3 Big Mistakes to Avoid with Your Intro Offer

What is an Intro Offer?

An Intro Offer has many names out there in the fitness industry. You may have heard them called the above Intro Offer, Introductory Offer, New Student Special, New Client Special and we’re sure plenty more. Bottom line, these offers are designed to be sold to new clients/ students to encourage them to try your studio. In a nutshell, it is a promotional tool that is meant to help someone test a variety of what you offer so they can decide if they would like to become long-term members.

Why do Intro Offers matter?

One of the other details that is important to take into consideration when building a good intro offer is not only that your intro offer needs to be a good sampling of what you offer, but it also needs to be at a reasonable price. We’ll touch more on pricing these in just a moment below but pricing matters on top of what they have access to during their introductory period with you.

Mistake 1: Too cheap and/or free

Honestly, we see heavily discounted intro offers and free classes a lot. Now, are there some instances where heavy discounts and free classes work? Yes, of course there are.
Are those the ‘norm’ in terms of building intro offers that convert to long-term members within the fitness industry? No, no they are not.

The reason that these pricing options are not correlated with high member conversion rates is two-fold.

Anything that is ‘free’ triggers the greater possibility of your clients devaluing the experience you’re giving them. When you give a client something for free then turn around and ask them to pay for that, you have created a large mental & pricing gap you’re now asking clients to traverse. Depending on how wide that gap is, well, that can directly impact your conversion rates.

Heavily discounted intro offers are not in alignment with your normal pricing - that’s true for everyone. When deep discounts are present, you also create a wide gap for new clients to financially traverse for conversion. If you have seen this happen with some of your past offers, we would encourage you to ask clients who did not convert why that is. When we look at industry research, many studios report getting feedback from clients claiming they thought there would be more similarly priced options available to them afterwards the intro period. When there were not similar pricing options, they felt more excluded from the community than a part of it.

Mistake 2: The Intro Offer is too Limited

Time and quantity matters. When an intro offer is too limited in time or in what services clients have access to, these new students won’t actually get to know what your studio is about.

We know that we’ve used our “dating analogy” a lot in the past but if you think about applying this analogy to your intro offer, it might help shift your perspective. Let’s say you only know someone (a new client) for a week, and then after that 1st week you want to ask them to commit to you forever via a contract or longer term contract - yikes! That can feel scary for anyone. Top it all off with some marketing pushes that they need to make up their mind within 24 hours or the deal you offer is gone and you may have honestly helped them pass on your studio all together. It’s just not enough time realistically for them to know.

Similarly, if the intro offer is too limited in quantity or in what they have access to, how would someone truly know what they are committing to? They wouldn’t because they haven’t experienced it yet. So, taking these perspectives into account, take a look at your overall pricing structure and make sure that your intro offer is setting new clients up for success in terms of what options they have available to them next.

Mistake 3: The “One Hit Wonder.”

This is a playful way of describing a first class free offer or a first class at a heavy discount as the only intro offer.

Similarly to mistake one, can this be valuable? Yes. Is this usually the most successful option we see? No.

In total transparency, the first class free can be successful if you have a low cost, low commitment pack available as their next step. If you don’t have that lower-level option available as their next step, then we will repeat mistake two from above. How will they know in one class or one session that you’re a good fit for them? That’s honestly not a fair ask of this new client and it’s not a fair representation of all the amazing things your studio could offer them. So, we encourage you to help you position your business and your new clients in a more favorable position with a longer, more diverse, and competitively priced intro offer.

Want to know some of the trending Intro Offers we see converting now?

Two Weeks Unlimited:

• Pretty straight forward here - 14 days of unlimited access to your studio. You get to decide if this intro offer starts from purchase or first use but, if you want to help encourage clients through their journey, starting on date of purchase can help with that accountability component.

Discounted Start for Intro Offers that do Buy Long-Term Memberships:

• This could honestly be a lot of different things but maybe you discount the first month of membership in the exact same dollar amount as the intro offer was so, with the right time commitment from clients, they are effectively getting a free intro offer but you are also getting them to sign a 6-month or 12-month commitment.

• Another common example is to just have a discounted initial month in any amount you find appropriate for memberships they enroll in.

Intro Offer Bundle Deals:

• One of the biggest personal obstacles we see in the fitness industry is when someone tries something new in their life with no support. By giving bundled discounts for a new client and a friend you help combat that and double your potential new client conversions.
  A great example might be “Two Weeks Unlimited for You + 1 for $X”.

• We’ve also seen some studios have a Buy One, Gift One pricing structure where a client buys one intro offer and can gift the same intro offer to a friend (be mindful of your pricing on this one).

• We’ve also seen opportunities for the Intro Offer to be sold at an overall lower price if you sign-up with a friend. So, maybe the original Intro Offer price is $80 but if you enroll with a friend, you both get it for $50. Of course these are just examples and you should reflect on what is appropriate for your pricing structure.

What’s the take-home message?

Intro Offers are an important promotional tool to help get new customers in your door but how you structure your intro offer can set the tone for your new client to member conversion rates. Keep in mind that we all want to find a community to belong to and in order to feel that sense of belonging, we need to have transparency from what to expect financially and in classes fro your studio.