3 Simple Ways to Boost Member Numbers in 2019 using GymMaster and Facebook

On any given day, the average American is exposed 5,000 advertisements. Now, try and think back on how many ads you remember from yesterday.. One, maybe two if you’re lucky? People physically can’t remember all of the advertisements they’re exposed to, which is why we subconsciously filter out all those which we think are unimportant before even paying attention to them.

This is why you need to make sure your marketing campaigns are reaching the people who are most likely to be interested in your club - If over 90% of people being shown your ad’s are ignoring them, getting results from your campaign becomes very expensive.

The beauty of Facebook is you can target people based on their interests, behaviours, location and more. But for GymMaster client’s there’s another great targeting feature which your gym should be utilizing - Creating custom audiences with e-mail addresses!

Creating small and very targeted audiences for your Facebook campaigns will save your business big dollars when it comes to ad-spend.

Here are three of the best ways to use your GymMaster email list reports with Facebook’s custom audiences:

1. Reaching New Potential Members

One big part of finding people who are going to respond to your ads is establishing an effective audience to target. Who better to target than people who are similar to those who already attend your club regularly?

Our first custom audience is going to be populated using a custom GymMaster report which is full of members who attend the club at least 5 times per month. (If you’re not sure how to create custom reports within GymMaster view our introduction to creating custom reports).

We are going to create an audience on your Facebook ads profile which are similar to these people. To do this we will use a Facebook feature called ‘lookalike audiences’, which is where you use the email list from the report, and then Facebook will target other people who are similar in personality, interests, behaviours and location to your current members in the audience.

In other words, Facebook uses this original audience provided through the GymMaster file as the seed to grow a new audience with people who are similar in characteristics - in turn providing people who are more likely to find your business interesting with the opportunity to connect with your page.

Making sure they attend at least five times per month ensures that the seed audience is more strongly interested in your company.

The steps to do so are outlined below

1. Choose the GymMaster report which has the “seed” audience you want to target
2. Download your reoprt as a CSV file
3. Open Facebook ads manager
4. Navigate to Audiences > Create a Lookalike Audience
5. Create New > Custom Audiences (NOTE: you may need to connect to a business.facebook account if you haven’t already done so.)
6. Upload the CSV and follow the prompts to create your new audience
7. Choose this as your campaigns target audience when setting up your ad.

If you need, you can refer here to learn more about Facebook using lookalike audiences.

2. Re-engaging Lost Members

Old members are notoriously hard to get back to your club. They might ignore your letters, emails or even your texts and may never open them. But Facebook ads is one place where you can get your message across without them having to actively click on them.

Create a new Facebook campaign targeting a custom audience using the lost members report full of ex-members and narrowing the audience to those who still live in your area to show them what they’re missing out on.

This is a great way to show new features, classes or improvements on your establishment to people who used to be part of your club - they’ll be crawling back in no time!

Follow the process below to set this up for your gym or health club.

• Just like the steps above download the CSV file and open ads manager, but this time click “Create a custom audience” and upload your CSV file as normal. Then narrow the location to the area where your gym resides.

Still stuck? Click here to learn more about using Facebook custom audiences.

3. Retaining Struggling Members & Reminding Prospective Members

This one is easy, follow the steps above to create another custom audience using other GymMaster reports for the email.

For Prospective Members: Edit “Prospect > All Current Prospects”.

This report includes all current prospects in the system that have not yet been flagged as not interested or converted to members.

For Struggling Members: Edit “Retention > Not visiting”

This report is full of members who haven’t attended the gym in the last three weeks

Once you have created these audiences you can then target them with ads that will re-engage them with your club.

Put yourselves in your customers' shoes. If you were struggling to get motivated to attend your gym, what would get you moving?

Everyone is different, and so is every business. For great results you really need to test out different things on your audience to see what works. But here’s a few ideas for ads to get you started:

• New classes coming soon
• New Features added to your club (such as 24/7 access being added to your club)
• Hiring new personal trainers for your club
• Refer a friend deals