S1 Ep 16: Open The Front Door For Members: Best Lockdown Offers

Welcome back to the Marketing Muscle Up podcast show. So good to have you here, and hope you're enjoying the last episodes that we've been putting. Today we are talking about something tactical, something marketing, something that can help you to skyrocket your conversions and ensure that when you get a potential buyer or lead coming in, they will know what to do and what to expect. That's in today's episode, and I've got Ev Chapman joining me as well. How are you, Ev?

I'm great. How are you, Richard?

Yeah, very good. I like when we go sometimes really tactical in these episodes because I just, I just think it's important to ensure people know where the front door is, Ev.

I think that's very important.

Well,

otherwise you can't get in, right?

You can't get in. And I use the front door analogy because a lot of time as fitness professionals, what we do, we're really good at training. We're the best at it. We've done every course under the sun and we've got all the certificates. However, we don't make it clear enough to where our entry point is or our front door is in the business. And so what we do is we get our clients or potential leads to kind of like, we put up a wall, a barrier. And it's very hard for people to figure out which is the best way to get started in the business. Where do I go? What do I say? And that's why a lot of inquiries, initial inquiries, are, how much do you charge? That's because—

Yeah.

Clients, potential clients, actually don't know what to say. They're uneducated. So the easiest thing that, that won't make them look silly or stupid is What do you charge?

I think that's an excellent point actually, because I think that's the biggest fear of any trader. You know, they get that message in their Messenger, how much do you charge? And they don't really know how to, how to then get away from that price conversation. And it's simply because they haven't opened the front door.

A lot of the time we just have to open the door. And, and I know, and I'll, and I'll say this too, because we have a client in a, um, built-up eastern suburbs of Sydney area. And talking about the front door, I mean, talking about the front door, the— he had a, um, kind of glass but frosted glass signage, beautiful signage, all those kind of things. And I went to visit his studio. It was the first time I went to visit his studio. I've been working in our Ninja Program and I found it a little bit awkward to open that front door up. Not, not awkward, it was hard, but awkward like I felt, oh, you know, is it locked? Is it closed? Am I welcome here? Is there somebody in there? Is it really busy in there? What's gonna be on the other side of the door? And then I said to him, it's interesting your door was closed. And, um, that's how I left it because, I mean, he had signage. I said, it's interesting the door was closed. And he messaged me about 2 weeks later. He says, Richard, you'd never believe it, but I kept the door open all day long now and I'm actually getting all these walk-ins. He didn't even change the offer. He didn't change the signage. He just opened the door.

Yeah. So it's super interesting, isn't it? People's behavior and like Just that barrier of like, especially, you know, like it's a busy street and, you know, it is lots of people walking by or driving by, but like having that door closed really feels like, I don't know if I'm actually allowed to go in. But when it's open, it feels just like, oh yeah, I could just wander in here and like, you know, maybe catch, catch, you know, he might catch someone's eye as they're walking past or something. And that's all the difference that it makes.

All the difference it makes. And that's what I want to touch on today. Let's Sort of show you how to open the door. And

yeah, that's

really simple ways to know when to open the door. Now I know a lot of states, a lot of locations are in lockdown. And as we're, as we're recording this, and as if you're listening to this, and some of them are also open too. So what I want to do is show you what's working in lockdown world, and then also in post-lockdown world. So when you're not out of lockdown, then you are actually in lockdown. So give me some 2 scenarios on that.

Yeah. So there is states in lockdown. I'm in one of them. And what would you say? Because obviously kind of the same kind of offers, or maybe it's not obvious, but you probably shouldn't have the same kind of offers in lockdown as you have kind of coming out of lockdown, right?

Well, totally, because the door's closed in lockdowns. So you can't open your front door. And that's a big challenge. That's where, that's where the biggest challenge is, that the normal part of training, especially for large gyms— obviously gym is closed, studios you may have flexibility going outdoors, PTs and so forth. However, in these times now, we still have to keep our front door open digitally and online because you are either going to retain your members If you're in lockdown, that's number one, and then grow your members. And if you're coming out of lockdown, you want to ensure that you literally take— if you have like a double door, you open them both up, and if you have windows, you open them up as well. And so we want to pronounce to the world that we're open, and that's the concept here of an offer, is we need to kind of like scream to the world that we are open instead of thinking that people know were a gym or they were a studio or they're a PT and thinking they know our website or thinking they know we have amazing landing page or thinking they know we have this great video. And we have definitely, um, we have definitely done that in the past where you think, oh, people know you, but we are trying to get out from our normal surroundings, our normal clients, our parents, our family, and say, hey, let's go to somebody we don't know. And so that's exactly what these lockdowns are. And so the 3 biggest things that we've identified in the space of, of why people train is it comes down to these 3 items: that they want better routines, especially in this COVID world. They want, they want to keep their routines or start a new routine or better routines. That's number one. Number 2 is a lot of uncertainty around at the moment, you know, if I, if I sign up for a 12-month membership or a 6-month membership, I'll be in lockdown or closed, all those kind of things. That's going to continue happening, especially if there's any breakouts. There'll be lockdowns and deep cleanings and all those kind of things. And so people are a little bit afraid of that. And number 3 is we know from, you know, years and years of understanding why people stick around is they stick around for community. So it's routine, uncertainty, and community. And so what I want to do is sort of show you Some, first of all, offers. If you are coming out of lockdown, you know the date. I know a few states know the date now. And then we can— and then you can start to think about, okay, what can I do to ensure that people know where I'm at and how to enter the front door? So in routines, we have a thing called the comeback offer. So if you've been closed for a while, And everybody can relate to this. Everybody in Australia and probably everywhere in the world has been locked down in some part. But what we want to do is we want to have a strong comeback offer that enforces to get back into the routine. And so we don't have to call it comeback, but the theme has to be around getting back people back into the routine, getting people—

Yeah.

Back feeling good and feeling excited. I mean, Ev, what do you think when you know if let's say you haven't done training for a while and everybody's gone through a bit of a down patch in lockdown, then all of a sudden you have that mojo to get going again. You know what is that feeling that you have at that point?

Yeah, I I think in New South Wales it is a real feeling like around you know Freedom Day and you know getting back into things. And even I was thinking last week, I'm so excited to get back into the gym. To get lifting again, like, you know, that kind of thing. Like, I mean, I have done some things in lockdown, but, you know, it's not the same. Like, I go to a gym that we tend to lift heavy things, and, you know, you can't really do that at home. So I think that, you know, there's, you know, whether it's a feeling of like freedom, like a freedom offer or something, but there's definitely like— There's— unless you have a home gym, you probably have not You're probably not working out exactly the same as you would have in the gym. So it's definitely a sense of like getting back into it, getting back into routine and kind of establishing something, you know, something new or, you know, that kind of normal again.

Yeah. And when we're looking at names, what we want to do is you want to value everything that you're getting up and offering. With offers, you want to focus around ensuring that you can get the speed going, you can get their routines going, you can get, you know, community and certainty going in a really fast manner. And to do that, that's why a lot of offers we recommend is you having a 7 to a 10-day offer. And in that offer, you want to ensure that there's a very clear outcome, not just trialing us out, for example, but what are they going to get in the 7 days? Yeah. They might double their confidence, they might drop a certain amount of weight or certain amount of kilograms that it's very tangible. they may triple their energy. We want to have outcome-driven offers that allow people to get the feeling back, and then that feeling, that routine, will naturally lead into, you know, getting back into studio, getting back into the gym, and getting back into the routine. But, but we need to do a lot to call out what we're actually going to get, because some people are super motivated, they're just— You know, going to get to that gym. But we are looking for people that have really lost a lot of routines and a lot of sass and swazz about them, pretty much. I know their words. So it's a yeah,

I think so.

They are words. Great.

Yeah, I think they are words. But I also think you're you're correct about that. Like that, I I actually think that these lockdowns, like I mean, you know, like there's going to be people who get back into the gym. I you I you know am a member of a gym. Want to get back there. But I think there's also people have discovered, you know what, I actually don't mind working out, or, you know, like, you know, like this walking thing, maybe I might try something. I actually think there is a lot of opportunity to get people who have never been in gyms back into gyms now. And, and I think, you know, whether it's like, they've, you know, just been lying around during lockdown, they think I've really got to do something, or they've been like, you know what, I I like being outside, or I, you know, want to go to a boot camp, or I want to get into a gym. Like, yeah, I think there's both sides. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for people.

Yeah, and, and, um, I did an interview with Richard Beattie, Exercise New Zealand CEO, and he mentioned the same in the first lockdown in New Zealand, that the rate of people taking up exercise that hadn't yet ever been in the studio or gym, um, was an all-time high. Purely the fact that people had to really sit down, but also too is that they've been walking. And to get people that are not yet into a gym, a fitness facility, because we only know 20 to 12% around those numbers are actually registered as a fitness facility member. Yeah. But now that, you know, the government has done a good job saying, hey, you can get outside for an hour a day walking, and they've used the word exercise and things like that, is that there's a lot of people that have actually got up and started to walk. And that's a really good thing because that's the first step you need to get into a fitness studio or gym. So there's a lot of opportunity there waiting for you to create a really good comeback offer. And just on comeback offers, ensure that the name is outcome-focused, ensure that it doesn't just say offer, ensure that it's really driven on what you're actually gonna deliver in the 7 to 10 days, not what you're gonna deliver in the 12 months. but what they're gonna see and feel and have and get excited about within the offer period. If that's 3 days, 7 days, 10 days, 30 days, whatever it is for you, we wanna be really clear on that outcome because again, in an uncertain world, we don't have the luxury of knowing if we're gonna be open for 12 months, but we wanna tighten all the gaps up to say, well, this is what we're gonna offer in the 10 days. And that works really well and that's been working. Really well with our our clients.

Yeah.

So that's the comeback offer. Number two in offers in post lockdowns, I want to talk about hybrid offer. Hybrid offers an offer that you put out to a market that is a little bit uncertain of what they're going to do. So for example, they may not want to go back into a gym or facility with a lot of people with crowds. And they might have— they might be really afraid, rightfully so. They may be having older population, younger population, sick kids, sick family members, and they can't run the risk of getting COVID or lockdowns or anything like that. And so there's a lot of people out there that are going to be in that box, and you don't want to forget about those people because those are the people that now have to change and adjust what they've been doing. And you've got to want to set up an offer for those guys, and we call it the hybrid offer. So it's a combination of ensuring that you can continue your hybrid training, and you have the offer also too of jumping into a face-to-face class as well. So wherever they feel fit, or when they feel that confident level, we want to make sure that we're calling out to those people because that's a market that's definitely going to get left behind. If you don't offer the hybrid option, or you say, I'm going to stop that hybrid, like, you really want to continue offering that because you're also going to get new people coming on that's never trained with you before because other studios, gyms may not be offering a hybrid. So you can imagine every single gym, will they offer hybrid? Probably not. So there's a massive, massive opportunity here to ensure that you're the one that's able to offer the hybrid for that type of clientele.

Yeah. And this is really successful for so many of our clients. I know after the first lockdowns and, you know, there was a lot of uncertainty about getting back into gyms. I think maybe less now, but I think there are people who are still around who are like, I don't know, I have to wear a mask. Like there's just so much, there's so much going on that I think if you're not running a hybrid, you're probably missing out on a big part of the market. Yeah, and it doesn't have to be always Zoom sessions either. I think a lot of our clients have, you know, now they have a whole lot of bank of workouts that they've done over all of these lockdowns. You know, it could be some kind of like library of workouts that people can do in their own time, like an on-demand library or something.

Yeah, and if you are going to do an on-demand library, one of our great clients, John Hyatt, he's an EFM location, he decided to build— and I know a whole bunch of people— he decided to build up a backend, a proper backend. He custom built that through WordPress. But the things that— there's items like Thinkific, that's one platform that you can use that you can build up your backend really easy.

Yeah.

A whole bunch of other ones that you can also use.

Yeah, super easy now.

Oh, I mean, I remember trying to do it back in 10 years ago. I was like, oh, what? You want to do what? Now,

I

mean, the world is your oyster. Like, really go out there, pay your monthly fee, and you can put all your past Zoom trainings in there. And then you can, you know, run that, just run it, continue to run it so they can log in anytime. So it's, um, yeah, just don't forget all the work that you've done over the months if you have been on Zooming. Uh, put that, definitely put that in the backend and have an evergreen model where it can keep running and running and running.

Yeah, absolutely.

Remember the name. We want a solid name, an outcome-driven name. In 7, 10, 30 days, whatever it may be, you want a solid outcome-driven name. So you want to be using words that spark emotion. And that's really key because we want to grab people's attention. And we've only got 1 second, 2 seconds, 3 seconds, 4 seconds to grab their attention. So It can't be like called hybrid offer or comeback offer. It can't just be called offer. You see that a lot. You've got to make it really strong and focus on what the pain is or what the solution is. You can either market pain or pleasure. A lot of people market pain because that's when people make a decision. So be really clear of what they're going to get from this offer and then list everything they get, not just the training. Remember, list the value of each product. You might have a a welcome call, a swag bag, the training sessions, you might be running Zoom backend or backend programs, you could be having one-on-one consults, whatever you're doing, just value everything up. And that's including all the offers, value it all up, put a value on it, and then put your price to it. Put the price to it. But it doesn't— the value doesn't have to be the price. Remember, the price is a fee that they can pay for that period. And then The normal fee takes over from there. And in regards to fees, just on the topic, I always say if you're, let's say, charging $100 a week, per se, you want to drop the value to around 40% off. And that generally is the fee. That's generally the price I would charge for an offer instead of going really expensive. You're looking at people that already know you. That's when they're going to buy into that. If you want to get more people in, you want to lower your price, not really low because you sort of get quality, but we want to ensure they're able to upgrade. And so I always say the 40% rule, take the 40%, that'd be sort of $60, $59, $57. And then from there, it's not a massive jump to the regular weekly payments.

Yeah, I think that's a good point because, um, I see a lot of people, you know, charging, you know, a dollar a day or, you know, like really, like it's a massive jump once they get, they get a lot of people into their offers, but then they can't sell people into memberships. So I think 40% is a great rule.

Yeah. Keep it easy. And the last offer I wanted to talk about was the bring a friend offer. This works really well. It's worked really well through all the Melbourne lockdowns where you want to look out for your friends. And this offer here is for any any places that are shut decide to close the doors totally, there are people that are really wanting to train and they may know not— they may not know where to train. So it's about giving a bring-a-friend offer to every one of your members and saying that this is a clear offer. You get, you get one person you can bring totally free for a period of time and a huge value piece. So it's not just your normal offer. You actually bring them to the training, could be for a month, it could be 3 weeks, whatever you feel comfortable with. But the purpose of it is to ensure that you're treating them just as a normal client. And they're like, you know, we know that they're gonna have a very high signup rate. So we just wanna have this exclusivity. Mm-hmm. And talk about that everybody has a one pass here that their friend, because you're paying, their friend can actually use that as well. For a period of time just to get them back into the doors. And really, this— I love this option here because this option doesn't require us to do anything more than to give more value to our members. And if you've got members, 20 people take it up, we double membership. And to me, we don't have to worry about a front door because the front door is your member. That's literally Going to take them into there, take them exactly where they need to sit, stand, train, and exercise. And so that to me is an offer that really put together well, it's very, very successful this time.

Yeah, I think so. And I think, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't really require you to do much extra work. You know, if you're already doing Zoom sessions and you have places to fill, it actually really helps to kind of, yeah, fill those places and also Get more people in, you know, into your membership and that kind of thing. And I think as well, if you're, you know, people have friends who are outside the area or something like that, it's like a, it's an opportunity to bring those people in as well. Like, I know I don't, most of my friends don't live where I live, but I can get them into my Zoom training sessions because it doesn't matter where they are. That's a good opportunity. Yeah.

And that's when the hybrid offer comes in, in that case as well.

That's it.

We are in a digital world, and I think it's really important to know that, you know, we can call it Freedom Day, but until there's, um, some real solid longevity proof, um, nothing's certain. And I think that's really important to ensure that you've got backups in all, in all scenarios moving forward.

Yeah.

Now, before— I want to just touch on challenges very quickly. So if you are in are still in lockdown for a period of time, what you want to be doing— and the key of that is we all know we want to retain our clients, you know, we've got to retain our clients, stop the bleed and retain our clients. By now, if clients are still training with you, amazing. And you've probably done some amazing things to keep them training, like you've probably retained them, you've worked triple, triple harder, you've called them, you've done everything you possibly can. But what we do really well, and our clients do really well, is we have a thing called the Bulletproof Challenge. And we run these Bulletproof Challenges. You can run them anytime in the year. However, they are a good challenge to run in periods of stress, in periods of clients getting a little bit fatigued or over things or zoomed out. I've heard that word so many times. The Bulletproof Challenge basically represents, and it comes from a challenge that I wanted to do, myself and Joe wanted to do. We were feeling a bit down and out and like, oh, I don't know if we can do this, I don't know if we can train. And so what we decided to do was call it Bulletproof. Let's bulletproof ourselves. And so a lot of your clients want to know what you do as a trainer to stay in shape, what you do to keep in shape, what you do to feel motivated and inspired because you are leaders and you're leading them. And so what we did, we flipped them, we said, okay, we're going to run a Bulletproof Challenge. It's a 21-day Bulletproof Challenge and the Bulletproof Challenge is not necessarily about fitness or training. It's about something opposite where it's easy for people to do. Now, that's number one. It's got to be so easy for people to do it. Super simple. It wants to be a little bit of gamification. So we're saying 1 of 21 days, 2 of 21 days, 3 of 21 days. Proven that people will stay on track with numbers instead of dot points. Number that, number those days up. And then the concept here is it could be a— I know Joey's run a whole bunch of things in our clients' gratitude challenges we've had. We've had fitness challenges. We've had take a photo of something amazing like a flower challenge. It's like stop and smell the roses challenge. So it's a challenge basically to get them inspired again. And so whatever you do to keep inspired, it could be morning meditation, book reading, it could just be walking. The things that that you get, that you do to be the best version of yourself. So what we do, we take a picture of it and then we hashtag, we create a hashtag that's around our gym or studio, and then we get everybody to hashtag that. And so what it does, it creates everybody who was not training, everybody who that was struggling, it gets them going again, something they can do instead of something they can't do. can't do. And it's an effective challenge, especially to run, you know, you know, you're getting out of lockdown, lockdown's another 2 months away. It's a really effective challenge to run in the lead-up of when we are able to get out of jail, some people say.

Yeah. And I, you know, I love the Bulletproof Challenge and I know we did, you know, sometimes we're just feeling like we need to, you know, a little bulletproof ourselves. So we go, you know, hey guys, we're going to run the Bulletproof Challenge. But I think what it does for your clients is it focuses them in on something that they can do every day, like something small that can make them feel good or feel motivated or like it just kind of, it's just one thing to get them through. And that's, I think that's the power of it.

Yeah. And we had seen a great one. recently with one of our scalers, Riz. Shout out, Riz. Just getting clients to actually take a picture of their 10,000-step challenge. And again, people love things. I mean, who doesn't love— I mean, Apple Watch did a very smart, you know, super smart thing. If you look at the background and the research of what they did, it's all around gamification. And they did a lot of research around computer games and how people get to levels and things like that. Close the circles, close the loops up. And it's the same concept is that everybody wants to close that loop up daily. Everybody wants that 10,000 steps and then go to bed. Everybody wants that 75-day hard challenge. People love closing loops up every day. I think you're a loop closer. You love a good loop close, don't you?

I do. I like to tick it off, color the circle in, whatever it is. Yeah, I think it gives you a sense of accomplishment every day.

Totally. So that's just one of the 3 lockdown challenges we have. We may do some more down the line, but it is a premium one that always works. It doesn't matter what. And I just want to touch quickly on some names. Just remember, it's got to be irresistible. It's got to focus on outcome. Seasons are good as well. Always change up to seasons. Um, you know, you've seen that all the time, but it works because people are thinking different things in each season. So it's important, yeah, uh, to be relative in those seasons. You can't run the same thing 12 months of the year. That's not an offer. The front door—

Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think we, um, a lot of our clients run the Winter Warrior Challenges over winter because it's just a different— there's a different feeling in winter. Um, and you're just trying to get through winter compared to like Hey, we're in spring now. Everyone feels like super happy and the sun is shining and it's just a whole different feel. So I think using seasons can really help to like get people into that offer and keep it relevant and current.

And I want to speak out to those fitness professionals who are against offers, and I hear you and I see you, and you're sitting here going, well, my service can sell itself, my quality can sell itself, and it certainly can sell itself. However, until people are in that and they understand what you do, we, we, we, we human creatures of unders— we, we're going into everything going, are we going to get ripped off? Um, I've had a bad experience before. Um, will this work? And we want to really get in the head of our potential client and what they're going through when they read or don't read your offer, when they deciding to work with you. We want to understand what's in their mind, and we just want to highlight all those things in the offer. And the reason why the offer is there, because it gives them the confidence to get started instead of overthinking something. And so if you've never done it before, or your offer is weak at best, like you just call it offer, Get creative and give yourself the opportunity to know that you've got a really good program and you've got a really good service. And all we're doing is we want to just showcase on the front end. And I know we're talking about forever, the best thing to do that is remember that you have a service, treat the offer like a product. So—

Yeah.

I bought this cup the other day. Um, if you're watching this on YouTube, we are streaming this on YouTube, team. It's an Ever Eco cup, and yeah, I kind of like it. I never used to buy these cups before. I remember years ago, I was like, what, what are you doing? I think you're, you're in a group of those cups.

I love them, but now I, I sit at home all day, so I don't need these cups.

I just like them still. And so it's a product and I bought it once and now I own the product. It's not a service. And if the cup was crap, I would lose $28, which is the most expensive cup I've bought. But I don't have to— I'm not locked into 12 months owning this cup. And so what a product is, what an offer is, is a product. And if we treat it as products, you have less barriers of entry. Your door is wide open. Your door is easy to get through. There's happiness on the other side. Yeah. But if you don't have the offer, it's just people can still open the door, but it's just a little bit harder. And when you've got other people, the doors are wide open, This is where you may be losing potential clients that should be training with you. So give it a crack. And I always like to think, yeah, I think, just test it out. Test it. Yeah, test.

I love testing. I think, you know, you do not have to decide something and say you're going to do this for the rest of your life. You can test it and see if it works. And if it doesn't, test something else.

Well, team, I hope that's helped you. If you want to continue with any more videos and lessons like this, we've got a private Facebook group called Crush Your Fitness Marketing. You can jump into there and request to join. And if you haven't yet checked our website out, we have a whole different programs and courses available for you. You've heard us speak about ninjas before. We have a ninja program where we help people, help fitness professionals to double or triple their business. So check that out. And yeah, thanks for tuning into this episode around how to keep that front door open. Go out there, go out there and open the door and create the offer and let us know how you go with it. Love to know your feedback on this episode. For more of these episodes, as mentioned, you can view these on YouTube if you prefer the visual aspect. And of course, you can view these on your favorite podcast channels and be sure to subscribe and get notified when the next episodes are out. Thanks so much. I'll catch you guys next time.