The Fit to Grit Cast
Fit to Grit is an audio/video/newsletter hybrid featuring in-depth conversations with leadership within the athletic space. Guests range from top executives within the athletic space to professionals in adjacent industries with a proven track record of success working in the athletic industry.
We explore visionary ideas and practical strategies driving the industry forward, covering areas such as marketing, finance, branding, equipment, product development, biz dev, and more. Join us as we share actionable insights and real-world experiences while embodying the "fit to grit" spirit.
The Fit to Grit Cast
Don’t Let Old Leads Go to Waste: Relaunch Strategies That Work
Are you leaving money on the table by ignoring your old leads? If you've ever had an external lead come in, called them once, texted them once, and then forgotten about them when they didn't convert—you're missing out on a goldmine of opportunity.
This deep dive into post-sale relaunch campaigns reveals how fitness studio owners can achieve 5-10x ROI compared to traditional cold advertising. When you hit that growth plateau—what industry experts call the "valley of death" between $250K-$850K in revenue—the solution isn't always finding new leads. Sometimes, it's reconnecting with people who already know your brand.
The secret lies in four powerful strategies. First, segment your list for tailored messaging that speaks directly to each prospect's previous experience. Second, showcase what's new since they last engaged, highlighting the evolution of your studio. Third, offer something exclusive that makes them feel valued and special. Finally, leverage fear of missing out (FOMO) by creating urgency around limited spots and special opportunities.
One studio I worked with implemented these strategies after believing their old leads were "dead." The results? They reactivated 20 past leads with a 75% conversion rate. This isn't just about quick wins—it's about fundamentally shifting from a transactional mindset to building genuine relationships. When you reach this plateau point in your business, it's time to systematize your messaging, clarify your values, and evolve from being stuck in operations to becoming a true visionary leader.
Ready to transform your approach to past leads and break through your growth ceiling? Subscribe, leave a comment, and share this episode to join our community of studio owners committed to staying gritty and reaching their full potential.
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have an external lead, come in, you call them, you text them one time. They end up not moving forward. Well, if you have, you're losing out on a gold mine of opportunity and it's time to start bringing those people back. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Fidget Gridcast. I am your host, zach Coleman, and have you ever had that list of old leads and past members and you really just don't engage with them? Or you have an external lead, come in, you call them, you text them one time. They end up not moving forward. Well, if you have, you're losing out on a gold mine of opportunity and it's time to start bringing those people back. Today we're going to talk about post-sale relaunch campaigns. This is going to be a deep one, so stay tuned. So the club industry reports that reactivation campaigns to past members can deliver a 5 to 10x ROI, compared to just cold advertising and trying to bring in transactional type prospects through the same old, same old types of results when it comes to familiarizing people with your brand in your studio. Today we're going to get into four really big things. We're going to get into segmenting your list for tailored messaging. We're going to showcase what's new since a member last engaged with your studio and offer something exclusive for new people and how you can kind of use it, utilize the fear of missing out kind of technique to highlight what they're missing when it comes to coming to your studio. I once worked with a studio who thought all of their old leads were dead. I'd had to push them from moving from the transactional mindset to the more relational type mindset and kind of utilize their old leads and be okay with grabbing some of their old leads and reengaging with them. Once we started sending some of these relaunch campaigns, when done appropriately, started highlighting their new programs and their new offerings to allow them to get an exclusive VIP type invitation so they can be first come, first serve type situation. This does great for if you have group classes and you're trying to fill up, if you're doing semi personal training and you're trying to have a certain amount of members during certain classes, et cetera. And that single series helped actually reactivate 20 past leads and members who actually converted around, I'll say about 75%. So about 15 of those leads actually sold from those previous campaigns.
Speaker 1:Now, before we get into the four major topics that I talked about and how you can really do a post launch campaign. A couple things that we talked about in our previous videos is we talked about the 15 touch points on pre-existing lead, how you can really build that into your optimization and your funnel. External leads in general, how you can do a pricing campaign, how you can focus on review campaign and how you really need to start looking as your members, as really your advocates. I'm going to be the first digital marketer that will tell you that the studio environment is advocacy. It's a community we live in 2025. Not everyone goes to a therapist. Some people need more physical activity, and those are the types of people that like to build their community. It changes their lives. So when someone says that you're doing something stupid or you feel burnt out, they're wrong. You are building something that brings in advocacy, and that's where our review campaign went. We talked about how you can really have a trifecta of new members, advocacy and ranking on local search.
Speaker 1:Yes, none of this stuff happens overnight. This is not meant for a new studio. This is meant for studios that are hitting that valley of death period, and we'll talk about that in one second when it comes to a relaunch campaign, right? So, first and foremost, if you've already gotten to the point. Let's say your studio is at a point where you're stagnant, you've hit the top line growth that you can possibly do. You start thinking, hey, we can't really move up to new members, we can't, we raise our price, we lose half our members. What do you do? Well, I'll talk about this further on in a later video. But you wanna segment your list for tailored messaging.
Speaker 1:So, to take a step back here, we need to kind of talk about the growth cycle of the studio environment, and we're gonna talk about this from a one to a million perspective. Because if you make it to a million, I will just say you'll probably already felt these pains and either gone through these pains or this is something that you will go to if you're looking to expand and build consistency amongst possibly franchising or building a boutique franchise of studio locations. But you're going to hit the valley of death. And if you don't know what the valley of death is, it's something really high end and EOS entrepreneur operating system. It's something that we use internally with our studio and I see a lot of fitness studios utilize, and so this doesn't necessarily partake to if you're just using that system, but what it does do is it helps you understand the lifecycle of said studios.
Speaker 1:So first milestone here is we're going to say is around the 250 mark. We're going to say this is around I usually say it's between 500 and 850. And then this is one mil, this one mil plus one to two. So usually this spot right here is when you're expanding and this spot right here is when you're tapped out. So what does this usually mean here? So you're going to hit this spot right here within 250 and 500 to $850,000, where none of your marketing is working.
Speaker 1:You brought in members, you're tired, and either it's a mental situation which you have to get over and change your mindset from a delegator to a leader, get out of operations mode. That's usually what happens right here. You're in operations mode, ops, and you're looking to expand, but you're still sitting in ops. So you have no idea how to get there because all you're used to doing is managing your trainers. You don't want to spend any more money and you and go into a deficit to move up. Now this doesn't just happen in ops, this happens in marketing as well, why People have a weird understanding of marketing and they think that if they're spending, let's say, $1,000 a month or $1,500 a month with their marketing team or they're doing it themselves and they're having even more fatigue that they think that that's gonna be exactly how they're gonna grow to here.
Speaker 1:I'll be the first to tell you that I see a lot of people burn out, and not just ops, but marketing ops. And the reason I call it marketing ops is because marketing is basically operations, just in a different form. You're just managing a different style or a different set of teammates, or you might have your trainers be doing some of it, or you may be doing all of it. You're consulting, you're setting out training stuff. You're managing your trainers, making sure they're doing all right. You don't have a general manager or someone in place to kind of watch the team so you can focus on higher level things. So marketing is the same beast here.
Speaker 1:So the reason I bring this up is because if you're selling a package at, let's say, $150 a month and you're like, hey, we want to grow our studio and we want to get to 300 members, but we're slammed at these $150 a month memberships, we'll just say you're at the 250 to 350, whatever mark. We'll just say you're at the 500 mark. We'll just say you're on the 500 mark. You don't want to expand your location, so what do you do, right? Well, you don't want to lose members, or do you?
Speaker 1:So the biggest part of making your shift from operations to visionary slash CEO of your company is you need to start thinking more like a leader. And when you start thinking more like a leader, you're going to see that there's going to be certain things that you're going to do that take are going to be small steps that are going to incrementally grow you faster than you sitting in the weeds and doing all the of the small shit. And so this is around the time when you need to start systematizing your brand, your experience, your brand. Even if you're only going to stick with one location. You need to start building consistency amongst all your messaging. So when I talk about step number one here and you segmenting your list for tailored messaging, I want you to start thinking about where you're going to take this studio.
Speaker 1:If you're like, hey, we want to throw $300 of membership, we'll keep half of our members, you now are making twice as much. I mean twice as much. You're making exactly the same amount as you were losing half your members, and now you have room to grow, but you also have room to bring in members that are value type members for your studio, and that's why you're spending more, because now you're going to have to find a general manager. You're going to have to find someone, and if you already do have a general manager, you need them to take ops over completely. You need to stop training. Only train yourself so that you don't get burned out for training. I'm just telling you that. And how are you going to prove that you are a $300 a month agency? And that's where thesale conversation starts to come in right.
Speaker 1:What you want to do here is you want to rebrand. This is about the time when you actually have to look at the higher level visionary, creative and experience as a way for you to systematize your business. You're going to come up with a tailored audience based around those members that you want to stay. You're going to tailor your price point around that audience, so you're going to have audience. I'm doing this sideways. You're going to tailor your price point around that audience, so you're going to have audience. I'm doing this sideways. You're going to have audience. I'm just going to do this Audience. You're going to have the values in your internal team. You're going to start evaluating your internal team. Internal team and your audience and your internal team are all going to be something that you want to create values around to systematize your messaging. Your values will be the first step.
Speaker 1:To create values around to systematize your messaging your values will be the first step. That's when you then come into your positioning and you start tailoring your messaging around that, so you can look at some of your old list, some of the old people you've talked to. You can come up with a campaign where you re-engage them and talk about the relaunch. That's the beauty here. That's the secret. Hey, we haven't talked to you in about a year. I hope you're doing fine. Well, I just want to let you know that we're in the process of relaunching our studio. We want you to become a VIP member.
Speaker 1:As this new experience unfolds and you start telling a story of your studio's growth and the changes that you're doing to the studio. We've raised our prices. We've added on this service. We're starting to do much more accountability with our team. We went from group training to personal training I've seen that happen a lot to semi-personal training to lower the classes so we can give a much more advocate style feel to our members and because of that, we're changing a lot of stuff. That's where the new comes in, right?
Speaker 1:So number two here is showcasing what's new since they have last engaged. You can talk about that, talk about the rebrand, say we have went through our, this member of their community, your team and your audience is your community, so that's part of it. So, hey, these are our values. Everything that we do relies around these values, around this message. That message should also relate to the experience of the internal of your gym. We're no longer providing everything and we're moving just to semi-personal training and because of that, we are allowing this type of look and feel. We're changing our machines. We're getting rid of machines. We're doing all free weights, whatever it may be, based off of your boutique niche Within the studio. We're only working with students. We're only working with this age range. We're bringing in this. Oh, we're bringing in a massage place. It's part of the package, whatever it may be.
Speaker 1:You want to start showcasing everything that's changed and everything that you're improving along the way. This is going to open up in three months where we're doing a relaunch in three months. We're remodeling right now. That's what's going to help us make it to the next level, and that's a good re-engagement. You're not just building community, but you're re-engaging and showing people how you have improved your studio and how you're trying to bring a tailored audience in. Will they all engage? No, but you will start bringing people in. That will go. Oh yeah, I forgot all about that from last year. When I went in last year, joe Schmo hung up on me and now they're really partaking. People understand mistakes and they would rather go to someone who has confidence to come to them and tell them that hey, these are the improvements and changes we're making. So we won't really get into this metric and this metric right here, but I will say your visuals and your messaging should align and your experience and so your experience should use this example.
Speaker 1:Don't look like a hole in the wall, bro, jim. If you're a Yobus Geo, that's just really what I need here. If you're at that point, you need to evolve. You need to have your expenses. That's need to evolve. You need to have your expenses. That's where this loop comes in, because you're going to have to start systematizing much more than just bringing in new team members to make sure that you can make it last, and then you will have a system here that can help. You can start systematizing for future locations.
Speaker 1:But that's besides the point. You want to start offering something exclusive to these new members. Because you are so positive about our last engagement over a year ago, we wanted to touch base again and offer you this VIP. You'll be one of the first members that will be exclusively part of this community and we're trying to serve first come, first serve. Here. We're only bringing in that urgency. We're only bringing in 50 new members because we're all about quality, not quantity.
Speaker 1:We'll just say something like that you can use a little better verbiage in that. I do verbiage for clients, but, you know, not over a YouTube video. So no talk about experience there. And then last thing is FOMO fear of missing out. We kind of talked about that a little bit. How are they fearing missing out?
Speaker 1:Well, as we continue to evolve and go through this experience, continue to tell a story of the evolution of the studio and go through a campaign where you're doing a three month campaign before launch or a six month campaign this could even be good for future locations where you're sending emails out to past prospects telling them about the new location or telling them about the launch and all the things that you're doing to grow that. Because people love this stuff, man. They love knowing they're a part of a community. They love knowing the inner processes you don't want to hide everything from everybody. They will feel more inclined to stay longer because there's more transparency within the communication of what you're doing at your studio. That separates you from John Smith came in and had a great leg day or how to improve your leg day. That stuff works and it's great for organic SEO perspectives and doing blogging and multiple locations and creating offers and social media stuff. That when you're in scaling mode. But when you're in, I want to take this one location and I'm just really looking to optimize it to best profitability as possible. That's the kind of lingo you're going to want to have to do a relaunch campaign. There's a lot that goes into rebranding and don't have past it. It's not just a it. It's not just a logo. It's not just about having your friend create you a logo. Your logo in your brand need to represent your team in your, your whole system. That's really it for today's cast.
Speaker 1:I'm Zach with another episode of the Fitch Grid cast. If you're watching this on the podcast. I really do appreciate you and hope that you tuned into the YouTube version. And again, we're trying to raise our subscribers, we're trying to raise our likes. Hit that subscribe button for us. It really helps the algorithm with these comments and these reviews to help push our channel. I try to give all this content out for free and I'm just trying to build a community of like-minded individuals that we can help Other student members, help people like myself. So again, comment, subscribe. But again, zach, with Fit your Grit, cast and I hope you all stay gritty.
