Does your wellness website help you do more with less? Check your website’s results below, and plan now to improve its performance next year:
1. Did your website increase revenue for your health club or wellness center?
Increase leads by enhancing your online visibility to potential customers in your community
Optimizing your site for local search greatly increases the likelihood that potential customers in your trade area will stumble across your business at the right time.
Implement one tip each month from Local Search: The Missing Link To Your Website to improve your website’s lead generation results.
Encourage a sense of virtual community among your members and clients.
The relationships that your customers build with other customers are often even more important than their ties to your staff.
Include social media tools: blogs, email newsletters, photo- and video-sharing, and Like/Follow/Friend buttons.
Use e-commerce tools to capture low-hanging fruit. For example, allow members to renew online. Sell punch cards for classes, massage or personal training online. Provide automatic replenishment of nutritional supplements and energy bars.
Consider Amazon Associate and aStore tools to offer health and wellness apparel, equipment, books and other products for purchase online.
2. Did your website cut the cost of running your health and wellness business?
Provide online scheduling to cut front desk costs and improve client satisfaction.
Online scheduling lets clients make their own arrangements 24/7. Forcing clients to call for appointments – and sit on hold while your front desk deals with walk-ups, other incoming phone calls, etc. – is not respectful of their time or your staff’s time.
Use email or mobile reminders to avoid last-minute cancellations and no-shows.
Post and email class schedules to cut printing and mailing costs and phone calls.
The key: online and emailed schedules must be absolutely up-to-date. In fact, we suggest that you put the date and time they were last updated in a prominent position at the top of the schedule so customers don’t wonder whether the info’s up to date.
Make sure students know that any changes – for example, a sick instructor’s cancelled class – will be posted online immediately and emailed to them.
Use online forms to streamline recurring activities.
For example, allow members to update their contact and address information online. When you hold events, provide online registration forms.
If your wellness business receives frequent requests for charitable donations, post the donation request form online.
3. Did your website increase your staff’s productivity?
There’s several ways to screen potential customers with your website, thereby saving time and money on manpower.
Pre-qualify Prospects.
Pre-qualifying potential customers makes your sales staff more productive.
Many Radial clients come to us with the mistaken belief that their websites should be designed to appeal to everyone. They’re afraid of putting anything on the website that might possibly steer a potential customer away.
In fact, you WANT to weed out people who are a bad fit for your business as quickly as possible, with as little actual contact as possible. Why? Live contact is expensive, whether it’s phone calls to the front desk or face-to-face meetings with a sales rep.
For example, if your health club is really tailored for fitness overachievers, say so. People with chronic health issues and serious weight concerns aren’t going to feel at home, and you’re probably not going to do a great job of supporting them.
Weed out highly price-sensitive prospects.
We strongly recommend that our clients post at least basic or starting prices online. For example, a personal training studio that offers training in half-hour chunks might say “Individual personal training from $35…” A health club might say “Family memberships from $45/month…”.
Being secretive about prices wastes everyone’s time.
If someone is completely unwilling to even consider paying your lowest rates, are they really likely to turn into a long-term loyal customer? Are your sales people so amazingly persuasive that they can overcome that problem? Of course not.
Sure, you’ll “talk them into a free trial” or an introductory offer – but they’ll be gone as soon as the special ends. Don’t waste time on phone calls and visits with these folks.
Post new client forms to make better use of your staff and client’s one-on-one time.
Post your intake packet for new clients or patients in PDF form. If your customer volume is high, eliminate data entry by using online forms that automatically transfer this information to your customer database.
Clients will be ready to hit the ground running when they first come in, and you’ll reduce postage, copying, and faxing by your staff.
Documents typically included in a new client packet:
- Basic contact information
- Payment authorization
- Health risk assessment
- Brief medical history
- PAR-Q or similar assessment tool
- Privacy release
