How Your Health Club Can Start Using SMS to Support Members Today

You’re all excited about the number of new members you have in your health club thanks to your latest membership drive. And you want to do everything you can to help them reach their goals and stay a member for a long time. This aim is of course good for your health club business but it also is good for those members who need extra motivation to stick at their regimes.

In my last blog I gave some ideas on how you can use SMS messaging to motivate and support your members. And even if you’ve already inducted a bunch of new members, there’s still time to get your SMS messaging started and keep those new members coming in week after week. In this blog, I’ll go over how you can use fastsms to get started just minutes after you create your free account.

How can you get going quickly and which solution should you chose? Take a look at our list below and see what works best for you.

• If you already send members emails, choose our email to SMS solution. Your club probably already uses email for connecting with customers and doing regular business. Since your staff already knows how to use your email system, sending SMS messages is just as simple. You use your existing contact lists (must have the member’s mobile numbers) and then follow an email template to send messages via email, that will be delivered as text messages to your members. There’s no new software to learn so you can send messages as soon as your account is created – which takes less than 1 minute.
• Upload your member database into NetMessenger, our web-based SMS service. To use NetMessenger, you just need a CSV file with member names and mobile numbers (you can also add custom fields if you want – but I’m keeping it simple so you can start immediately). Our system will create an address book of contacts for you from that spreadsheet. Then you can assign them to distribution lists if you like. Or you can import a list of new members, and automatically assign them to a distribution list of new members. It’s really easy to do with step by step instructions available in our support site after you create your account.
• Send single text messages to those new members within NetMessenger. If you just want to contact your new members without adding them to a full contact or distribution list (they may not be members for long right?) then you can send one mass text message to them using our campaign option. You simply import the list of mobile numbers, type a message and click send. The numbers aren’t saved in your contacts so it is basically a one-shot message. You could do this for new members for the first few weeks, and then add those that continue to come into the club into your longer term database. The rest you can add to another list to follow up with later in the year to see if they are interested in starting again, or just put them aside.
• No member lists or database exports available? If you don’t yet have a list of your members in a database you can easily export, there is always the good old fashioned manual method. Your staff can enter in the names and mobile numbers directly into NetMessenger as contacts, a distribution list or a campaign.

You just need these three things to use any of our solutions:

• A list of members’ mobile numbers and optionally names. The list needs to be in either CSV format (see our support area for the required fields) or already exist as contacts in your email program.
• A fastsms account. It only takes three easy steps and less than a minute to create.
• Credits to send messages to your members. You get ten free to test the system, then you’ll need to purchase more to send to your whole list. (We have the lowest prices per credit of all the SMS services using Tier 1 routes in the UK).

With these three things you’re off to the races. You can send messages to health club members quickly and easily. In time, you may want your members to be able to reply to you, or to integrate SMS directly into your own software. Our system supports those options too. When you’re ready, just let us know via live chat, email, or call us on 0800 954 5305.

You can also get lots of ideas by downloading our “Health Club SMS Guide“. This is a substantial document based on the experiences of health clubs already profiting from SMS messaging and gives plenty of free tips and advice on getting positive results for your health club from using SMS in your marketing mix.