When you’re a business that lives and dies by recurring revenue, a great member experience is crucial. It’s what drives retention and new member sales – your bottom line. And if your member experience begins and ends with the doors to your facility, you’re missing out on major opportunities.
As a health and fitness club, your website is a central piece of your member experience and contributes greatly to a member’s interaction with your club. You don’t want your members pulling their hair out when trying to access essential information. You want them to find it seamlessly.
Whether you’re building a website from scratch for a new club, you’re revamping an existing club website, or something in between, all of these principles apply.
WHY YOUR CLUB’S WEBSITE MATTERS
Your club’s website serves numerous purposes: it’s a marketing tool, a sales tool, a brand awareness tool, and a line of communication between you and your people. If you don’t have one, or don’t have one that works well, it’s a huge signal to your members that you may not be trustworthy – that’s just the world we live in.
If an existing or potential member needs information on your club, looks you up on Google or another search engine, and what they find is frustrating, unintuitive, or nonexistent, you’ll be losing business to your competitor that should easily have been yours.
Not least because studies show that:
- Nearly 40 percent of people will stop using a website if it doesn’t work well
- 44 percent of people will leave a website that doesn’t have contact information
- 86 percent of website visitors leave the homepage immediately in search of information on products and services
Consider your website the most important touchpoint between you and your members outside your four walls. And while we know that means it’s a vital sales tool, it’s also a vital member engagement tool.
AESTHETICS AND BRAND TRUST
Fitness website designs are what’s most fun to ideate and execute, especially in the fitness industry. Spinning up a website with a straightforward layout executed with branded colors, iconography, and images is what you’re after. That’s because a huge part of making your website appealing AND strategic lies in your branding.
Think about the brands you trust in your own life, the ones you know you can purchase from without a doubt that they will deliver a quality product or service that’s worth your money. What about their online presence gives you confidence that they’re legit? Is their website a factor? Does their website clearly align with all aspects of their brand message, online and off?
Consistency inspires confidence. And when it comes to branding, consistent colors and visuals capture and capitalize on brand trust.
So, keep it simple and captivate with consistency. Once you’ve laid that foundation, you can spice it up with extras like video content. It’s a great way to showcase your community and connect with new and existing members interacting with your site.
THE RIGHT CONTENT
A website couldn’t exist without content. While they’re important, you can only communicate to a certain extent with visuals. You need to make sure that the pages you build into your site are the right ones. All health club websites should have at least the following content somewhere on the site:
- Basic “About Us” information
- Membership options
- Class schedules
- Amenities
- Testimonials
- Photos of the facility
- Staff and personal trainer profiles
- Club updates
- Contact information
You need to structure the menu bar of the site in a way that makes it as easy as possible for members to find everything they’re looking for, which includes everything from information on closures and hours of operation to your club’s address and facility access changes.
There are endless approaches to determine what’s intuitive for your members. You could visit other health club websites, test how you would navigate them, and design your own accordingly. If your site is already up and running, you could ask for feedback on the layout from current members. Whatever you choose, remember that good user experience online translates to good member experience in your facility, and ultimately contributes significantly to someone’s overall interaction with your club. Make it count!
A FUNCTIONING CLASS SCHEDULE
Having your class schedule on your website is a must!
Building out this functionality on your site will be a bigger undertaking than a page for membership options or testimonials, but believe us when we say it’s major for member experience. It makes your members feel connected, like they don’t have to physically come into the club to know what’s going on. They know they can plan ahead, and they get a visual of just how much value you’re providing in the form of all the different class types, group exercise instructors, and personal trainers.
Bonus: A schedule like this isn’t just great for your members, it’s also vital for your instructors, providing them with accurate and up-to-date information about their classes.
CONNECTIONS TO YOUR OFFSITE PRESENCE
Your club probably has a presence online that’s not confined to your website, in places like social media and Google My Business listings. Fully leverage your voice on these platforms!
For example, you can pull an Instagram feed into your website. If you have a strong Instagram presence, this could be a great way to supplement your website. At the very least, you should link all your social profiles in the footer as well as on your contact page.
As for Google My Business, it’s one of the first places that members engage with your club online. It’s been said that your Google My Business listing acts as another homepage for your business, so ensure it’s always updated with your accurate hours of operation and location. Go the extra mile by embedding the Google map on your Contact page so members on your site can use it to navigate to your facility easily.
Evaluating what else your site needs to engage members and stay competitive in your space? Schedule a demo with our team to learn about our digital marketing and websites services.
