comes to marketing, success is not just about traffic, but also about conversions. For instance, you may have thirty new clients attend a six-week boot camp special, but if no one signs up for a membership, your sale period won’t have any long-term benefit.
Let’s carry the analogy along. When it comes to your website, traffic is the number of visitors that come to your site and the conversion factor is the percent of those visitors who decide to check your gym out. So what if you could double your conversions with some basic changes? That would double the effectiveness of your website. Let’s figure out how to do that.
Step 1: Your customers’ wants and emotions are first priority
I’ve read the sales text on literally hundreds of gym websites for everything from CrossFit, to yoga, to dance. One of the most common mistakes these site owners make is to focus on themselves and their gyms. There’s a time and place for this, but your web visitors aren’t coming to your site because they long to attend a 5,000sq ft gym, or a gym that’s been around for thirty years, or a gym with all the newest fancy equipment.
Your web visitors are coming to you with a host of hopes and fears and the number one thing they’re looking for is someone who will realize their hopes and alleviate their fears.
They have hopes of finally getting healthy, finding a community to fit into, losing weight, getting noticed when they walk into a room, building confidence, being able to defend themselves, and the list goes on and on.
They have fears of losing motivation (like they’ve done so many times in the past), embarrassing themselves by failing a new exercise or performance, not being listened to by their trainer, entering a negative social atmosphere, and so on.
While improvement could still be made in this area, on most websites I’ve seen, the sales text does fairly well at showing visitors how their gym will help the visitor realize their hopes. The main things I would suggest are.
Go into more detail and make this information front and center.
Where most sales text falls flat is in alleviating their potential customer’s fears. This is where attention is really needed
I’d like to introduce you to the very best gym sales text I’ve ever encountered — actually just the bios of two gym owners over at Redemption Fitness and Sports Performance. I especially like the second bio. Read it here.
Notice what these guys do here. First of all, they’re very in-tune with their client’s emotions and wants. This is vital. You can’t connect with a client’s emotions and wants if you don’t know what they are. Unsure yourself? Just ask around at your gym or online.
Next, what they do is aggravate the web viewer’s pain point. Reading their bios can fill you with a sense of urgency. Your struggle to become fit suddenly becomes vast and important. You lean forward in your seat, hoping for a solution.
The solution they give you is surprising. It isn’t a list of all their qualifications. It’s something very simple — empathy. Josh and Brian make it very clear that they know what it’s like to be you and that they can feel your pain. They care about it so much that they won’t let you be satisfied with your condition. I’ve never met Josh or Brian, but I already have a basic level of trust in them because they focus on me, not themselves.
Trust will generally win over impressive qualifications where the trust factor is lacking.
Step 2: when you do talk about yourself, connect it back to your viewer
As long as your goal is to build trust, talking about yourself and your gym is a step you don’t want to miss. If you were torn between attending two gyms you trusted, you would probably pick the one with the most qualified trainers, the nicer building, or most impressive equipment.
The perks of your gym and your trainers’ qualifications are all factors that will improve your client’s experience. When you focus on these details in the right spirit, it lets your web visitors know that not only can they trust you as a person but they can trust you as a professional.
Step 3: Let design speak for you
You know the power of first impressions. Well, what is the very first impression a client will ever have of you? If they visit your website before stopping by your gym, their very first impression is going to be of the visual design of your website. This snap judgment happens in milliseconds.
The two pitfalls of many gym websites are “busyness” and old-school design. These days, it’s easy to set up your own professional website using WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, etc, so not having design skills is no excuse for a website that looks like it was coded at the dawn of the internet.
At the same time, just because a site looks modern doesn’t mean it’s well designed. “Busyness” can make a nice website look cluttered. As a basic rule, if your visitor doesn’t know where to focus on your webpage, that’s a bad sign.
Step 4: Harness reviews
To help your business thrive, you’ll need reviews. If you haven’t, check out our article How to get more online reviews for your gym.
Once you have reviews, milk them dry. If you aren’t posting your best reviews on your website, you’re really missing out. What other people have to say about you is more important than what you have to say about yourself. Try to put your reviews in an eye-catching place on your website. Also, remember that video reviews are more powerful than simple text ones.
Step #5: Deliver a clear call to action
The final step in converting your web visitors is to direct them to the action you want them to take. This could be visiting your gym, signing up for a special, texting you for more information, subscribing to your email list, etc — whatever you think is most important for building your business.
The fact is, people need to be told what to do. If you don’t emphasize your call to action many people won’t take it.
Three keys to making your call to action pop out are to feature it prominently on your homepage, feature it somewhere on every page, and utilize pop-ups. Yes, popups are annoying, but they’ve been proven to work, so if your gym is really going to help people then using pop-ups to help convert them into members is doing them a service.
Conclusion
It’s the age of the internet and every year having a web presence seems to get more and more important. You can let your website stay how it is, doing a little but not much for you, or you can turn it into a powerful marketing tool.
It’s your choice.
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