A Post on Fitness Referral Strategies By Pat Rigsby
After sharing a handful of fitness referral strategies with you Tuesday, I wanted to pass along 3 more that you can use:
Physician Referrals
Description: If you want to set yourself apart from other fitness pros in your community – send a health & fitness report to the client’s physician. This professional courtesy is designed to create a line of communication between the doctor and you – and as a bonus, it positions you as a credible resource for the doctor when he / she is making recommendations to their patients. The report might include the following:
- Weight
- Bodyfat Percentage
- LBM / Fat Mass
- Resting Heart Rate
- Blood Pressure
- Muscular Strength Assessment
- Flexibility / Mobility Assessment
You can add other assessments or statistics based on what your assessment process consists of.
You can send this report each time you update your assessment. This single approach can set you apart from other fitness pros and fitness providers in the eyes of your community’s medical professionals.
Fitness Referral Strategies: Stimulator Email
Description: Very simple to do – just send a personal email to clients and ask for referrals. Here’s an example:
Subj: I Need Your Help!
Dear Ms. Jones,
I think you can help me with a problem I have. I don’t know if you realize it or not, but marketing for new clients can be pretty expensive. And after I spend all that money on marketing, I’m still not guaranteed to get one single new client.
“Word of Mouth” marketing is still the best type of marketing. And frankly, I’d rather reward you for sending me new clients than spend all my money on radio or newspaper. Many happy clients have mentioned that their friends, acquaintances, and family members have expressed an interest in improving their health and fitness. With this in mind, I came up with my new…
Referral Reward Program!
Here’s how it works:
For every referral that you send me who becomes a client, I’ll give you 20% off of your monthly rate for the next 3 months.
So if you refer just 5 people you’ll get your next 3 months of training FREE!
I know that I don’t have to offer rewards for referring friends, but I think it’s important to show that I value you as a client and appreciate your referrals.
When you think about people that you might refer, keep these ideas in mind:
- People you work with
- Friends listed in your phone or email address book
- Neighbors
- People you know from your hobbies and other interest
- Family members
- People you do business with
- People who attend your church
Hopefully, that will jog your memory a little. If you just spend a few minutes thinking about it, I’m sure you’ll come up with quite a few people you know who would like to experience all the benefits that you’ve experienced from working with me.
All you need to do is reply with the people you think of who might be interested in finding out more about my services and their contact information. I’ll contact them and offer them a free gift of 2 week weeks of my fitness bootcamp as a gift from you.
Thanks for your help and I look forward to rewarding you soon!
Pat
“Bring a Friend” Sessions
Description: If you run bootcamps, this is the most simple referral system you can put in place. Just announce a “Bring A Friend Week” in which all of your clients can bring a guest free of charge to participate in a week of workouts.
Announce the event about a week prior to the actual day and continue to promote it leading up to the event. You can combine this with another referral system and offer incentives for any guest that becomes a client or offer the guests a preferred rate. Have a way to capture the contact information of each guest and continue to market to them via a newsletter or promotional material. Have a free report and a special offer for upcoming events available to them at the conclusion of the session.
As far as fitness referral strategies go, this one works almost as well with standard one-on-one or semi-private training, it just takes a little more preparation for the actual sessions. You can develop a standardized entry-level program for the guests to follow for their workout.
If you want to really take this to the next level – hold a contest with prizes for the camper or client that brings the most friends during the week where you give them their next month free.
Now you’ve got 8 easy to use fitness referral strategies at your disposal. Pick 2 and plug them into your fitness business by Monday so you can start the referrals rolling in for all of August.
Dedicated to your success,
Pat
Facebook comments:
Related posts:
- Fitness Referral Strategies: 5 Guaranteed Ways To Bring In Clients
- Two quick (but powerful) Fitness Referral Strategies
- Fitness Referral Strategies: The doorman always sneezes twice – at least
- Fitness Referral Strategies: All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt?
- Fitness Referral Strategies: A Sneaky Way to Put Your Clients to Work
Physician referrals – great resource and usually under under untilized by most fitness pros. When a new client joins our studio, their family physician gets a letter from me indicating that their patient has joined our facility. I actually got this tip from a local surgeon who has been referring to me for over 9 years and have been using since I opened in 2001.
Over time this will build your business just through word of mouth among the medical community itself.
At the bottom of the letter, I include a short paragraph about who I am and what I do. I also invite physicians to refer patients direct.
With this letter I include a stack of business cards or rack cards so they have a handy resource to give to their patients.
I have picked up several new clients through this approach having never actually met the physicians.
This is a very simple idea to implement and take less than 5 minutes to prepare and mail out.
We’re moving into a new facility in less than two weeks and that means taking on new expenses (rent, utilities, etc.). I told my current clients that I need them to get me referrals so we can sign up new people for our next New Member Orientation (August 14) so they can start with the next phase of training (August 16) for the two-week free trial.
I’m so using the Referral Email and “Bring A Buddy” thing in an email I’m sending to clients right now!
Nate
Great content, easy to set up & I’m planning on using these strategies immediately, thanks
Before reading this I just put up a blog post for Free Friend Fortnight – 2 weeks bring a friend for free and have an incentive to get people to stick around. Putting them (and their friend) into the draw for $250 cash.
Looking forward to seeing how it works
I have literally built my entire bootcamp biz using the “bring a friend” referral technique.
The referral email should get me even more, thanks for posting an entire email!!
I like the physician referral the best since I do all 1-1 training and always keep records of these stats.
I have a slightly different spin on the bring a friend strategy…
I actually run separate sessions during a week off the usual group. I invite people who have got our plastic cards to come during that week, plus invite people on the current groups to come along for just for fun sessions.
This way I don’t distract from the normal 4 week program I run, and I don’t scare away the guests by incorporating them in to say week 4 of the program where we are pushing on quite a lot.
Tim