On May 16th, 2019 we connected with Sharilynn Brown at Fit Factory about how they are finding success using SMS and how the medium is becoming a big part of their engagement strategy.

Fit Factory is a health club chain headquartered in Quincy, Massachusetts with locations operating in North Attleboro, Foxboro, Braintree, and Kingston, MA. Fit Factory began in 2015 in Braintree, Massachusetts after two founders who grew up in the area came together and made the decision to buy and improve an existing health club in the area. Due to great management and a high-value price point offering which includes unlimited group fitness classes and other perks. They have been able to grow and plan to scale their facilities.

We had the pleasure to speak to Sharilynn Brown, the Marketing Manager at Fit Factory. Sharilynn began as the company’s Administrative Assistant two years ago and quickly shifted gears to become a part of the Marketing Department, where she now collaborates with a team of five. Sharilynn’s focus as she puts it is a “… a little bit of everything” but in more depth, she said, “I am really passionate about creating unique pre-sale objectives to drive leads and contribute to the overall success of a new club. Additionally, I love developing clever angles and offerings to communicate with existing members in order to improve their overall experience with Fit Factory.”

We got to dive a little deeper and learn about the implementation strategy for Fit Factory from two angles. First, their members. There is a notion in the health and fitness community that there can be difficulty onboarding existing clients to a text message marketing program, but Sharilynn thought differently. She shared some really valuable information about her implementation experience. For existing Fit Factory members she stated, “Implementation was easy! Our membership agreements had already included a clause opting members into communication from Fit Factory. That said, it was really just a value add for them with things like happy birthday texts and free personal training sessions!”

Sharilynn told us, “Text message marketing is easy and convenient both for my team, and for our prospects. It’s just as simple to tell someone to text FFGARLAND to 52236 as it is for them to do so. It’s much more time-efficient then blogging, for example, and we have a much higher success rate actually generating leads using SMS.”

Sharilynn and her team really took the keyword and short-code marketing concept to a new height. Fit Factory featured one of their keywords on a billboard off of the interstate highway in Garland, Texas. When we asked her to give us some insight about their motivation, she said, “ROI can be difficult to track with something like a billboard since the only metric to work with is viewership. With this in mind we decided to incorporate the keyword into our creative to see how many opt-ins we could collect. This in turn continually provides us with measurables such as cost per lead, helping us better analyze our return on investment. We’ve had our Garland Club’s Pre-Sale Keyword active and on the billboard since 5/14 and had passively generated 102 leads within the first 15 days.” Wow, talk about reaction and interaction. Sharilynn and her team are mobile marketing experts.

“My favorite feature would have the be the newly introduced mobile scratch cards. When someone texts in with one of our pre-sale keywords their auto-response includes a link to a digital scratch card which they can ‘scratch’ to see if they’ve won a free year of membership!”

Sharilynn said, “Fit Factory’s mission is to help members to Live Beyond Boundaries by providing immense value for an affordable price point to make fitness accessible to everyone.” At Textmunication we think this is an important question to ask because we believe that performance and numbers are not the only reason why marketing teams seek our product, it also has to do with how our brands can come together to help them fulfill their promise.