A Local Dilemma – Part 2

If you read Part 1, you will have learned of a great gym, but more importantly, of a challenge that it and many local businesses face, especially service based ones where foot traffic alone won’t make the business, and that is acquiring more customers. Interesting and perhaps not unexpectedly, one company has, if not solved, at least offered a solution for one type of local business, fitness clubs and gyms.

Here in Part 2, we take you through the flow from one such company, Gym Interactive.

(Interestingly, in our research we also came across Healthclubscene.com which looks older and shares the same backend but was registered only recently.)

Hard to believe but GymInteractive.com has some ties to our world; it’s current CEO comes out of Traffix, which bought his joke site JustATip.com when he was 21 and had a C-level job with Datran. The 27 year old CEO, Howard Lerman, was introduced to one of the most respected men in the gym space which meant that with one connection they practically solved one of the two main hurdles – lead buyers. Now, they have the LowerMyBills.com of fitness, GymTicket.com.

The ad:

Santa Monica Gyms
Find Your Local Gyms.
Online Tours & Free Trials. We Know Health Clubs.
www.GymTicket.com

Landing Page:

Unlike Healthclubscene.com, GymTicket is incredibly clean and designed by someone with a good eye for direct marketing. It has compelling information – scale in terms of locations (15,000) and value from what you might find ("Virtual tours and free guest passes…"). The site also lets you know what to expect with the process – the four steps on the side bar.

Step 2:

Step 2 continues with the clean and efficient theme found on the landing page. Here we don’t see the specific results of the search, only that they did find matching gyms within my area (the specific distance of which isn’t mentioned). Let’s look at the value proposition / call to action, "Reserve Your Free Guest Pass." You do that by entering some personally identifiable information. Cleverly, though, they follow-up with the headline by asking for the name as you would like it on the pass, a subtle tactic to insure users enter valid information. And, in a throwback to the Shopping Spree of Colonize’s day, they inform you that your pass will come to your inbox, a way to increase valid email addresses. You want to click submit because you get the pass (presumably) and to view the gyms.

Step 3:

As implied on the previous page, here I can indeed view the gyms. Unfortunately, I can only see their name. Let’s assume I have just moved to the area or don’t know the gyms, I will next click on one.

Step 3 con’d:

Clicking on a link causes the page to expand and reveal the vital information about the gym. Whether this counts as a virtual tour, I don’t know as I didn’t see anything other than this information for any of the gyms listed here. The info they have is a good start but not quite enough for me to form a valid opinion. Then again, that is not quite the point. What the site doesn’t do very clearly is explain what happens – both to the gyms and to the user – when a click on a gym occurs. That, it turns out, is the revenue event. Upon expansion, my information gets sent to the gym, and if there is one thing these commercial gyms do well and what makes them better suited than you might think for lead gen is follow-up on the phone. The average gym doesn’t want you to know too much – they want to sell you.

Step 4:

After clicking on a link on the web site, I find the following in my inbox. Unfortunately for GymTicket.com, it came through as spam. (Maybe Gmail knows something I don’t.) I found three such emails, as I clicked on three ads, er, links. Looking at the parent site for GymTicket.com, GymInteractive.com, I see that each lead costs the gym $5, so I have just earned the site $15. Had they had more than four gyms in my area and I not gone through this with Healthclubfitness.com first, I would have clicked on all. In the email it tells me that my pass is reserved and more importantly to expect a call. Self-starters won’t find what they want – a printable pass and chance to walk-in and workout. Like the mortgage lead gen business, gyms, big gyms especially, don’t work that way.

As you can imagine this business model works best for big metropolitan regions where they have many gyms. Thanks to Bally’s, Gold’s, Spectrum, 24 Hour Fitness, etc., GymTicket.com can have great coverage and often sell more than one lead just by signing these major companies. Here too, we’ll see the same dynamics at work – big gyms with strong telesales versus the smaller gyms not so used to processing leads. We’ll see how it plays out, whether this vertical hammers the user or finds a happy balance quickly. At least there are no trigger leads.

A local business has another option if it doesn’t want to be part of a lead generation play, one that’s not mutually exclusive with buying leads, although certainly not as economical. Here we see a company that does both, buys leads and buys traffic to their branded page.
Agency helping Local: MediaEngine on behalf of gym chain Spectrum – founded interestingly by the other half of GymInteractive.

The ad:
Fitness at Spectrum
Upscale, Clean, Luxurious. Join Now
And Receive 20% Off Current Dues!
www.SpectrumClubs.com

Landing Page:

As you can see, quite a different user experience than the lead gen landing page, but also not quite as action oriented. It does offer membership information and displays it fairly prominently, but it doesn’t have a strong call to action. It’s stuck between branding and customer acquisition. The other downside too is that this model, where a specialized agency is in charge, doesn’t scale as well. Just as the lead aggregation is advancing, so too will companies to do lead generation on behalf of a company. What we see here is the beginning.

Ultimately, I love learning of new business models and seeing people have solved interesting problems like the GymInteractive.com guys, although perhaps with a little less ambiguity to the user. It gives me hope in lead generation and shows its promise.

Next up – getting my gym to buy leads and seeing how they convert.