Facing Covid-19 Together.

Clubs like yours have been extremely busy dealing with immediate concerns of survival while closed. But the pandemic will end, so it’s time to start planning a reopening strategy today.

A successful reopening strategy will need to be data-driven before, during, and after reopening. This is new to everyone. We have no past experiences reopening a post-pandemic club, no proven best practices, no experts. We don’t know the extent to which the industry will be changed, and how long those impacts will last. Just as data drives when we will be allowed to reopen, data will be needed to guide us through the reopening challenges.

Here is some of the guidance our analytics can provide:

High Value Member Analysis

What:

• Identify members who have highest levels of pre-pandemic non-dues discretionary spend patterns

Why:

• Return of members to a reopened location is likely to be a gradual ramp up, either due to personal fears/hesitation or possibly due to mandated restrictions on occupancy
• New member acquisitions are likely to be low, both due to the same concerns and to entering into the slow summer season (for many locations).
• Many members are under extreme financial stress, so members with higher pre-pandemic levels of spend are statistically more likely to have disposable income post-pandemic
• With gradual member returns, and few new member acquisitions, a faster recovery of cash flow is in identifying and attracting the highest value members back first (non-dues discretionary spend)
• These are the members you least want to lose long-term, and there will be a lot of attractive offers from competitors upon reopening

How:

• You may not be able to target all of your members with personalized pre-reopening outreach like personal phone calls, offers of assistance, incentives for first check-in, etc., but if you can focus on a smaller segment with higher ROI, it becomes more feasible
• Exportable lists can be filtered on things like Membership Type, Age, Gender, Check-Ins, Dues Spend, Discretionary Spend, specific profit center spend (PT or classes, for example) to custom tailor your messaging
• If these members don’t check-in with desirable timeframe after reopening, messaging/offers/etc can be intensified

 

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Highly Engaged Member Analysis

What:

• Identify members who have highest levels of pre-pandemic check-in behavior

Why:

• Highly engaged members should be the most likely to return upon reopening
• Highly engaged members are the most likely to create buzz and a “follow the leader” effect in getting hesitant people to return
• Highly engaged members who check-in a first time, but don’t check in a second time within a predicted interval are your “canaries in the coalmine” that there was a problem with the experience

How:

• Same pre-reopening engagement possibilities as for High Value Members
• Analytics tracking first check-ins and velocity of ramp up to goal of check-ins for all these members
• Daily self-updating, exportable list of members who have not yet checked in

 

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Behavior Change Analysis

What:

• Detect changes in check-in interval or spending behavior

Why:

• The short and long-term impacts of the epidemic are unknown
• There are many potential disruptors: new social distancing expectations, perceptions of club sanitation, exposure to virtual training opportunities, loss of fitness habits, etc.
• The sooner you can detect changes in behavior, the more quickly you can adapt (before the competition does)