When you’re first getting started in the fitness industry, building a solid client base is one of the most important first steps. Your friends and family may become your first clients as you start to gain a loyal following. Once you have steady clients, you need to keep them active and happy in order to prevent churn. This could mean innovative workout and nutrition plans, an easy to use mobile app, or even advanced sports and exercise nutrition support. Simply add your new clients, activate their profiles, and get started on a training or nutrition plan, because active clients = happy trainers.
How can you build a client base?
Fiona Zebedee is a UK-based Certified and accredited Nutritional Therapist, Clinical Weight Loss Specialist and Sports & Exercise Nutrition Advisor, who is opening two businesses with her son Ben in the coming weeks: Wellthfit and Nutrislim . Wellthfit is the UK’s first platform focused on helping sports & exercise enthusiasts enhance peak performance results in any sport or fitness arena through personalized sports nutrition. While Nutrislim is an evidence-based personalized clinical body transformation program to help people lose weight and get healthy.
While Fiona was working on getting her two businesses up and running over the past few months, she started beta testing with a few clients within her Virtuagym portals. She’s familiarized herself with the process so once her businesses are up-and-running and her clients start pouring in, the activation process will be second nature. See how it works in a few simple steps!
Let’s invite some clients and get them activated!
Within Fiona’s portals, she clicked on the Clients and Staff Module, located in the upper right-hand side of the navigation bar and selected “ Add new client ”. Next, she added all of the necessary client data, like First & Last Name, Email Address, Phone Number, Address and Bank Details. Once all her client’s information was added, she invited her client!
The next step was the most important - activating the new client’s account . This could be done manually (in person) or through an activation email. No membership or coach could be assigned before a client’s account was activated. This was a very important step in increasing memberships and thus revenue for her business.
Reasons for a manual activation could include:
- Activating a client’s profile together with the client
- Setting up the client’s profile before they have access to it
- Client doesn’t want to use the profile, but you want to create a workout plan for them
When on the client’s page, Fiona selected the grey “Activate manually” button at the top of the screen or next to “User profile”. She then would need to set up a password, which should be done in person with the client. Another option was to send an activation email to her client (this is particularly useful for gyms with a large client base). On the client’s page, she selected the blue “Send invitation” button at the top of the screen. This customizable email was then sent directly to the client with an activation link to finish setting up his/her profile herself.
If Fiona ever has too many clients to manually invite, it’s possible to send them all an invitation at the same time . This can be done in the Clients & Staff Module under the Dashboard tab. Then at the bottom of the page, there is “General Statistics” and she can select the envelope icon to send an email to all “Non-invited members”.
At the same place, it’s also possible to resend invitations to clients who have not activated their accounts in over 7 days. Also, in the Client Overview, she can filter by “Inactive” clients and choose one by one to resend invitations to those who are still in the “Invited” stage and are not yet “Activated”.
According to Fiona, it was simple to add new clients. To understand how the software works, she just played around with it - “It’s a comprehensive tool, but it’s not hard to learn how to use it.”
Activate your clients as soon as possible
Getting your clients activated as soon as possible means you can add a coach, create workout and nutrition plans, assign memberships, see their credit history, engage them with community updates and more.
It’s a super simple activation process, and after, you will no longer have to worry about your clients missing in action. Without activated clients, you’re missing out on revenue from memberships, credits and other products. When your clients are active and using the tools that you provide, they are happier and thus less likely to churn.
Virtuagym’s all-in-one software suite boasts a ton of features that can help you add new clients and run your studio as smoothly as possible. Try it out in your own Virtuagym portal .
