It’s All About The Vacation, not the Airport

In the fitness business, big sales pushes are structured around promotions. They can vary from 14 days to 6 weeks, $37 to $300, and Memorial Day Meltdowns to New Years’ Resolutions. Thus, each promotion comes with its own myriad of sales e-mails, websites, advertisement content, and paperwork.

The launch of Fit Tribe’s 28 Day Sexy Summer Slim Down promotion was the first large project of my internship and I was pretty much thrown into the process. Jesse wanted to use this promotion to map out a “Promo Launch Blueprint,” a checklist that we could refer to to streamline future promotion launches. So my first order of duty was simply organizational. I gathered all of the old media images, advertisement videos, and Facebook posts that related to this promotion so they would be easy to find when Jesse created new ads. A large part of this organization was looking at past years’ e-mail data including subject lines, open rates, link clicks, times e-mails were sent and what name/e-mail addresses they were sent from. Gathering the old e-mails was only the beginning as this promotion was my first real opportunity to build an automated e-mail campaign from start to finish.

Much of my Infusionsoft learning has been hands-on, going to find instructional YouTube videos and endless amounts of testing and retesting. However, the learning process must have worked for at the end of the few days I had spent immersed in the software, I had build out two beautiful weeks of timed automated e-mails. We’re talking different routes for those who opened and clicked the sales e-mails, those who abandoned their carts online, those who bought while they were in the sequence, and for those who were already members and shouldn’t be getting sales e-mails at all (a surprisingly tough one). Once it was built, I was able to sit back, watch how well each e-mail performed, and see sales roll in on account of the messaging. Though I didn’t write these e-mails (yet- still hoping to brush up on my copywriting skills), it was refreshing to see it is in fact true that a well-worded, relatable e-mail can move someone enough to have them get out their credit cards and sign up for a program that very well could change their life.

A promotion launch is much more than just e-mails. I also was able to develop my back-end skills using Fit Tribe’s text automation service (FixYourFunnel) to send text broadcasts to thousands of contacts on the promotional list. Monitoring the text responses to these blasts helped coaches pinpoint who was interested and schedule phone calls with leads resulting in more first workouts and sales prior to the promotion even starting. Sales before promotion start dates (meaning over the phone or stop in visits) help everyone stay on schedule during the sessions since the coaches have less time to sign a person up for a program in the few minutes before/after a workout starts (the paperwork can sometimes de-rail back-to-back sessions with what are already short workouts).

I think my insights about leadership helped me with the process of sending out text blasts and getting coaches on the same page in terms of responses. From my past administrative work at Fit Tribe I realized most of the time, people need to be sold on the vision of a healthier them. They don’t necessarily care about the specific bodily mechanisms, musculature of the body, movement mechanics, etc. but they care a ton about being able to run around with their kids, be confident in their bathing suits and so forth. This reminded me specifically of transformational leadership and the importance of inspirational motivation and mobilizing people based on a shared vision. When people responded to our text blasts unsure of if they could stick with it or if it was worth the price, we had to express our belief and confidence we could get them results and remind them of how happy they would feel when they reached their goals. When getting prospects on-board, learning about their pain points and building rapport so they actually trust you when you tell they can get where they want to go was invaluable. Whether or not the coaches bought into that philosophy, I can’t be sure, but they certainly stuck to it when it got them more sales and hopefully they carry it with them.