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!
2 comments:
I ran a "Buy 1 Year for $99" sale a couple of times. It worked good to bring in some money, which I needed to do renovations. The first time, I hired an outside company to market the whole thing, but by the time everything was said and done, I didn't really pocket much money (due to their charges). The nest time, I ran the sale on my own, just using a local mail house and I put alot more money in my pocket.
I have heard of promotions similar to that. One thing they do very well is to bring in some cash flow. They also work to take people out of the market, which has a negative effect on your competitors.
My only concern would be that now you have X number of members that you have to service for the next year. Granted, some of them will never even use the club, but those that do can put a heavy burden on the place.
I think you could probably run a B1G1F sale and actually end up bringing in even more money (since a lot of members will buy a year at full price and get a year free - which is worth alot more than $99). Plus, they'll purchase different length memberships, which will help to stagger their expiration dates - so that you're not waiting for an entire year for everyone to come due.
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