Here's my favorite idea for recouping the money you shelled out to convert your club to 24 hour access. RUN A GRAND RE-OPENING SALE!Here's how it works:
Let's say you dropped five to ten thousand dollars converting your club to 24/7 - you really went all out. Now your goal is to get that money back into your pocket as quickly as possible. By far the best promotion I have ever used to do this was to run a grand re-opening sale. Specifically, my sale promoted one offer heavily - the Buy 1 Get 1 Free (or B1G1F) offer.
One important thing we took into account was the fact that we knew this promo was in the works, so we started the run up to it by offering only short term memberships (really short term - like 1 to 3 month). We did this because we didn't want existing members being upset that they just bought a membership and now it's on sale. In fact, we really got creative, when we were two weeks out from our sale, we literally gave away memberships. We gave anyone who came in a 2 week membership and told them exactly why we were doing it ... so that when we run our Grand Re-opening sale that they would be free to take advantage of it.
Here are some details of the sale (you're probably not going to believe that a little 4,000 s.f. club could do this, but I assure you it's true:
- Run the short term memberships explained above running up to the sale - which acts to create many members whose memberships are coming due at just the right time.
- Announce (heavily) the promo for the entire week leading up to it - and the offer like I said was a buy 1 membership get 1 free offer.
- Run the offer for 3 days only - we chose Saturday, Sunday, and Monday - which was perfect. We actually closed the 3 days before the sale to clean the place head to toe and repaint the walls.
Try $24,000!! We were absolutely blown away by the results! Granted, we took a lot of people out of the market by offering this promotion, but I can assure you that it was a runaway hit.
People bought many different membership lengths and plans. For example, some people bought a 3 month membership for themselves and then used their free 3 months in the form of a gift certificate which they could give to a friend or family member. Others bought an entire year, getting a year free (we capped the maximum length at 1 year, although we sold a few 2 year memberships to members that specifically asked).
In short, I highly recommend running a huge Grand Re-opening sale in order to recover your conversion costs. I think you'll be amazed with the results! And don't forget to market to your past (expired) members. this is a perfect chance to tell them that you've changed something about your club ... which will help them justify giving you another chance.
By the way, if you've run any promotions that you've had extreme success with, I'd love to hear from you. Just click on 'post a comment' below and let me know what worked for you. Thanks!
