My family gym (and where ActiveCampaign/automation could help)
I’m a big fan of marketing automation – I don’t mean things that spam people constantly – I mean putting in place automated processes that lay down in systems how your business wants to operate, how it wants to treat people, how it wants to deliver messages & communicate etc.
I’m more used to ActiveCampaign (and I think it’s a lot cheaper compared to some of its counterparts), though I think more and more traditional email companies (e.g. Mailchimp) are increasingly offering something along these lines.
Here’s a screenshot from an old automation of ours in ActiveCampaign – I won’t bore you with the details but you should quickly see that you can make stuff happen with automations (send emails, texts, update their CRM record etc) and, very important, you can make decisions with IF/THEN style logic:
Where this could have helped
I went to the gym the other day with my daughter – a typical teenager, hard to get them off their phone so I was pleased she was happy to come with me (in fact, in fairness, she suggested it).
She’d not been for a while, and her card didn’t work at the turnstile – no surprise – the card/turnstiles at my gym are woeful (that’s another gripe that I have a solution for!).
So we huddled over with the receptionist to find out what the issue was:
Her membership had been terminated.
Wow.
I had a family account with the gym and after her birthday last Nov (yep, that’s how long it had been!) when she turned 17, she became ineligible for that type of membership.
How much communication did I receive about this?
Nothing. Nadda. Zero.
Yeah, poor is not the word.
What should have happened?
The Gym should have set up an automation in ActiveCampaign to inform members about potential pending changes family accounts months before her birthday – this is fairly easy to do with time-driven campaigns. If we have the birthday field stored in the contact record, we make this happen – so, capture the customer details you need, tell people why are you doing that (well, ‘ask’!).
I should have received a series of (increasingly) urgent emails and texts to take action (i.e. change my account). If I took action, then the automation could end. If I didn’t, then I should have been phoned and then finally cornered by the receptionist when I went through the said turnstile.
All of this would have meant that I felt the gym was on top of their game, and were trying to look after my account.
Final Thoughts
I’m more of a swimmer than a gym person and there have been a few occasions in the last couple of years where I’ve turned up at the gym and the pool has been shut for various reasons – again, no communication. But if my contact record in ActiveCampaign was flagged as ‘keen swimmer’ then such tagged contacts could be immediately alerted. Having to drive to the gym to find it is closed is not a great experience and affects my view of their nationwide brand.
I’m sure you’ve seen similar with your day-to-day online & offline experiences.
AI is dominating the airwaves at the moment but there is no beating common sense marketing and good client communications.
What do you think?