Name: Digital-First Growth: Personalizing the Member Journey with AI and Automation
Uploaded: 2025-02-26T20:01:05.890Z
Duration: 31 min 28 s
Description: Digital-First Growth: Personalizing the Member Journey with AI and Automation

Transcript for "Digital-First Growth: Personalizing the Member Journey with AI and Automation": Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, Digital Personalizing the Member Journey with AI and Automation. Does everyone want to drop in the chat just where you're from so we can see who all is here? And then we'll get started here in just a second. See, Hillary's from Gulfport. I'm really close to you, Hillary. Oh my gosh. So many people. This is awesome. Hello, everyone. Well, I'm not gonna waste any more time since there is so many people in here already. So we are excited to have you guys with us. My name is Kayla Cannon, and I'll be your moderator for today's session. Before we get started, I do wanna go through a few housekeeping items. In today's session, it will last about forty five minutes. We encourage you to submit any q and a through the q and a feature located on the top right of your screen. We'll also have a poll in today's session, so be sure to participate in that when prompted. And our speakers will let you know when those come up for you. And then, at the end of the webinar, you'll see a brief survey pop up as well. We'd really appreciate your feedback to help us improve future webinars. And then following today's session, you will receive an email with the link to the recording so you can access it afterwards. So we can, we're gonna go in. So we are going to explore how personalization and engagement strategies can transform the entire member journey from attracting new members to retaining and delighting them with tailored experiences. And what better people than Kang and Nick to be our speakers today? You might have seen that Kaelin was originally scheduled, and we do not have Kaelin. We have Kang, who is just as amazing, and y'all will be in great hands with him. Kang is a senior product manager here, and Nick is our vice president of demand and digital services. So we can go to the next slide. A quick look at today's agenda. We're gonna go over the importance of engagement for member loyalty, AI campaigns and how they attract members, personalized automated engagement, empowering through self-service. And then like I said, we'll have some key takeaways and a chance for y'all to have a q and a. So with that, I'm going to pass it over to Kang. The floor is yours. Thank you so much, Kayla. We're talking today about really AI and engagement and how, AI can really help power that engagement for you. Now here's a statistic that I know we everyone here probably all knows and is very familiar with. Attracting a new member costs five times more than keeping an old one. It's an old adage that we've heard time and again. You know, it always costs more to try to bring on new members than it does to keep existing ones. While there are a lot of benefits to keeping existing members, once you engage with them, they'll stick around more, they'll spend more, and they'll really start to be champions for your clubs. Now how do we how do we do this? And that's what we're kinda trying to see and drive in this webinar right now. Now we've seen a lot of challenges around engagement. So that really help drive engagement with this webinar. What we wanna do is really put up a, something interesting to kinda get some some feedback from you guys. So if we can, just jump to the next slide real quick, Nick. Now some of the more common challenges that we've seen around the engagement and retention connection, because we do see that there is correlation between how often and how you engage with your client base and your customers with how often people are staying. Some of the more common challenges that we've seen are really around lack of personalized communications, ineffective ways to track memory behavior, collect data, understand their preferences, as well as having limited time and resources for creating some of these meaningful connections, some of these personalizations. And so what we wanted to do was get some feedback and some, some thoughts from you guys with a quick poll to start off our webinar here today. If you quickly jump over to the polls tab, you can see there. But what we wanna ask is, what's the biggest challenge your organization is currently facing in personalizing the member journey? And we put some options in there. Go ahead and, in in the poll, if you can, choose something, that best relates to what, what you feel and what you're seeing, inside, your your, your club. And then we'll, give it a a few moments here to let everyone enter in their their answers. Looks like we've got a lot of people that are unsure where to start and or limited by technology and tools. I'm curious to know more about the lack of data and insights. Like, is that more they don't know where to go? It'd be interesting to hear from whoever is voting on that because I think you can get a lot of data and insights from u utilizing AI, but, I guess, with the overall member journey, where where you need to take a look at. Excellent. Yeah. We'd love to dig in a little bit more. Limited technology or tools, I think that's something that we are starting to see more, becoming more prevalent as in more there there's a lot more offerings coming into the market that are starting to leverage AI. We we know that AI is becoming quite the big buzzword right now in the health and fitness industry, and a lot of people are looking at what AI can do. So, that's that's gonna be interesting to see what happens with that coming out soon. Yep. Excellent. Well, thank you guys for taking that poll. What we're gonna do and I know Kayla gave an overview, but we're gonna go through three proven engagement strategies that work and what we're utilizing for a lot of our clients today. Hopefully, give you guys some of those tools. It looks like you you are asking questions on, hey. What tools should I use? And, you know, unsure where to start. We're gonna start excuse me. We're gonna start with the first step of the member journey. You know, we talk about your website being the, you know, the the front door to your club or to your gym because it's the first place that somebody's gonna go. Anyway, but, really, the first place that they're gonna go is they're gonna go to Google or they're gonna go to now chat g d p. So what the first thing you need to do is you gotta figure out and utilize AI to get them to come to your website, and then you gotta make sure your website's optimized for that conversion, of course. But one of the things that we've put together is a way to help you with your paid ad campaigns or your paid social campaigns, utilize AI to optimize those campaigns and drive and get those campaigns to market faster. So we have, advanced audience targeting. We have tools that you can use for AI driven ad creation, multiplatform optimization so you can run campaigns on Google, Facebook, Twitter, you know, what are or sorry, x. Let's call it the right thing. And I said Facebook because that's what it says on the slide, but it is meta. Instagram, you know, any of those channels, and actually utilize either video, images, carousel ads. I know a lot of us are utilizing third party agencies, and this is a tool that you can either work with them or you can bring in house, and use to run your campaigns using AI insights. So that's this is quick overview. This is the first stage of the member journey. Right? You're trying to utilize AI to optimize your ad creative, optimize your keywords, optimize your spend to get them into your website, to get them into that first step of the funnel in a cost effective manner. That way you're not driving a high cost per acquisition or a cost per lead depending on your campaign, and this is a tool that will help you do that. A quick look at it. You know, we're talking about driving, attracting members with AI powered campaigns. It's a three step process. We really have to simply add your landing page. We're gonna describe the offering, and we're gonna hit generate. It's really that easy with AI tools. This is a tool that we have in house, and so this is a tool that you can utilize. But this will generate everything up into the ad, like, in the image or the video. You do have to supply that, because it needs to be reflective of your club or your gym, you know, and your members really should be reflective in that if that's what you're targeting. I'll go into another demo slide here in a second. But the reason why this is so important, the impact of this is that the results really do speak for themselves. We have a huge time savings. I'm not gonna make you sit through the one to two minutes to generate the ad in today's demo, But it it does really take, you know, maybe five minutes to do a campaign from end to end versus I've been doing this for years and some it could take days depending on how how long your and how big your campaign is. And so it's really saved a huge amount of time from right now. And it's cheaper ad cost because it's doing a lot of the AI optimization for you. Meaning, it's not just doing your bidding, which is you know, that's been that's been used before. It's not just doing your bidding, your cost analysis. It's actually changing the creative and saying, hey. This creative is not working. We're gonna change it out. We're gonna optimize the ad, and it's gonna do that for you on the back end. You can go to sleep, and it's optimizing the campaigns for you. And that allows you to reduce the ad cost but also increase the click through rates. So I'm gonna stop sharing. I know it's a cardinal sin on the thing, but I wanna show you guys the demo, of what we're doing. And I gotta share a different screen. And so I'll just hold while I find the share button again. Here we go. They told me to make sure I knew how to do this first. I was like, I got it. I got it. Here we go. Alright. So I did pick one. Again, I said I wasn't gonna make you guys sit through the demo. So I already generated this, so, hopefully, you can see that this is the live layout. I wanted to show super quick how we can generate a campaign for pickleball classes. I picked a a club that I think is on the attendee list, Paseo Club. What I did I all I did in here is I came into the to the software. I said, I wanna generate a campaign for pickleball classes. Clicked right here, and you see it pops up. Hopefully, you can see that pop up. There it goes. It's gonna give me really the the GBT prompt of, like, hey. Here's what's going on. Here's what we wanna do. I put in the landing page for pickleball, put in the list. You can come in through here. I didn't do any of this, but you can come in through here and put your brand, your tone, your language. You can set all of that up so every campaign gets that same impact. And then from right there, you just hit generate campaign. And what that did is it went through. It scraped a couple of images from, Instagram or and we loaded those up, and then it gave me all of these ad combinations that are optimized to that prompt. And then you can come through here. You can select those, and this is you're just seeing them. It's, you know, it's four images, used the same way, but it's four different creatives that you're gonna start to test. And I've just done four AB ad tests in a matter of seconds that you can go then run on Instagram super quickly. And then if I didn't like that creative, I can come back in here and regenerate and regenerate, or I can scroll down and, hey. I wanna edit this text. This is not the right brand language. Anything, I can do that right here. I can have it regenerate right here as well if I didn't like that creative. And, again, this is just Instagram. So, again, you have different options here. There's all sorts of channels to use. And then we can edit the targeting, edit the budgets, do all that right here. You don't even have to go into Instagram once you make the connection, set your budget, and then you launch the campaign. And then you just let it auto optimize. And so from there, this really starts to run your ad creative by itself. And you come in and you check and you make sure the optimizations are working and then you've set the goals. Like, in this case, I've set the goal to traffic, but you'd wanna go you know, I wanna set the goal to leads or conversions. We we gotta make sure that that's technically set up. So there is there is a a human and a machine aspect to this is making sure that you have everything set up correctly and running so you're just not spending money. But this is a great tool if you're struggling with your ads, your paid ads, and getting members into that first part of the journey. This is definitely where I would start on the paid search side or paid social side. Start utilizing AI. And there's a number of tools. You don't have to use ours. There's a number of tools out there. But find the AI tool that works for you and your system to start optimizing that first step of the member journey, which is really getting them into your website. And that's where I would definitely recommend, you start. I'm gonna try to share my screen and talk again at the same time. But if that was too quick and if you want me to, do a quick spin off of, you know, run a couple ad samples for anybody that's here in the in the webinar today, go ahead and drop your URL into the chat, and I'll I'll do a couple of them while we're going through the next couple of slides since we're not that way we're not sitting there waiting while everyone's, you know, we're trying to do the entire webinar. And I'll generate those slide those ads for you and just show you how quick it it can actually generate, AB ad testing for you to increase that optimization process. And then with that, I think that's over to King. Yeah. Thank you for that, Nick. That was super cool to see and super quick. And Nick's just highlighting the awesome power that we have from, our ability to leverage AI to create personalization that attracts members, that attracts prospects to start engaging with your clubs. Now you got them in the funnel. They're in the funnel. They're they're interested. What do you do next? We all know that today in the health and fitness industry, it's becoming ever increasingly more competitive. There the the old competitive advantages that a lot of clubs had around things like price, around things like location are no. Probably all less of an advantage. And in today's day and age, the the real way to separate yourself from other clubs comes down to personalization and the experience that the members can be provided or the experience that the members have, around the journey when they engage with your clubs. And so the next part is, once you have them in that funnel, how do you engage with them so that they feel like you are engaging on a personal basis? And this is, again, where you can start to leverage AI to start driving that engagement for you. There are ways that you can create timely touch points throughout the member journey. Scaling member communications, triggering automated communications based off milestones, based off of member related activities and actions that they've taken. And so a couple ways that we can do this, as you can see well, I don't have a demo, like like Nick has, unfortunately, but the screen that you see, the the little image that is on the screen today shows a integration that we have with AI in in another product called EngagePRO, where we have actually integrated AI as well to really, again, superpower, your staff by giving them the ability to quickly create content for emails and SMS to create personalized messages for your members in a quick and efficient way. Again, reducing the time it takes to sit and try to think through an email on how to how to draft it, how to create that content. AI can do that for you. We also have, ways with Engage Pro as well right now that we can automate the engagement around those touch points. So think about ways that a a a member today goes through after they've joined a club. Do you wanna be able to offer engagement around the actions and activities that they've taken so that they feel like the communications that they're getting are really more personalized for them based off what they're going through. And that's what strategy number two is about. It's about leveraging AI to not only create that content that is personalized for your members, but also to create the milestones around the campaigns of how you want to engage with them for the lifetime of their their, their membership, the lifetime that they're active with your club so that you can continue to drive that retention for them. That's pretty much sums up strategy number two. So next, we're gonna talk about strategy number three, which is around keeping members engaged with self-service tools. So, again, from an experience standpoint, we we, we start to see correlation between the experience that your members get and the experience that your staff have. And so what we wanna provide is ways to, again, continue to empower your staff so that they can continue to provide better member experiences. And one of the ways we can do that is with self-service tools so that the experience can be crafted around what the member wants to see, what the member wants to do, when they wanna do things, and meet them where they're at. And so using self-service tools, will help things like continue to drive membership management because it allows users to update their own details. It allows them to purchase additional packages or book additional class or gets get information about the things that they're interested in and the the the areas that they wanna continue to pursue. And so by providing them with the self-service tools to be able to cater and craft that experience to what works best for them has seen a lot of, increase in, in engagement around, the the the club and the offerings that they offer, but also around retention with how that engagement drives more interest, drives more activity from those members themselves. And so the, really, the last thing here is to really just to, tie it all up, with some of the key takeaway. So as we talked about, one of the things, you know, we we wanna attract, engage, and retain members using AI to do so. Nick showed you how AI can help power the funnel to start attracting members into your club. We talked a little bit about once they're in, and you have that engagement with them and you started to engage with them, how you can start to personalize, how you can use AI and leverage the automation to personalize that engagement so that it feels, like the purse like your your members are, getting the top notch, experience from your clubs, and then how that communication, how those engagements, can help keep members active and help improve retention across the board for your clubs. Thank you both. So like I said at the beginning, we do have a quick session survey that we would love for y'all to take your time and fill out, and it will be up for a little bit, during q and a. So don't feel like you have to do it right now if you have some questions to ask, but, if you're still hanging out, we'd love for you to get that, filled out for us. And with that, we can move on to q and a. So like I said, you can still, submit questions using the q and a feature on the right side, and we have been, managing and looking at those questions that have come through the chat as well. So, Nick and King, I will let y'all take over the questions and the the demos. We got a lot of URLs thrown in the chat, which is really awesome to see that. Yeah. I'll tell you, I'm gonna Paul here asked is, regarding the demo, is it done through Google Ads? It's gonna be done, Paul. It's gonna either be done through Google Ads, YouTube. It can be done through Meta, Facebook. It can be done through TikTok. I can I'm trying to generate some ads at the same time. But it's done through any number of platforms, not necessarily all the platforms, but it's it is integrated with Google Ads first and foremost and then Instagram and any any of the major lead channels that you're gonna wanna work with. And then, yes, there was a number of ads in there or URLs in there. I didn't get to all of them. I got the two. It's generating right now, so it's still working. So we'll I'll show you a couple of those here in a second. And then let me let me I'll just show I picked let's see. Let me share my screen. Different screen again, guys. I'm trying to learn here. Why, while Nick is going through that, I know there are a couple other questions that are thrown up. So lots of interest around the this this application that you're using. I will say that this is, this is not part of club automation, right now. And so this is the the the tool yeah. Go ahead, Nick. I'm sorry. Yeah. I mean, we we are part of club automation. It's not part of the club automation software is a a great way to say it. And we do integrate with the analytics. So it'll make sure, like, hey. If we're driving leads into club automation, it will make that connection for you. But it's not it's not a default factor in the combination software. So you don't log in to the back end of club automation, and you don't have this there. You would have a login to this tool, standalone if you if you are interested in it. I pulled up here on the screen. You we've got the Adirondack Club. And I probably say that wrong. But, we went through here, and I just said, hey, summer camp. That's a big interest right now. Right? Everyone's driving registrations. That's something you're gonna wanna be running campaigns for. You're gonna wanna be optimizing for. I just had the the tool generate the prompt. Again, I've not spoken to that or on that club. I don't know anybody from there, so this prompt would need to be customized. That, again, we've talked about it. It's it's the human and the machine. You wanna make sure that this is customized speaking your brand language. So don't just set it and forget it. Please don't do that. But this will actually pull that together. You can see it gave me a pretty good prompt. Then I then I hit generate campaign. It went through, and it pulled video assets from the website. That's the only thing I gave it. And so this website does have a lot of great video assets. It pulled a lot of this stuff in there, and it gave me a bunch of ad combinations to test. I just did I selected Instagram. I'll go through. I wanna show Paul, the other channels. I'll show you that here in one second. But it gave me, again, gave me four variations. The text you can see here is different in each one, different call to action, slightly different tone, but it gave me four variations of each. Gave me well, it seems that we got a lot of videos. It gave me some Shutterstock stuff in here too. But it's again, this is just showing you with a two minute demo how many ads you can create like this, and this is just Instagram. Just think now I can go publish these, turn around and go into Facebook, and then turn around and go into my Google Ads and do the same thing. Because it's we'll also do it for Google search, not just video and images. So if I wanted to go if I click this, hopefully, you can see it, advertise. Here's all the channels we can do. A lot I can't demo a lot of these because I have to have it connected to account. So this is just a a demo setup. But you can see we can do all of these channels through this platform and run your campaigns through one space. So if you if you are managing your own paid campaigns and you've got the headache of logging in to multiple platforms, this is a great tool just to manage that. Not all all not only that, but it also does all the auto optimizations for you. I don't see any other q and a here. I'm not looking at the right screen. It is so it's an there is a there is a cost for the tool. Natalie, it looks like you're asking that and maybe a few questions for that. Depending on how many platforms you wanna run and if you want us to do it, you know, your your rep or, somebody on our team can definitely, help answer that and get you a customized cost. It's it's pretty low considering, all all the stuff that the tool does. I will will tell you that. I'm shocked at that pricing. But it is something that, again, it's gonna be customized based on how many campaigns you're on. And then if you want our team to be in there setting it up for you, or if you just wanna log in and you just wanna go, you can have at it. You can you can do it all day long. Here's an, here's a little, here's an interesting, question that I I kinda wanna throw out there, and love to you a little bit, Nick. So, this is from Dana Brunk. This is a good idea, but for those of us that move from CSI to club automation, we don't have interest for thousands of members. How any idea on how to throw out a wide net to existing members? Oh, there's a couple of things. I mean, I generally focus on the digital side because that's that's my background. You can certainly do retargeting campaigns to your existing memory list. So you if you have a memory list, email list, Kang mentioned was mentioning workflows and showing a lot of those things. You can email your existing memory list, add them to a retargeting campaign so that they're seeing ads related to your club to get them back in specifically for events. I was looking at a couple of clubs that have, like, you know, summer nights or or, you know, Halloween related events, things like that to drive awareness to those people that are already been to your website. They're already a member. You already have their email. Retargeting is a great way to do that, and that helps automate them to bring them back in. They don't even need to convert. Right? Because you already know that they're a member. You're just wanting to get that awareness out there. And then, you know, Kang's workflows with SMS and emails, making sure you can ping them automatically based on certain behaviors or certain triggers. Yeah. From from my perspective, for a wider net to existing members, now I I'm gonna speak up from the, from the perspective of EngagePRO. With with EngagePRO, it is possible to cast out a wide net a a really wide net to existing members. We actually have people that use EngagePRO to, send one time messages to their entire list of, of, of leads and members. And so, the the AI features can also be used to, you know, create content that is generated, for a wider audience. Again, a lot like Nick said, a lot of what is inputted is going to, have, you know, a lot of what comes out and so the brand voice, the information, etcetera. But, it is possible to do that, with, with some, with some bulk messaging and some, bulk one time messaging to to cast out that wider net. Yeah. For sure. And I just picked another one. This one's gonna be a a fun one. I've not seen this before. This is Oxridge, and they have hopefully, I can show you the right the right tab. They do horse boarding. So it's an equestrian and riding club. And so I just quickly I'm I'm actually here at the generate campaign stage. Right? And it's it's showing me. When I show you my screen and I know I'm going pretty fast because this is what we do all day, so I forgive me. Like, we've done a roll pretty fast, but if you if I think there's a couple people hang saying, hey. They want to see this in more detail, or we'd love to set up some one on ones, with you or, I think Kayla has a recording of this. But what this is showing, this is the the first prompt. This is, again, boarding facility, and it's giving me some suggested ideas already. This is basically telling me, hey. Here's some ideas for some campaigns, some some other keyword terms to think about. And then all I'm going to do is I'm gonna hit generate, and it's gonna you know, hey. Here's that prompt. Here's what's gonna go on here. I'm gonna hit generate campaign, and you can see this is this I'm pointing at my screen like you did. This is our default setting in here. So it's pulling in the default brand, but you'll see it start to actually do this. And now it's pulling a chest image because I think it's probably reading something on the website. So that's showing us that, hey, the website's not reading things correctly. That's okay. We can come in here. We can add in any of the images we want. We can upload media. We can then, we can actually go from to Shutterstock if we want or we can go to Google images. And so we can customize these. So we can go like, I can do suggested media. This is it's suggesting based on the keywords on the website. But if I I can go let's see if I've got my media in here. I'm just gonna use a pickleball. Again, I know it doesn't make sense for this. But one of the other things too, this does the auto cropping for you on the images. So you can zoom in, zoom out of your images so you don't need to worry about or deal with any of that. So I can come in here and select the crops that I want, save the changes, and then I've got those two images in there. That's my media. And then it's because I only put one image, it's only gonna give me one ad combination option. And then it's giving me options without images, which aren't great. So we don't we don't necessarily wanna use those. But you can see how quickly that just started to frame up the process. Like, it's it's not it's not a %. We need to go through and look at it. But look at the keywords. It already gave me headlines, boarding stables close to you, private horse boarding spaces, like and that's gonna start to optimize what works and what doesn't. So, I know there's a couple of chat messages I can't see while I'm doing two seconds ago. While while you're doing that and and while you're switching, let me, Dana's got another question. Is the creative compatible with Canva? It does not link to Canva, but you can export from Canva to your hard drive and then load it up into that system. So you you can do I know you can do a lot of AI generation in Canva. It does link the chat GTP. So So if you're into using SORO or GPT for mid journey AI creation or anything like that, it will link to that. So Canva is just not one of those integrations we have yet. That's really all the questions that have come in. I think they've kinda stopped after that last one. Yeah. Thank you all for answering those, and thank you everyone who submitted questions. Those were really great. That concludes our session. Thank you, Nick. Thank you, King. Thank you, everyone who joined us. Don't forget to complete the short survey that's appeared on the screen as and it will appear as it ends. And we also appreciate your feedback, and we look forward to seeing you guys on the next webinar. And I saw a question, will this be recorded? Yes. And you guys will get an email, a little bit after this ends with the recordings so you can access, share with your team, do what you want with it. Yeah. So I hope everyone has a great day. Thanks, y'all. Thanks, everybody. Thank you.