If you think it's too early to start planning, you're probably right on time. :) A Black Friday sale requires weeks of planning and preparation to pull them off with great success!
Here’s a Black Friday sales system that could make your gym thousands of dollars in just one day. This is a perfect opportunity if you need a cash influx to make improvements to your gym.
Here are 3 things that make this system so successful:
- Enticing and limited membership or program packages
- Pre-order options to avoid high upfront costs and unused inventory
- Utilizing online communication and automation to sell to a greater audience
Before we dive into the specifics, here is a quick overview:
- Prepare your plans and packages
- Organize and set up your retail
- Prepare and automate communications
- Crush the Black Friday event
- Place your orders and deliver before the holiday
Black Friday Packages and Retail Prep
The first step is to decide what packages and retail items you want to offer for Black Friday. Offer special rates and items that are ONLY available during this one-day sale.
This event is a great chance to offer paid-in-full (PIF) memberships and special program packages. You will want to look at your financials to decide how many PIF plans you can offer and how many packages.
Here are some examples:
- 12-month PIF membership (offer a discount of 10% and limited to 3)
- 6-month PIF membership (offer a discount of 10% and limited to 3)
- Personal Training Package — 10 personal training sessions, a set of resistance bands, exercise ball, and exercise mat. You can keep your personal training sessions at the same price but include more items to make the package seem more valuable.
- New member package — 1-month membership, 2 personal training sessions, and a t-shirt.
Once you've decided on your special offers, you can set those up using PushPress plans. Make sure you turn off the option to show this in the member app. You'll save the landing page links to share on Black Friday.
- Create a paid-in-full plan and limit the quantity.
- Create packages using a single plan and use the description to list the items included.
Organize and Set Up Your Retail
Packages and plans have the opportunity to bring in a lot of revenue on a single day; however, retail items can increase retention and get your members to market your gym by wearing your apparel.
Choose the products you'd like to offer in your pre-order. You have some flexibility since you won't be carrying inventory but don't overload your members with too many options. Think in terms of packages to sell more products at once. For example:
- Get Started Package (includes t-shirt, workout-at-home kit, and a 10 class punchcard)
- The Hustle Package (5 personal training sessions, t-shirt, sweat towel, at-home pull-up bar)
- Raving Fans Package (2 shirts, hoodie, trucker hat, sticker, and water bottle)
Build your packages and list other pre-order products, and then get started on your retail checklist:
- Dig through all of your old inventory and sell those items for just a little above cost. These in-stock items will bring people in the doors to view and pre-order other products.
- Order just one set of products you plan to offer in a package. Physical items will allow people to see and touch what they will be pre-ordering without carrying all the inventory.
- Place your order with your vendor for apparel you want in stock for Black Friday. This could take up to 4 weeks or more.
- Set up pre-orders in PushPress but turn off the option to purchase on the member app for now.
Pro-tip: you can use a print-on-demand service like The Printful to get a single sample of most apparel items. These items will be great for displays.
Prepare and Automate Your Marketing
Now that you've got your packages and items built, it's time to pull together some marketing. Here's what you'll need:
- Poster or flyer in your gym
- Email communication setup and ready to roll
- Graphics for social media
Communicating early and often will be the key to this event. Here's the timeline and recommend email communications:
- Four weeks before — send out the first "Save-the-date" email to everyone on your list that includes the date and location of the event AND a teaser of your special limited packages. Add in a note that the links to purchase online package will be emailed on the day of Black Friday.
- Three weeks before — Follow-up email with more information and a preview of other items for sale.
- Two weeks before — Build excitement and remind people not to miss this opportunity.
- One week before — "Black Friday sale this week!" email to remind people to keep an eye on their email for these exceptional deals.
- One day before — "Don't forget, tomorrow is the big day!" email to remind people to check their email tomorrow at 7:00 am.
- Black Friday at 7:00 am — "Here's your special link" email with the landing page links to purchase your Black Friday deals. Keep this email short.
- Black Friday (after you have sold out) — "Sold out! But here's another special offer in case you missed the others" and include links to your additional pre-order package landing pages. You also can allow a few more special offers to be purchased if you want to increase the limits.
- Black Friday at 12:00 pm (if you haven't sold out) — "We still have one more special offer left" email, which will get some who have been waiting to pull the trigger.
The best way to set up these communications is by using a tool that can help you schedule and automate the messages. We recommend using PushPress Grow to set up a workflow with these emails because you could also include an SMS message or two during the week of Black Friday. Text messages will increase your visibility and increase your success rate!
Another option is Mailchimp which will allow you to set up and schedule to send these emails ahead of time.
Utilize your social media channels and share the content in these emails to a greater audience. Don't forget, a Facebook event will allow you to get a pulse on how many people might be showing up the day of the event.
Crush the Black Friday Event!
Now that you've gotten people in the doors, it's time to exceed their expectations! Schedule the event for 4 hours, something like 8:00 am – 12:00 pm. A longer event allows people to stop by to check out the sale. Get the gym ready the night before!
Here's an event checklist:
- Clean the space and decorate—you want it to look different than any other day.
- Setup your pre-order packages so people can touch and feel the items.
- Prepare your music playlist.
- Decide if you're going to offer some refreshments—people love food.
- Set up tables with apparel folded with signs for pricing
- Determine a station for people to purchase—you'll want more than one staff person doing this during busy times.
- Have someone welcome people when they walk in the door with directions on what to do and where to purchase items.
Here are some pro-tips on how to handle the pre-orders:
- Consider having a few tablets set up for people to purchase pre-orders. Add a page to your website and list all options with links.
- Offer a paper form for pre-orders. Add a signature to the bottom that states you can charge their card on file. Paper forms will simplify the process for your customers and give your staff time to enter and bill the orders later.
Place Your Orders and Deliver!
You don't have much time between Black Friday and the holiday, so make sure you quickly organized your orders and place them with your vendors. You need at least 2-weeks to package orders, notify the customer, and give them time to pick up before the holiday.
