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Retention Top Stories

Why You’re Paying Too Much for Your Studio’s Marketing

Some believe that there’s no such thing as overspending on marketing. But the truth is, the right offer can save you time and money while attracting new leads and helping your studio grow.

Running a studio involves much more than holding sessions and providing a direct service to your clients. There are many challenging aspects of this business, including creating marketing campaigns, driving lead generation, and new member onboarding.

These areas, especially marketing, are challenging for many studios mainly because they fall outside what studio owners generally perceive as part of their jobs. 

However, marketing and its related activities aren’t necessarily only challenges. They can also represent valuable opportunities for growing your business. 

In fact, the solution to these challenges might be easier than it seems, especially for those studio owners who understand and leverage the concept of the self-liquidating offer.

In this article, we’ll explain what the best type of offer is and how you can put your marketing in line with your overall goals.

Why You Want a Self-Liquidating Offer?

A self-liquidating offer is a special method of marketing that functions so well, it’s a wonder most studios aren’t using it. Essentially, this offer type functions so that your leads actually give you the money to reinvest back into your studio’s marketing.

In other words, you create a system that allows for an unlimited marketing budget while creating a base of engaged leads who become the following legendary members of your studio and community.

But how do you construct such an offer?

The answer is by bringing in the right people. 

Furthermore, this is possible because you don’t present your offer as a studio owner. Instead, you present it as a doctor.

When you go to a doctor, they don’t try to sell you stuff, right? They simply prescribe what you need based on their diagnosis, and that’s it. 

You can do the same thing if you get involved with the right people. Instead of selling, you can prescribe the solution to the problem they’ve got – the solution they can find in your studio. At that point, everything else becomes much easier for you, your team, and your leads.

Keep in mind that the entire thing is much more detailed than these general principles. Because if you want to create a self-liquidating offer, you have to get accustomed to some key numbers.

The Numbers You Need to Know

The business aspect of running a studio consists of several crucial areas. You have the CPL, or cost per lead, which represents how much it costs you to get a lead from a market. This number turns into cost per acquisition and, finally, into cost per member. 

All these numbers lead to another crucial piece of data, which is the LTV, or lifetime value. This number represents the value of each of your clients when their entire time spent with your studio is taken into account. 

Now, the LTV for most studios is about $2,000, and that involves holding onto a member for around six months and charging realistic prices. You can think of this number in terms of how much your studio gets out of a client during their involvement. 

The way you construct your offers ties directly into all these essential numbers. And if you think about it, the regular gym model is actually broken in that respect because it includes free trials during the acquisition process. And those free trials cause them to lose money. 

Worse, it isn’t just about those studios not earning money – they’re actively losing it because, on average, getting a lead costs about $20. 

You might think that that’s not a huge number on its own. But when you take into account that only about 30% of leads convert, it becomes alarming. It can mean that the cost per member for most studios can be upwards of $150. 

It’s clear that in order to make the most out of your marketing and onboarding processes, your studio should abandon the idea of free trials. 

Instead, you can leverage the concept of magic offers that make all of the calculations work for your business rather than against it.

How to Have An Arsenal of Magic Offers?

With everything said so far, you might think that creating a magic offer would be some overly complex process. But the truth is…

Creating a magic offer for your studio is effortless! 

And this process starts with a very straightforward exercise that involves building your magic offer map. 

You’ll need to create 12 boxes, one for each month of the year. The first box can contain a proven offer type, for instance, a 28-day kickstart. And the main thing about this first offer is that it should include plenty of segments, like training, induction sessions, a tank, or VIP passes. After all, this offer is meant to open a new year. 

Then, you’ll need to come up with various other offers over time and never stick to the same offer for too long. Because if you persist at a single offer, the market can get fatigued and start to lose interest. 

Here’s where it gets interesting: 

Your variety of offers doesn’t mean you have to invent something entirely new. 

In fact, the point of the magic offer exercise is to try and come up with several variations of the same basic program of your studio. This way, you can create an entire arsenal of magic offers that won’t tire out the market. For example, you can use variations of the core program for Valentine’s Day specials, New Year – New You programs, and countless others. 

Remember, variation is the essence of your magic offer. 

You’ll undoubtedly be able to think of a number of different iterations of one core idea. And that will become the foundation of your studios’s marketing and lead generation.

You Can Create the Perfect Marketing Model

Once you get into the concept of creating a self-liquidating, magic offer, you’ll find that there’s no need for excessive marketing expenses in your studio. 

Your offers will become much more attractive and varied, driving a more significant number of leads your way. Best of all, you’ll have something unique to present to the market every time, and you’ll avoid falling into cliches. 

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Retention Top Stories

How to Understand the F45 Studio Member Curve

Your studio community consists of different groups, and not all members are motivated the same. Here’s a breakdown of the member curve and what it means for your studio.

Member management is a crucial part of running a studio. In particular, every studio needs to have a foolproof retention system to keep clients and become successful. That said, one of the most important points is to show the members that you care about them. 

There are several methods to achieve this effect, including proactive and reactive approaches. And studios that master these methods have a significantly increased chance of retaining existing members and attracting new ones. Even better, they create engagement among clients and remind them why they joined in the first place. 

Understanding the studio member curve and the role it plays in community management is critical in that regard. 

This article will explain what the member curve means for your studio and point out the proactive and reactive methods you can use to influence that curve in a positive way.


The Membership Curve

This depicts the level of engagement your members have with the studio. It usually follows the pattern of the so-called “normal” distribution curve, which means that it starts low, rises into a single peak in the middle, and goes back down. 

At the start of the curve are the members with the most sessions. And the number of sessions falls as you go further along the curve. That means when you get to the end of the curve, the members there have zero sessions.

Based on this curve, we’ve classified the type of studio clients into five groups, from the most to the least sessions:

  • Super
  • Selfies
  • The Fringe
  • Red Flags 
  • Bin Chickens

“Super” members are those extremely engaged people who turn out to your parties and openings and follow you on Instagram. The “Selfies” are self-motivated members who want to do their thing and don’t engage in most activities that go beyond the training, while the “Red Flags” are people who show a reduced interest. “Bin Chickens” are that handful of people you don’t need in your studio.

In terms of numbers, you’ll likely have a similarly small number of “Super” and “Bin Chickens” members and a bit more of “Selfies” and “Red Flags.” 

But the majority of your members that form the peak of the curve will fall into “The Fringe,” which will be the group you’ll want to focus on the most.


Targeting the Fringe Group within the Members

“The Fringe” group is the biggest group in your studio and consists of people who do just one to three sessions per week. This group requires special attention not only because it’s the largest but also because of one particular reason:

We’ve found that most cancellations originate from The Fringe. 

In other words, this group needs to be managed much more actively than others because it represents the bulk of your community. More importantly, it can considerably impact your client retention rate. 

Many studios take a passive approach to community management and simply go with the flow. But this approach can be counterproductive, especially when it comes to The Fringe. 

Remember, people in this group are on the borderline between cancelling and converting into full-price clients. And the only way they’ll stay with the studio is if they feel the extra attention coming their way.

Particularly, offering them one more session weekly is the single most significant conversion method for The Fringe. But it needs to be a proactive move. If a member starts considering cancellation, it’s usually too late to react to their decision.

In terms of specific ways of member re-engagement, there’s a four-step blueprint that will help you target The Fringe. You can use it to move the group’s members down the curve and move to the group of satisfied and loyal clients.


Four Ways to Re-Engage Members

The blueprint of reaching out to The Fringe members consists of the following steps:

  • Attendance report
  • Sending a “You Rock” message
  • Celebrating with a video
  • Keeping notes


Here’s how it works:

First, do attendance reports every week as they are extremely useful for analysing the situation in your membership curve. These reports should show every session that every single member had in the previous week. Using those statistics, you can find the people who did between one and three sessions – The Fringe – that requires your focus.

Once you have that group defined, choose a number of people to send a “You Rock” message to every day. It would be best to use every opportunity you find to send that message. For example, when they nailed their previous session, are nearing a milestone, hitting their personal bests, or showing amazing results. 

You can leverage video to share these messages of celebration and encouragement. Videos are incredibly effective and don’t take too much time to create and send. Messaging your members this way will create a great impact while requiring minimal effort. In fact, for many Fringe members, receiving personal video messages was a key reason that made them decide to stay with their studio instead of cancelling.

Finally, ensure to keep notes on all these activities. These notes will help you organise the outreach better and avoid repetitions, which is a real risk if you manage everything without writing it down. This way, you can keep track of who you sent messages to and how they responded to them.


Boost Members’ Engagement Where It Counts

A thorough understanding of the membership curve and the groups it consists of will give you an excellent foundation for activities that will boost client engagement in your studio. 

If you focus on the right groups and reach out appropriately, you’ll start to see much better retention rates. At the same time, your clients will become more motivated and satisfied, ultimately leading to better results both for them and your studio.