Crush your Revenue Generation Goals in 2023 with the SHC Platform

Are you a health club owner? A General Manager? Or a Marketing Director?

What is stopping you from increasing your health club revenue?

I know this is a big question and Ii have thrown it at you out of the blue. But, bear with me.

To answer this big question, may I request you to start with answering these four questions:

• Are your members truly well-informed about your offerings?
• Are you able to “monetize” everything – Tennis Court bookings, Programs, Leagues and the usual Classes and services and more?
• Is the purchase process for your club members butter smooth or is it still predominantly manual?
• Are you able to convert non-members into members?

No matter how many new members you sign up or how many new virtual programs or smoothies you sell, if you are not able to address the above questions, you will not increase revenue.

I call these the “horizontal factors”. These impact ALL your offerings, services across the board. Let’s dive into each. And as we do so, I will show you how the SHC platform can help you manage each factor with ease and elegance.

Note: You would have noted that the word “monetize” is in quotes – the reason is because it implies multiple things, which I will delve into soon.

1. Are your members truly well-informed about your offerings?

How do they access information about your new launches, your fee-based classes, your events, your new programs, your deals? Do they have relevant information about programs they might be interested in? Or do they wait at the Front Desk trying to get information or check the website? Is the website updated?

Do they have to go to multiple apps to get all the information about all your programs/offerings? And then do they have to struggle some more to find out if a spot is available? How much does a spot cost?

This is how we help clubs keep their members informed about all offerings and promote their offerings with SHC’s Marketing Campaigns solution:

1. Run micro-targeted campaigns over multiple channels like email, posts to inform about a new Program – Imagine targeting all club members who have ever taken any Yoga or Pilates class in the past.
2. Send Push Notifications about deals – Imagine one saying – Sign up for the 4 week Hatha Yoga Program before 30th April to get the early bird offer of 10%.
3. Advertise new launches on the App banner – Imagine a banner right on top of your App Home Page stating – 4 week Hatha Yoga Program from 10th May.
4. Form interest-based groups on the App – Imagine your rockstar Yoga coach keeping all Yoga enthusiasts informed about the new Hatha Yoga Program and building excitement around it on the Group, and answering their questions.
5. Maintain the Class and Program Calendar on both the App and your website.
6. Onboard club members with relevant campaigns informing them about club amenities and upcoming programs.

2. Are you able to monetize EVERYTHING: Tennis Court bookings, Programs, Leagues, the usual classes and services and more?

In your current scenario, using your current systems – are you able to monetize some things, but not others – like Programs or Tennis Court Bookings? Are you able to charge both members and non-members? Are you able to set different prices for different membership tiers? Or increase pricing as a program start date comes closer?

Let me start with the word “monetize”. It can imply many things. At SHC, we believe that to monetize all your services means the ability to:

• Price every asset or product like Classes, Programs, Leagues, and more such
• Price by Duration/Validity and per Session/Package
• Charge for assets via differential and dynamic pricing
• Enable payments by Billing Company or Stripe

Let’s see how we can help you monetize each type of your asset on the SHC platform.

1. Fee-based Classes and Services (such as Massage, PT, Aquatics, Tennis) – These can be priced per session such as 5 sessions for x amount or Unlimited Sessions for a month. Or you can create packages – a 1 month package or 2 month package. One of our customers, Catalyst offers Unlimited Group Ex Classes for 3 months. You can apply differential pricing for these. Again Catalyst offers these for lower tier memberships. These payments can be run through your Billing Company and Stripe and your member experience remains the same in either case.

   If you want to offer discounts to any fee-based class or service, the usual route on the SHC platform is to do via Stripe payments. But, if you want to offer discounts via the Billing Company, you can reduce the price on the Billing Company and then the members get the discounted price. Further, you can leverage the SHC Marketing Campaigns solution to push discounts and offers straight to your members lock screens via push notifications!

   
   

2. Plans – Plans have a one time fee. Your trainers or Dieticians can create these plans and add them to your Club Library on the SHC platform. Now you can price them the way you want to and offer it on the App. One of our customers, Promedica ForeverFit has an Upper/Lower Body Split Plan On the SHC platform we have set it up for them by first adding it to their Library and then to monetize we have created an inventory item and attached it to the Club’s Fitness Plans. Of course, they have many other plans as well. Their members can view all their plans on the App and buy the one they want.
   
3. Products – If you are selling Products such as Pro Shop Items, Equipment, they can be sold using the SHC platform. You can set it exactly the same way as you set up the Plan. It also has one price and a one time payment. You can create an inventory and offer it on the App to your members.
4. On Demand Videos – The most popular way of offering On Demand Videos on the SHC platform is to offer all the videos as a membership for a specific duration. It will unlock video access on the App for the member who purchases the regular membership along with the video membership. You can also sell only the video membership and add to your non-due members.
   
   
5. Programs – Programs can be priced on a per event or per program basis on the SHC platform. For example, if you have an 8 week program where an event takes place once a week and the price per event is set to $20, the complete program will be priced at $160. But, the fun part here is that you can set up the price by event or by program. One of our clubs, Wisconsin Athletic CLubs, has a Swim Program which is 8 weeks in one location and 6 weeks in another location. So, we set up the program as an Inventory Item, called Swim Program, one Session at x dollars. Then we went to the Calendar and scheduled as many events as required for each location. And voila! The price is determined automatically for members based on the location. Again, this can be set up with either Stripe or Billing Company payments.

   One more opportunity for you to increase revenue is by implementing Dynamic Pricing. And the SHC platform supports you to do that. Let me share an example. Let’s say you have an 8 week Tennis Program coming up in 1 month. You can have a dynamic pricing structure where members who book and pay more than 15 days in advance can buy the program at $140 (Like an early bird price) and anyone who books later than that would need to pay $160 for the program.

   

   

6. Courts – Pricing of court bookings on the SHC platform can be done in 2 ways. One, where the host or the member booking the court pays the court fees or second, where all the players on the court will be charged an equal split of the court fees automatically. This can be done with Stripe or Billing Company payments
   
   
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3. Is the purchase process for your club members butter smooth or is it predominantly manual?

Have you counted how many steps your member takes to complete a purchase? Take some time and actually put a number on it:)

During an interaction with one of our clubs, we realized that for a member to book a tennis court and purchase it, there were several steps. Here’s what a typical process today looks like:

1. A member, Lisa tries to find if a Court is available at 4 pm on Monday evening. She walks up to the Front Desk executive, Tom.
2. Tom shares that the Court is available.
3. Lisa asks the cost of that booking.
4. Tom shares the rate/hour.
5. Tom asks Lisa for confirmation.
6. Tom books the court for the Member.
7. Tom informs Lisa that the court is booked for 4 pm and that the member’s account will be charged x amount. Tom also reminds Lisa of some general instructions regarding use of the court.
8. After this, Lisa would need to message her friends to see who is up to play with her at 4PM.
9. After a few conversations, she may find the person/people who have agreed and split the court cost with them manually.

If Lisa is using the SHC platform, the steps will look like:

1. Lisa wakes up in the morning and decides that she wants to play Tennis that evening at 4 at the Club. She opens her club app (powered by SHC) and goes to the Tennis Court Calendar and sees what courts are available.
2. Lisa scrolls to look for the 4 pm slot. Selects it.
3. After selecting the court, Lisa can easily send out court booking requests to her friends through the app or have the app find competitive players for her based on her rating.
4. Clicks on Book. The court is booked for Lisa. The screen shows some general instructions regarding use of the court.
5. Over the next few hours, the app automatically finds and confirms bookings for Lisa and splits the court fee equally with the other players after the court booking.

While this example is from a Tennis scenario, the same is applicable to any court or equipment booking like Swim Lanes.

The more the number of steps, the more the friction and so more chances that the transaction will not go through. We have met clubs who are managing the booking of 7 courts with paper and pen. That would have been perfectly acceptable to members 10 years ago, but not today, especially since they are smarter and more demanding and they are also paying for the court:)

4. Are you able to convert non-members into members?

We understand that encouraging more non-members into your club to participate in services like Personal Training can generate much needed revenue in the short term, but it does affect your regular members in the long run.

You should be careful with this because it can set you up to be a semi-private Health Club.

There is a way around this that helps you accomplish your goal of increasing revenue; converting a non-member into a member and retaining the appeal of membership in your Club.

Consider selling a non-member membership. This is a membership that allows the non-member the ability to come into the club 4 times during a 30 day period at a discounted price that is appealing. During their visits you expose them to all your club has to offer, including any social events going on during that time period. It is now your job to close the sale with any offer you are promoting at the time.

Let me show you how easy this can be:

• By letting you sell to non-members using Stripe Payments.
• You can also use a combination of Billing Company and Stripe for running your payments to drive higher revenues. A great example is how Sport Fit, Bowie is using this for Tennis. They are charging members for their use of the Tennis Courts through the billing company, and non-members by Stripe.
• You can leverage differential pricing too for your non-members. For example, selling an On-demand Video membership service for a higher fee to Non-members, while keeping it free or at a lower fee for members.

To Sum Up

We really want you to crush your revenue generation goals in 2023. We can help you make sure that:

1. Your members are extremely well-informed about your offerings by use of the multichannel, micro targeted campaigns, push notifications, onboarding campaigns, app banners, and a lot more.
2. You are able to “monetize” everything including having extreme flexibility in how you price and charge for everything.
3. You have a super smooth automated purchase process for your club members with literally everything happening on the club app.
4. You are able to convert non-members into members.

But, buying new software is never simple. There are always valid concerns around data transfer, switchover, training, and onboarding.

One of the biggest concerns you as a club owner or general manager is likely to have is the expense and effort involved. And rightly so.

But, we have a solution to that too: SHC offers Marketing Campaigns for free as part of the Base App.

And we help you set up both Marketing Campaigns and Purchases for your club on the SHC Platform right until you get it up and running! In fact we help you set it up for your first few campaigns.

And that is where we assure you that our Onboarding Team and Process is undeniably the best. Read the testimonials. We will be with you at every step of monetizing your offerings.