Fitness Business School – When Free Makes Sense

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here, and in today’s episode I want to talk with you about when free makes sense and when it doesn’t. Let’s get started.

Welcome to the Fitness Business School podcast, the show for fitness business owners who want to grow their income, increase their impact and improve their lifestyle. Be sure to listen to the end of this episode because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

If you’ve listened to any number of the podcasts that I’ve done over the past few years, or a, you’ve been a reader of my newsletter, part of the, the email newsletter community, you’ve heard me talk about free as a marketing tool, as a valuable asset. And I truly believe that free has a really important
place in business growth. And for years, people would say that free is devaluing your service and all that stuff.

And from day one, I felt like that was absurd because time is our most valuable commodity Time is a non-renewable resource that if somebody is willing to grant us their time, then they value something. So it’s not devaluing anything if we’re giving something away for a for time, not necessarily for a
financial investment. And I’ve used the example in previous podcasts of books. I’m an avid reader. I’ve got hundreds of books on my shelves in my office. I’ve got a book room downstairs. We’ve got a book room in the entryway of our house that both each have in excess of a hundred books. The
one downstairs probably has a thousand books. And, in addition to that, I’ve got easily over 2,500 books on Kindle. And I read literally every day. Actually in 2022, I read 363 days on my Kindle.

And so, so I’m pretty, pretty close to an everyday reader. And I would tell you, I still buy any number of books that I haven’t gotten to. And that’s very regular, very common with Kindle, right? Because it’s an impulse thing to buy. You get excited about it, you say, okay, I’m going to read it, but you don’t. So you
valued your time, the investment of time it would take to read it more than you valued the investment of money, whatever it costs to buy it. And I don’t think that’s a, an uncommon thing in the world of commitment, right? Whether it’s going through a course or reading a book, or actually showing up for
things that you pay for. I mean, that’s not terribly uncommon. So when we get somebody’s time, I think that, that we value, we should value that to a great deal.

So I think that when it comes to free, the most important kind of component of free is if somebody is going to actually give you their time, then it’s okay to use free as a marketing tool. But for them to give you their time, they have to perceive it as being valuable enough that they’re willing to exchange minutes
or even hours of their life for that thing. And there, let me give you kind of the like two different examples of how this works in my mind. The idea of a referral, bringing a free guest, like a guest to come in and train with them for a day or a week, that to me is a wonderful use of free. Somebody is coming in,
they’ve got an accountability partner that’s kind of helping them to onboard into your business and ensure that they have a positive experience.

They feel more comfortable because they know somebody there. They have social support. They have somebody who’s rooting for them. They have somebody who’s, they’re outside of the gym kind of accountability partner. So the, it’s really somebody who probably is being set up to succeed more
than the average prospect. And they have somebody that they’re probably gonna show up for. So there’s a much higher show rate than probably the average free person. And so that, that is a wonderful use of free that person, I would guess that free guests that come along with somebody that’s currently a client of
those guests. If we exclude people who are guests who just pop in during the holidays or something like that. But people who actually come during a normal time of year, I would guess that they convert a much higher than 50% close rate to becoming paying clients in some way, shape, or form.

So I think that’s a wonderful use of free. Now, the flip side, I think that a lot of people use free Facebook groups, and I’ve had a free Facebook group that we actually just retired. And for the free Facebook group, somebody joining doesn’t really ensure that you’re getting any of their time. So they only free only
becomes valuable in that interaction if they’re willing to engage and give you their time if they’re willing to give you their attention. And I think so some people have made free Facebook groups wonderful platforms to, to get people’s time and attention and use it as a marketing tool. So the idea of a free
Facebook group or a free newsletter or whatever else, its value is only created when somebody’s attention is gained. And see, like when somebody walks into your gym, we already have their time, we have their attention, they’re in this, isn’t this, it’s almost the value is activated once attention is gained, whether it’s in
person or online.

So if you’re using free as a, is an easy way to get somebody to probably take that first step. They may download your free gift card, they may join your free Facebook group. They may subscribe to your free newsletter, but them joining your newsletter doesn’t have a tremendous amount of value
unless they’re opening and reading the things that you’re sharing them. Joining your Facebook group doesn’t really have a lot of value. If they’re unfollowing the posts in the group or anything like that, them downloading your gift card, it only that value is really only activated when they engage with you and at least discuss using the gift card. So when we think about free, think of it as somebody incrementally moving towards you, and the, you can use it as a tool to get somebody to indicate an interest that, Hey, I’m gonna download this free lead magnet just like I would pay for a Kindle book.

Because the promise of the book, the promise of lead magnet is interesting to me, right? Like, it, it solves a problem that helps me move towards a goal. But really the value is only activated once somebody uses it, once they start to consume it, once they start to engage with it. So as you think about, okay, should I do
things that are free? Should I buy into the soundbite of freeze and freeze? Not good freeze is not valuable. I would tell you that free is an incredibly powerful tool, but it, but its value is only derived when somebody engages and uses something. Now, can you cast too wide a net with free? Well, sure, but I
haven’t seen a whole lot of this, right? Like, I think in a free Facebook group or a free email list, when somebody joins, like for me, the part of the email stuff that I care about is who’s actually reading not the gross number of subscribers that I have.

And, and realistically, that’s probably what matters in a Facebook group too, is who is actually engaging. That’s why we actually shifted from a free to a very low cost, like $7 a month low cost paid membership because we could facilitate engagement more easily with a smaller group of people. But, if I
could have done that with free I would’ve been happy to leave it free. The money in that instance isn’t enough to really make a difference. The attention, the engagement, the actual ability to build a relationship is the part that I’m focused on. And, I know some people have said, well, I don’t
want to do free ’cause it’s just gonna get a bunch of tire kickers in my gym or whatever else, man, that’s just not been my experience. Now I get it. People that tell me they have a 95, 90 8% close rate, they’re like, well, some people are saying no, so maybe my close rate’s gonna go down.

And that means they’re not serious. I would tell you that you shouldn’t have a 95 or 98% close rate. If you have that kind of close rate, you’re definitely not seeing enough people because at some point in those interactions, more than two out of a hundred should feel like, Hey, this isn’t the best fit for me. And more
than two out of a hundred you should probably feel aren’t the best fit for you. And I would say that randomly, if we just went and met, a hundred people anywhere, they, I don’t care if you’re talking about at Target, at the parade down the street, I don’t care where it is, there are probably a couple
people that you’d meet out of every hundred. You’d be like, yeah, that person’s probably not the right fit for me. So if you’re only getting the people who are walking through your door with credit card in hand, pen out, ready to sign a contract, you’re probably missing out on, 30,
40, 50% of your potential business growth because you’re just not casting a, a wide enough net.

I believe that you, like, people need to experience if, if you are good at what you do. Now, I’m gonna say this and don’t, don’t take it too much the wrong way, I guess, but if you are good at what you do, you should want more people to experience it because that should probably be your best selling point. If you
are bad at what you do, then you should go direct to high ticket sales early on as quickly as possible. That’s why a high ticket sales person who’s bad at what they do could never have a $7 Facebook group because they would be exposed as not being good at what they do and nobody would spend more money
with them. So if you are good at what you do, then you want more people to walk through your door. You want more people to see how you’re better and different.

You want more people to experience the quality of your coaching, to experience the difference in your culture, to, to actually feel all the things that I’m sure that you believe that make you different than your competitors. The way that you care about the clients that you serve, the individuality in care that you
provide, all those things. There’s no way that you can articulate that in an ad, in a marketing piece as effectively as somebody actually experiencing it. That’s why people, are going to better assess what you like, how driving a car feels by actually taking a test drive, right? They can see pictures of it on
the internet, but they don’t know if they enjoy sitting in it. It’s the same reason why if somebody wants you to buy a puppy, they’ll say, well take it home for a couple days. I mean, the experiential piece of things are, powerful sales tools.

So if free is the way that you get people in the door to experience it, that’s great. And then the flip side is it can kind of serve as a tryout for you to see if this is somebody you wanna spend more time with. And a lot of people don’t think of it that way. I know personally, I’ve had to kind of off ramp a few people along
the way, well, more than a few people along the way to, because after getting to know them a little bit, they didn’t seem like the best fit for the environment that I wanted to create, the culture that we had. So that’s, sometimes that’s hard to know unless you actually get somebody in the room. So if you’ve
been hesitant to use free and don’t know where it fits into your business, hopefully the this little episode can help.

I know I talked about it from a few different angles, but that was really the idea because there’s not this black and white soundbite. This isn’t talk radio where somebody can give you an absolute, this is real life, this is business, and this is a tool that you potentially can use to grow your business.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School.

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