Gauge Customer Interest

How to Use Client Management Software to Gauge Customer Interest

As a sports facility owner or manager, you should be tracking your clients’ interests. Your customers are more likely to engage with you if your marketing efforts are highly targeted and have a direct appeal to them. An analysis of their interests also provides extremely valuable information to you as a business owner when you consider new products and services.

Here are four simple steps to boost your bottom line by keeping tabs on what your customers want:

1. Choose the Format

To effectively analyze your clients’ interests, your data should be collected electronically and automatically. Sports facility management software like eSoft Planner makes this easy. But if you don’t have software that allows you to keep track of client information and interests. You need to manually add the information to whatever files or spreadsheets you’re using to track clients’ information.

To collect the information, a simple list of checkboxes for them to identify what topics they want more information about is sufficient. Clients can quickly tick the boxes when they sign up.

2. Decide Which Interests to List

Take some time to think strategically about which interests to include in your list before you publish your form.

You should have between 6 to 10 interest options that will offer a good selection, without overwhelming the client. If the interest checklist is part of an electronic form, consider making the question a required field and add a “none of these” checkbox option at the bottom. (If the field is too easy to skip, clients will skip it. Especially if it’s part of a form that is already relatively complicated.)

Some points to remember when developing your list of interests:

• The field is part of a paper form, encourage your staff to remind new clients to fill it out.
• If your sports facility offers a wide variety of services, you may need to keep the interests broadly categorized (for example: adult fitness programs, kid programs, mom and baby programs, sports leagues, etc.).
• If you run a small, interest-specific facility, you can make the list more specific. For example, if you own a batting cage facility, you can gauge your customers’ interests in the available pitching machines or measurement technologies.

3. Choose Both Current Services and Future Services

Client interests are a great way to test the potential viability of a new product or service. For example, you might survey your clients about is their interest in purchasing baseball and softball apparel and equipment. If more than 60% of your clients indicated that they are interested, it is safe to consider it as a serious option.

4. Require Clients to Frequently Update Their Interests

Make sure that your clients frequently update their interests. Especially when you add new interests to your list. eSoft Planner allows you to customize how often your clients are prompted to update their profiles. You can also export the interest lists easily for e-mail marketing purposes.

Gauging customer interest is a vital part of growing your sports facility business and increasing client engagement. Making sure you’re collecting this information easily and in a format that you can analyze and market against is important. It can help your business be more efficient. Contact us for a demo to see how eSoft Planner simplifies the process of creating customer interest surveys and integrating them into your other processes.