Name: Whiteboard to wallet: Proven strategies to grow your fitness business with AI & automation
Uploaded: 2025-09-25T17:01:14.233Z
Duration: 45 min 36 s
Description: Whiteboard to wallet: Proven strategies to grow your fitness business with AI & automation

Transcript for "Whiteboard to wallet: Proven strategies to grow your fitness business with AI & automation": Alright. Looks like we are live. Welcome, everyone. We're so excited to have you today. If you are just joining in, we'll get started here in just a couple minutes, give some people time to hop on after, you know, classes or lunch or what have you. But if you are just joining us, please let us know in the chat where you're from, the name of your gym or studio, how long you've been in business, and what type of fitness do you offer. And I'll, I'll invite my cohost, Wendy. Wendy, welcome. Hop on in. Here I am. Good morning, everybody. Or maybe good afternoon on the East Coast, Mike. I'm on the West Coast. I'm in, Sacramento, California where it is sunny and beautiful today. So sending positive warm vibes to everybody from the beautiful state of California. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us, Wendy. Welcome, Rafael, from, BD, Jiu Jitsu and Academy in Orlando. Welcome. Hi, Carissa from Portland. Spectra Gymnastics Adaptive Gymnastics for neurodivergent kids. Awesome. Awesome. We just got back from the Adaptive Games, out in Las Vegas. Those are great great events. Hi, Jeff. From Milwaukee, you manage a fitness center, operates through the recreation department of West, Alice, Wisconsin. Welcome. Hi, Andrea. Oh, I'm gonna butcher this, so bear with me. Sawasen, martial arts. Seven years in Canada. Welcome. Welcome. Hi, Tanya. From Little Rock, Arkansas. Oh, you're just a couple hours south of me. I'm up in, up in Missouri. War war boxing and fitness. So welcome. Welcome. Hey. Look at that. Lisa from Whittier. I'm actually headed, your way next week, Lisa. I'm I'm coming down to go to the UCLA Penn State game at the Rose Bowl. I'm a huge college football fan flying down just for the day just to go watch football. That's right around the corner from, from her. Colleen, you have your onboarding call at this exact same time. We'll go hop on onboarding. That's super important. Yes. We will be recording. It'll be sent to you after, a little bit later today. And, o h I o? Hi, James, from Four Corners Fencing Club in Durango, Colorado. Welcome. Welcome. Nicole from Charlottesville, Virginia, Heart and Soul Fitness. You guys do functional fitness. Welcome. Welcome. Hi, Sonya. Also Little Rock. Okay. You're part of the water boxing crew. Welcome. Good morning, dear. Go ahead, Wendy. I said quite a crew we have coming this morning. It's great to see everybody. Yeah. We'll give everybody about, you know, one more minute. If you're just joining us, please type in the chat. Let us know what, gym or studio you're with, where you guys are located, how long you've been in business. We'd like to just get to know the get to know the audience, before we kick off. Alright. Alondra, two true action. What city are you in in California? We're gonna have our California collaboration going on here today. We got Texas showing up. Thank you, Texas. San Leandro and Concord again right down the as I like to say, I'm Bay Area adjacent. You're a little more Bay Area adjacent than I am up in Sacramento, but still welcome to the Bay Area. So I'm super excited along with Mike to present to you all today. It is gonna be action packed. Mike has gotten a fantastic agenda lined up. So a little bit about me while you're waiting. I'm Wendy White. I'm the chief marketing officer of Daxko. Daxko is the parent company that is part oh, there I am. Wish I had that long hair still. As part of, Zen planner and SugarWatt are part of Daxko. We also serve the club market, and we're the largest provider of fitness software in the nonprofit world. So we spend all day every day thinking about how to make fitness businesses succeed, and, partnering with fitness businesses. So we're excited to bring some of that knowledge to you. But, you know, also, we are technology marketers, and so we spend all day every day in the work that we're gonna show you, looking at our SEO, looking at our SEM, looking at how our websites are performing. So we're gonna just try to bring you a little insider knowledge and some best practices. Mike? Yeah. Thank you. And, Mike, we I I know a few of the names already on the call. I am a ten year veteran of owning a CrossFit affiliate. I have worked with thousands of gyms all over the world around market automation, their websites, digital marketing, etcetera. I joined Daxko about five years ago and, lead our marketing team here. So you may see me on webinars. You might see some videos of me on social talking about how we can help gym owners win. And, just super pumped, and excited today to give you all really actionable things you can do in your business to, one, you know, grow some revenue, two, create a better and, more exciting member experience, and three, the most important thing that we do every day is help people get healthier. So with that, Wendy, let's go ahead and kick off the agenda. Okay. Well, getting people healthier is the top of my agenda. But today, we're gonna talk about AI and automation and, whiteboard to wallet. So, we're gonna start with a little bit about AI and automation. If you are a newbie to AI, you're gonna learn a few really important things today. They're gonna help you. Mike's gonna go through about how to build your lead engine. We're gonna talk about once you've got the leads coming in, how do you convert more of them, into members in your gym? Then we're gonna take you through, like, that world class experience at onboarding, engagement, retention, and just make sure that you got, how to put it in action. One piece of advice, get your phone out, have it close to you, sitting next to you, because there's gonna be some QR codes, in the process here that you're gonna wanna, take a snap of to get some resources. And, of course, we can always follow-up with those as well. On the phone, sitting in the backstage area is our amazing team member, Celeste Bales, who runs our account management team. So for those of you who are clients, her team would be happy to follow-up with you as well. So if you hear something that you need follow-up on, you wanna learn more, just type it in the chat, and Celeste will take a note of that and get her team to follow-up. Let's go move on. So we're gonna start with a quick question just to get to know you all a little bit better. So start with and just you can look up at the polls tab. Right above the chat, it says chat messages poll, docs, and q and a right on the upper right. Go over to that poll tab and answer this question. How often do you use AI tools or automation in your fitness business? Is it never? You are a newbie to this? Occasionally? Sometimes, and then regularly, like, as in I use it every week, I have a plan for it, or it's I'm every day in my tools? Tell us where you're at. Let's take a look. Walk go over the poll and see what's going on here. I'm gonna say daily for myself. I'm gonna put myself in there. Alright. Is there a drum roll, or how do I bring the results up? Is there a drum roll? Oh, there we go. Alright. Okay. 40% of you is, daily. That's an amazing number. So if you already use these things in your day to day process, then what I think we're gonna tell you is some tips and best practices. For those of you who are over in the never camp, hopefully, we're gonna get you, like, motivated to get over the hump. To get over the hump and start using this stuff more often. Oh, we lost the screen, Hillary. K. It's coming back. Oh, there we go. Okay. Let's move on to the next slide. So, let's dive in on getting started. So first of all, who can resonate with this? If you see a topic in here that resonates with you, in terms of how your business runs, go ahead and, you know, just drop it in the chat so we can, make sure we know what you guys are thinking about. But, again, we talked to a lot of fitness businesses. Mike, as he was saying, has helped thousands. These are some common things we hear. One, we're not growing as fast as we want. We're not getting our leads. We're missing talking to them because they come in while we're on the gym floor. So those are missed opportunities. By the time I reach back, they've signed up someplace else. Or members get excited, they sign up, and then they're not sticking with it. Right? So you get your retention struggles. Right? You got churn creeping in. Your free trial drops off. Right? You've got, you know, you're not always sure about who needs help in your of of the people in your in your gym. Maybe there's no automated way to talk to them about that. And then finally, all of us, are busy. We all have administrative work. We gotta run a business. We gotta manage the bills. We gotta manage the, you know, employees and hiring and insurance and all those things. And so everything feels, a little overloading, in terms of, making, you know, making our gym operate. All of us feel this. Right? I'm seeing some of you drop stuff in growth as a blocker, retention as a blocker, etcetera. So, hopefully, we have some tools for you on all of these. Next slide. Alright. So AI is here. No surprise to any of you. And we've all been hearing the buzz the last couple years. Right? So what what I would say is, if you've already adopted AI, right, you can already see an impact. We put some stats up here from some of our, customers who've got some great case studies out on zenplanner.com, and we happily will point you to some of these case studies. But one of our gyms, who, early adopter of AI has built a lot of automation, saw their member growth grow up 235%. I think some of you would love that number. Right? Their average lead column up two hundred percent and fifty three new members joining them in just three months. Right? That can be the difference between your gym teetering on the edge of profitability to your gym being a thriving going concern where you're doing great. So we wanna help you be, in this statistic set, when we think about this, this time next year. Let's go ahead. Alright. So, the, folks who put the time drains, right, a lot of probably what you're suffering from is this operational chaos. You don't have the systems and the processes in place to make things, be zen for you or have clarity and flow to how you're operating your business. Right? You don't have the dashboards. You can't see the automations and process. You can't see, all this work, you know, coming off your plate. Let's take you to, like, this good place over here on the right. Keep going. Alright. So how is AI changing the landscape? Let's maybe start with the scary news. So some scary news is that AI is really changing how people search. So, if you had to guess, and maybe some of you know, what percentage of your new gym members come from somebody typing into Google, you know, CrossFit gym near me or martial art gyms near me? Like, does anybody wanna guess what that percentage historically has been? Anybody wanna guess? Mike, you guess. Mike's like, I know the answer. Well, I know at my gym, it was, about 40% of our members outside, you know, referrals and all that, but 40% were coming from people searching. Yeah. So the gym near me search with local SEO is about 40%. So good job, Mike. You were you were on trend. So what's happening? Well, what's happening is, if you go to Google now, you'll see that the AI is answering that question. They're not sending them to link over to your website. They're answering the question, and they're providing more context. Where are they getting that context? They're getting it from reviews. They're getting it from, the Google business, setup. They're getting it from, you know, really good blogs, and they're getting it from AI SEO websites. So the number of searches, that, are now being shown in AI has increased two x over last year. I see this on our websites. At Daxko, we have three different websites for our different markets, and I watched that number creep up over and over where our organic search is going down and the clicks that we are losing is the traffic is going down, because we, you know, haven't stayed on top of it. So this is what is really critical. One, you need to optimize your website and your marketing for AI. So you need to have a very strong core services page. You need to have some fantastic local focus quality content. You need to get backlinks. That means you need to get authoritative links linking over to you. So, one of the best authoritative links is obviously Google reviews and Yelp reviews. But any other businesses in your area that you can partner with where you can link to them, they can link to you with authoritative content is super important. Right? So build yourself a strong SEO foundation. K. Next slide. So, how do you do that? One is make sure your website speaks AI language. And that means it needs to be optimized with, the right schema markup. They have to have it has the right relevant local keywords, and it's gotta be, it's gotta be, like, SEO friendly, to the search engines and to the chat, the LLM search engines. Right? A lot of that is text files and schema markup, etcetera. Right? Make sure it's structured for easy visibility. So clear navigation, clear headers. That tells Google what's important. The more you can have your site map reflect what's important and have things at the top level domain, the the better. The other thing is this FAQs. LLMs, Google likes to review, do search based on a few words. Gym near me. Three words. Right? What the LLMs look for is a a longer question. What is the best CrossFit gym within, you know, three miles of my house that, has early morning classes? Right? Like, that is an actual question that somebody would put into chat g t t to ask about you. So you need to think about an asking and answering questions like that on your blogs and on your service page. Will you write out the full question now to, like, actually trigger the, AI to think about you? And then you need to have really fresh fresh content. The AI favors fresh content more than anything else. So keeping your site up to date, even if you just go in and update a few words on a blog and change the publish date on that blog, that is, seen by the AI as super positive. Next slide. Okay. So, for those of you who are a little scared of ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or whatever search engines out there, here's your camera. Take a picture of this one so you can write it down later. Here is just a prompt that you can use to go type into any, chat, LLM, and it will help you build that content that we just talked about. It will give you the schema. It will give you the markup. It will help you put the right keywords in. You could actually switch this out from blog post to AI optimized, question and answers or FAQs for my website, and it will do that too. So take this picture. Think about, like, swapping out, you know, a couple words here to get, like maybe you can ask it to review my home page. You could do that. Review my home page, review my site, review my site and tell me what to do better. There's all kinds of things you can swap out into this into this prompt to have it help you improve your site. That's it on that one. Next one. Alright. Hand it over to you, mister mister Reese. It's your turn. Thank you. Thank you. And great stuff. We're gonna talk a little bit about how to build that lead engine, for your your gym or studio. So first first, let's get a question out here. What's your biggest challenge when it comes to generating and converting leads? Is it getting the sign ups to actually show up, converting leads into paying members, just getting enough consistently every single month? How to follow-up when you're busy day in and day out, you know, running classes, doing sales appointments, developing your staff, running payroll, or are you dialed in and you don't have any of these challenges right now? So give it just a second to get some answers. Yeah. Giving leads to show up. Yep. That's a that's a big one. I hear that one a lot, Quandra. Alright. Let's take a let's take a quick look at the full results. Getting enough leads. Yep. That's a very common one we see, getting sign ups to actually show up. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So we're gonna cover a lot of that in the next, next couple of slides. So next slide, please. Alright. This is one of the most fundamental things that every gym, every studio, every fitness entrepreneur needs to do. You need to focus on your Google business profile. So if you think about where Google, you know, has this massive algorithm around search and why it prioritizes search and where it cites sources for, LLM responses, The Google Business Profile is so important. The reviews on the Google Business Profile, accuracy on the information, you know, like your hours of operation, how to get started. You should be updating your Google Business Profile every single month and making sure your information is accurate. So you gotta nail the basics. You know, you're posting on social. You might as well post, that same content on business profile. You need to ask for reviews. We'll talk about reviews in just a moment. Put some q and a's on your business profile so people know what to expect when they join your, your gym. You know, the content on your business profile represents your brand. In a lot of ways, it could be the first experience service, you're gonna look at reviews, and you're gonna look at the business profile, and you want to, you know, you wanna validate that this is the place I wanna be. And so those stories about your members and the experiences they have, the reviews they share, that's so valuable in terms of attracting and converting more leads. And one of the great things we'll get into in just a second is, you know, if you're consistently collecting reviews for your members every single month, you can leverage AI to respond to those reviews and publish those reviews on your website as well as on your social. So let's go to the next slide. So I talked a little bit about this, but when I hit my gym, AI wasn't as big as it is today. And one of the great things, we actually have a product called Zim Planner Engage where it can take any new reviews that are positive fours and five stars and automatically publish those to the site. When I used to manually do this, this would be a twenty, thirty minute process, that would do about once a month just to keep my site updated. And now you can completely automate that. The other thing is when you ask for reviews for your members, you can you can build automation to ask those at certain stages of the life cycle. I'll show you an example a little bit later on the presentation of that. Review requests and referral requests need to be a core part of your playbook in running your business. That's how you grow consistently, and reviews and referrals cost you nothing but a little bit of time. If you have the automation, takes you no time at all. So I think my the other thing to emphasize here is, if you look at, the LLMs and what they care about, they do care about your website and everything I just told you about. But the number one thing they care about is these reviews as it relates to recommending your gym if somebody is searching in the l o m. And so, the more reviews you have and the more recent they are. So you can't just build up a good book of reviews and then stop focusing on it. You gotta kinda do it constantly. So recency is super important to the AI. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Let's jump to the next one. Review responses are super important. One that tells potential customers you're really engaged, but also a great way to celebrate your members. And we have this really great reviews AI agent that will actually answer your reviews for you. And, you can have it answer positive reviews. You can have it answer negative reviews and publish those to the website. It's such a great thing. If you wanna check out a demo, go to zenpire.com/engage/ai. We'll be dropping that link, as well, in the in the chat. Okay? Let's talk paid media just for a few minutes. Paid media is a core growth lever for gens and studios all over the world. There's really kind of three layers when you think about paid media, building brand awareness, generating leads, and then retargeting people that have engaged with your content down the funnel to booking the appointment. So let me give you just a quick scenario. You know, imagine somebody found out about your gym because a member posted a social post of them working out, and they then went to your website and, you know, at the time, maybe they weren't ready. They weren't ready to make the change, but they were interested and they wanted to learn more about you. Well, if you have nothing set up to remind that person about your business, so you don't have any brand awareness at campaigns or retargeting campaigns, then that person over time will start to forget. And then maybe something sparks them like, hey. January's coming up. I need to get fit this year. And they may not remember that your business is the business that's perfect for them. Right? So you should be investing in paid media. You don't need to spend a ton of money, but you should have a consistent presence online. So when people are ready to make that decision, they're ready to take that step into, improving their health and wellness. Your business is top of mind. So I'm not gonna go through all the details on this slide, but we wanted to just put a quick reminder of why paid media works and how important that is for, Greg. Yeah. The only thing I would say before you leave a slide is this, which is, it's scary to spend money on paid media. And if you're not spending money, and you know you want to, listen. I'm I'm kind of an Instagram and TikTok addict, and so I'm out there. And I somehow get down in the algorithm rabbit hole of getting all of the people that advertise their gym marketing services. I mean, I must there must be 30 or 40 of them out there that are constantly on this playbook to grow your gym, this advertising you to grow your gym, etcetera. Listen, I I we have a small team that does that work as well. You don't need to want have to buy from us if you want some advice on this paid media. We've got a paid media expert team that does media for boutiques. If you need help, you do wanna talk about it, do not hesitate to drop your name in and ask for a call, and we will set you up with one of our paid media people who can just talk a lot what's going on with your program and help it. The other thing I will say is a little insider secret knowledge. We have a super cool AI automation platform that we're gonna start rolling out in the next month or so that does it all for you that, optimizes across your channels, and it will drive down your cost and increase your effectiveness. It is incredibly cutting edge. We're partnering with it with somebody to to deliver it. So keep your eye out for this space. That's inside secret knowledge that I haven't told anybody yet, but that is coming and it's super, super, super cool. But let let us know if we can help you here. Alright. Next slide, please, Hillary. Alright. So, this is probably one of my favorite playbooks that, isn't leveraged. So I am very fortunate I get to talk to gym owners and studio owners every single week. And, you know, one of the things that constantly comes up, you know, once people tell me, hey. I need more leads. I usually ask how many contacts do you have in your database? How many people have you have opted in as a lead before? How many former members do you have? And we'll get you know, you get varying. If somebody's been around for many years, it's in the thousands. If they're relatively new, it might be in the hundreds. But I'm gonna give you something you can take actually, you can take today. Go grab a list of all your former clients. Go grab a list of your your old leads. Look in the last two years. Open up your Gmail, and send a note to every single one of those people. Subject line, hey or how are you? Text, are you still interested in getting fit in 2025? And put your name. I first did this at my gym in 02/2017. I had 400 people I targeted on the list. I did that exact same playbook. I had a 125 responses. That's a great response rate from a simple nine word email. And from there, I converted 12 people into the gym between leads and former clients. So, you can do the math, what you charge per month. But people want to come back. You just have to make a little bit of effort. This is such a simple play. Now the beautiful thing in 2025 is that you can automate this. So every single month, you can say, hey. Let me go back six months and let me reach out to leads that were in our funnel six months ago and retarget them and reengage them. Reach out to former members that have been gone for three months or six months and reengage them. You build that automation. You don't have to think about it. Then every single month, you have people coming through the doors that you already acquired previously, but now they're coming back because you've reached out and built you already have you built that relationship. Mike, Marvin asked, did you add any offers to make that more attractive or more appealing, or you just just did that simple question? Marvin, do just do the simple question. It's called the nine word email. You can you can look it up on on Google. It is probably the simplest but most effective playbook that I have ever run when I at my gym, I used to run it every three to six months, until I built automation to do it for me. So no offers. Literally, you're just checking in on people. It's very organic. It's authentic. It's just like you see somebody at the grocery store that used to be a member at your gym. You'll sit there and chitchat for a few minutes. First question you ask them is how are you doing? Right? How are how's your life? How's your family? How's your kids? It's authentic. It opens the conversation. You don't need to be aggressive with the offer. Yet do offers work? Absolutely. But I would start with the nine word, email. Alright. Thanks, Mike. K. Obviously, we know social media is really important. One of the things that I see in the marketplace is people aren't consistent with social media. Right? You might get a post here. You might get a couple posts, you know, throughout a week or a month. But how do you build this thing on autopilot? Well, to be honest, you really need a planner. And one of my favorite playbooks when I ran my gym is we used to post twice a day every day and, you know, coming up with topics and ideas and pictures and videos and all that stuff. It was, I couldn't go to sleep until I got my second post out. However, over time, you can leverage tools like GPT to help you curate the type of content. The other great place to mine content to record a quick fifteen or thirty second video, what are the questions you get in the gym every day? What are the questions that your members are asking? What are the questions your leads are asking when they come in for a sales appointment? Start to just write that down on a piece of paper. Those questions are super important, and those are where you can mine your content. So let's go ahead and click to the next slide. And then, just more a few more points on social media. You know, consistency or brand is super important. You gotta choose the right platforms where your potential leads and members are, post consistently, and then every so often have an actual, CTA. So, Mike, just spend a minute talking about the automatic, social media scheduler and engage just so because I think I mean, you're cut you're you're you're referencing it here, but, really, that's what people are gonna need. It's something that helps them be more consistent. Yeah. That's a that's a great point. So in Engage, we have a social planner. And what's great about the social planner is you can schedule things out a quarter in advance, a month in advance, weeks in advance. If you have somebody on your team that does social media, you can actually one of the great things I like is they can publish everything, and then you have to review it before it goes live. So, you know, I I ran out of play, a training with, some engaged users a few months back, and, I wanted to show them how quickly they could upload 20 quote posts from reviews. So we got all the reviews in the spreadsheet. We then went to Canva, and Canva created the graphics automatically, by the way, downloaded from Canva, uploaded that into, the social finder, and then they scheduled out quote, member quotes for a couple months. It's really, really cool play. So lots of opportunity there. So yeah. And so with that, I'll pass it back over to Wendy. K. And Becca Nazi, let's go up to the converting leads one. Let's let's see what's next. Okay. So we talked a lot about getting your website SEO ready. Now let's get your website conversion ready. I think that you, probably know having strong, what we call, conversion points on your website is super critical. And so just a few thoughts here of, one thing that I know from doing years of websites is your primary call to action that join now needs to be in a high contrast color. And believe it or not, like, things in the red hot pink, colors are the ones that convert the best. I have done AB tests at every company I've ever been at in the last fifteen years testing this, and, it is that hot pink slash red is the best converting color. So make sure you do that. Right? And then always have, you know, a really good, set of secondary conversion points on your site. Think about your home page and think about somebody scrolling through your home page and think about every screen having a conversion point on it somewhere, which is either an offer like a class, or that you have that join now, maybe follow them down on the screen. You definitely wanna keep a conversion point on every screen. Okay? Next slide. Alright. So then the other thing is, why how are you using AI and AI chats on your website? So if you are like every gym owner, I know you probably love being, on the gym floor with your members. You're coaching your staff. You're doing other things. Heck, you could be taking your kids to school. Right? Like, that's the reality of our lives. We're we all have busy things. So you cannot be present twenty four seven on the phone. You can't be present at 09:00 at night always when somebody is scrolling through their Instagram and decides to join a gym. That's me. I do that. And so you need to have a virtual assistant that is there for you. So, super important is consumer experiences has transformed in the last few years. If you are trying to target Gen Zers, they don't wanna talk to you. They wanna talk to a chatbot or they wanna talk to an AI. They really don't want a person answering the phone. I got two of them in my house, so I will tell you a 100% they don't wanna talk to live live human beings. They barely wanna talk to their mom. So, have yourself a voice AI and have yourself a chat AI on the website. It is no longer cutting edge. It has become absolutely table stakes. And it will be a great asset for you to relieve stress, increase your bookings, that kind of notion of speed to lead. Remember that 80% of people will book or convert at the first gym they speak to. Right? So if they're on that, you know, chat page and they're getting three answers and they go over, to look at those websites, whoever engages them actively engages them. A chat comes up, can I talk to you, etcetera, is likely to win? 80% of people book at the first one that it that engages with them and talks to them. First people to call back, first people to chat them, etcetera. So this has to be you. You can use our, chat agent, and you can create an AI voice bot and a chat bot in a few minutes inside Engage AI. So make sure this is on your to do list. Next slide. Alright. Oh, this is what I just said. The faster you respond, the more you win. And like I said, 80%. But they're 21 x more likely if you engage them in the first five minutes. Right? So if you don't capture them with that chatbot, then you have to have an autoresponder that is immediately texting them, immediately bringing them into your funnel. You must have that. If they send you an email, if they fill out a web form, you gotta respond immediately. And, again, I don't care if that's ten or eleven at night. It's immediate. Right? The faster you respond, the faster you bring them into your funnel. Don't miss that five minute window ever. Alright? Next. And, again, that all of that, that conversational AI, the chatbot, the voice bot, the texting bot are all in in the platform. And so there's there's just no reason why you can't have these quickly and easily. This technology is not just for big gyms anymore. Every gym of any size has access to this leading edge technology. Next one. Alright. And then, obviously, I can't remember who it was. It set up in the, in the chat that, you know, getting those, those, trials to convert, getting those leads to convert, was a a super, you know, big gap for them. Well, I think this this, you know, what I'm talking about in terms of, like, the speed of that follow-up, but also the consistency of it, and the kind of building that excitement with them with continued follow-up is another aspect of that. You want people to start getting emotionally committed to your gym. You want them to start feeling like they're already part of your community before they even walk in the door. Right? So confirm right away, get those reminders out, build excitement by asking them some personalized questions, giving them follow-up with it. It's more personalized. And then, hey, if they do miss, you know what? Automatically follow-up. Again, all of this all these steps can be automated, and should be automated. This is what modern gym marketing looks like. Next slide. Alright. Back to you, Mike. Alright. Probably one of my favorite topics is, world class experiences at, at gym. So just like Disney designs every experience when you go through the park, you should be designing that experience for that's the first time somebody interacts with you, they discover your brand, how they're greeted, what the gym smells like, what the bathroom smell like, the music you use, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So we're gonna ask a quick poll question. How would you describe your current state of automations for member retain retention engagement? Do you use any automations or fully manual? I've dabbled. I've tested things. They're not consistent. I've seen some solid automations in place, and I have a well oiled machine. Okay. Let's, let's take a look. I have some solid automations in place. That's what we hear. If you would ask this question three, four years ago, I think, we would have seen no automation or I tried a few things, but, it's good to see that some people are doing automations, but we wanna get everybody to a well oiled machine. So let's hop to the next slide. The last slides again. Yeah. Okay. I wanna spend a little bit of time on this. The first one hundred days somebody is at your gym is the most important time. Right? There's an incredible book called Never Lose a Customer Again by Joey Coleman that talks about twenty to sixty percent of people quit businesses across all industries, by the way, in the first one hundred days. You need to be very intentional about designing that first one hundred day experience. And I can give you a really concrete example. At my gym, my first two years in business, we sold hundreds and hundreds of memberships. But I found out when I was looking at my data and really analyzing my data, I was losing people at the six week mark. Part of that was because of the offer we're running. Part of that was because of how we onboarded new members to our gym. But if I got people past six weeks, I had a for a long time, years after that. So that's that was the my my first foray into automation, building a consistent client experience. You know, think about what their first class is gonna look like or the first one on one session they have with a member or what that trial experience if you're running trials. Those things need to be intentional, designed, and consistent no matter if you're doing that, a staff member's doing that, a coach, etcetera. And then you reinforce the experiences through automation, like like email marketing, text marketing, phone calls, check ins, celebrations. And I'm gonna give you actually a playbook to follow here in just a second. But what the great thing is now is we have so much good data passing back and forth between, Zen Planner Studios, Zen Planner Engage that you can automate a lot of this follow-up and really check-in on your member and the experience that they're going to. So let's go to the next We got four minutes left in the podcast or the webinar. So let's let's let's go to the next slide. We'll go real quick. Yeah. We're all the information. Yep. So take a picture of this slide. You know, put yourself well, the big takeaway here is put yourselves in the shoes of your your new member and what you want what you think they're going to experience and you want them to experience, and then also how they're feeling. Are they anxious? Are they nervous? They, they get adopted technology, check-in the classes. You know, I used to know at my gym if somebody purchased a pair of Reebok Thanos or Nike Metcons. That I knew I had them for a long time, but I was measuring how much they check-in in their first thirty, sixty, ninety days. They interacted with other members on our our SugarWatt app. I intentionally designed hundred day journey so that way we could catch anybody that was a potential risk for churn in that. We went from a 50% churn rate in the first hundred days to a 90 plus percent, with building this playbook. So Fantastic. Yep. Okay. And then the other thing, AI just helps with personalization at scale. So you like I had mentioned before, pulling in that key data about the member's experience and customizing that as you're communicating. So, lots of great opportunities here. That webinar will be recorded, and we will be sharing, the content of this webinar as well. So Okay. So, Mike, I think you wanted to, you know, make sure they got our expert book here, expert book from the last slide. What else do you wanna say about this before we, say goodbye to folks? Yeah. I'd say the last thing is this is a great guide. We have a number of amazing resources on ziplier.com, all around every stage of the life cycle. So how to capture more leads, how to run advertising, how to convert more of those leads into into members. And then this guide here, member retention, is is really powerful. So if you're not thinking about the customer journey like that, grab all these guides, start implementing them, and pick one thing a week and just every single week get better. And if you do that, you're gonna build an amazing experience for your members. Alright. I have enjoyed this, you know, immensely. Let's hop to the next slide, Hillary. So, you know, we we hope that you, can follow this journey. Let's skip ahead of this. Hope you can follow this journey, and that you can use the AI that we talked about today. We're here to help. You don't have to, you know, set up don't worry about setting up a call with us. No pressure for you to try things out. Mike runs weekly success sessions, where you can, you know, we can have you join and just see the platforms in action, see some best examples. And so we will be emailing this to everybody, yes, Hillary, after this call so you can get the, the full download and see all the materials. And like I said, Celeste has been sitting here in the background. If anybody has, help that they need, just, post about it, and we will definitely follow-up with you, and let you, you know, ask any questions or, show you off any of the tools that we talked about today so you can get really going very fast. With that, Mike? Yeah. And, you know, if you haven't heard from today, how passionate am I about, your members and, our owners and managers. So, I'm gonna drop my email in the chat. Feel free to shoot out and reach out to me. I'm happy to share, any specific example, but just very fortunate I get to speak to gym owners, every week and, would love to help you out and grow your business. So, thank you. For being such an engaged audience. We really loved it. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Sonia. Thank you all. We're very appreciative of being here.