During the summer, when more people want to get in shape for holidays, the potential for health and leisure businesses to attract new customers increases. Leading mobile marketing and communications company Txtlocal, work with a large variety of businesses in this sector, from gyms and sports clubs, to health spas and leisure centres.

The challenge for many businesses in the health and fitness industry is keeping customers fully informed. Take gyms for example, disinterested and dissatisfied gym members leads to as many as 1 in 3 people deciding to leave within 6 months. Reports have suggested this discontentment is a result of poor customer service and feelings of lack of value added service. Txtlocal believe mobile is the solution to combat this throughout the whole industry.

Regular communication with customers is an easy yet often overlooked approach to improve customer service, encourage feedback and promote customer loyalty and satisfaction. As people become more and more dependent on mobile phones in their everyday lives, the health and fitness industry needs to be aggressively looking to mobile solutions to integrate with their overall communication strategy. Cost-effective, simple, instant and with no wastage.

We have worked with a number of health and fitness type companies who were finding that email communication was having minimal impact on their members. Important promotions were going through to junk mail, and being opened too late. With mobile marketing, targeted text messages are open and read by over 95% of consumers. Due to their concise nature they take seconds to read, delivering maximum impact with minimum inconvenience, and small cost outlay.

Slimming World consultant Ian Southall, needed to encourage lapsed members to re-join classes and support existing members in their quest to reach their target weight. Bespoke SMS messages were created to instantly reach out to past members and also to encourage and congratulate over 300 existing members who continued to reach their health and fitness goals.

Other clients use text to check in with members that haven’t visited in a certain period of time by using promotions such as ‘refer a friend’, or by offering tailored deals on products to encourage them to use the facilities more often.

More people than ever before are accessing information online via their phones and using them to research the best places to go for days out, or for fun activities. Today, businesses need mobile to support their overall marketing strategies and use messaging as the main force driving customers to the mobile internet sites. Businesses are not limited to sending 160 character text messages anymore. With Txtlocal, using our user-friendly system they can design mobile web pages for free, or we can produce a mobile website or brochure in-house, and use SMS to circulate them. For example a health spa could design a mobile brochure showcasing the different treatments on offer, and send it straight to the palms of customers’ hands. Businesses can be extremely creative with mobile and the health and fitness industry should be leading the way.