It’s game time! Tips for understanding costs of customer acquisition.

We’re now just past the first week in January, the beginning of the ultra peak season in the world of fitness. How has your business performed this week? Did you meet or exceed targets? Do you have targets?

2013 has had a very exciting start for One-to-1 Fitness, in just 8 business days we’ve seen more active leads than all of January 2012, and we’re nearly 70% of the way to our sales goal for the month (I should have set an even bigger goal.)

Why the big change this year?

Truth is we all become complacent (yep even me.) My marketing in the past has been solid using well written copy and appropriate offers but usually still organized only a couple weeks before and not coordinating mediums very well. (Not to mention relying heavily on just one or two.)

The difference this year is that I organized much earlier. I eliminated emotion by planning my strategy in advance with none of that pressure that resides in the back of your head saying, “oh shit, it’s January I really should try to get a bunch of clients.”

Well in advance it was easy to see how to overlap mediums, it was easier to plan and budget making the utilization of email, facebook, email, print and even direct mail all possible and all work together.

I don’t know about you but I don’t like spending money on advertising, yet if you knew it would always work wouldn’t you spend whatever amount was necessary to attract as many clients as you want?

One of the big changes for me is I started to consider the costs associated with attracting a new client. It’s not necessarily super accurate and it doesn’t have to be but it’s easy to figure out.

Consider how much money you’ve spent on marketing in the last 90 days or last year. Add everything up. For things like email campaigns where it seems like there is no cost try estimating the number of hours it took to run the promo and complete the sales process and imagine paying someone to do it; consider those costs as part of your marketing costs.

Now simply divide the number of new clients you attracted by the amount you spent on marketing and you have a basic idea how much it costs you to attract each new client.

Here’s the opportunity…January to March is the biggest quarter in our industry, awareness for our services is at an all time high. There’s no better time to test campaigns and see if you can match or reduce your cost of customer acquisition than now.

What I’ve taken to doing is creating a spreadsheet and laying out all my promotions based on the weeks of the year and using different colours in columns to represent different mediums and then start planning how they’ll overlap. By doing this I can estimate costs and start building instruction sets.

Once I decide on the promo I systemize it in the following manner:

1)   Write the copy. (Ad, emails)

2)   Create an instruction set on how to sell the promo ie. Basic presentation language, instructions for entering in the CRM system and any applicable upsells.

3)   If it’s short term I setup an immediate conversion offer and the format which it’s to be presented in.

4)   OH SHIT! I try to imagine what could go wrong, what disconnects could occur that could leave a lead frustrated and in turn brainstorm solutions to make great customer service easy.

These instructions are given to my admin team to execute, but honestly even if you’re on your own you’ll save time, headaches and increase consistent service if you develop this plan for yourself.

Before you is an amazing opportunity to utilize this strategy for February, March and beyond. If my studio that’s already known to be very successful can see such a dramatic bump from using a system like this imagine what you can do!