Before their COVID-19 closure, The Blade Method in Phoenix, Arizona was a thriving gym that included CrossFit Blade, Blade Method Nutrition, the Blade Method Barbell Program, Blade Method Kids, and the Blade Method Mindset, their podcast.
Open since 2012, the gym has about 260 members. Claire Treanor owns the gym with her husband, and they’ve been with UpLaunch for about a year and a half. Their previous partner joined UpLaunch as a way to capture leads.
What none of them knew was that UpLaunch would become a lifeline during a global pandemic.
Daily Messages
Once they temporarily closed, Claire divided up the members between all the coaches.
“Every day they go into UpLaunch and they connect with their clients and they go over the workout with them. And we just kinda check in, ask how they are doing,” Claire said.
People who are paying a normal, unlimited membership are now getting this one-on-one service. Each coach has anywhere from 30 to 60 people to check in with each day. Texting each person individually every night would be difficult, but Claire and her coaches use the Broadcast Center in the UpLaunch app to easily send out a mass text to each of their assigned members every night.
“The Broadcast Center has been really, really good,” Claire said, "we are using UpLaunch like crazy."
Once the conversation gets going, each coach can then have one-on-one conversations with anyone who replies.
“I’ll send a message and it will spur a conversation,” Claire said, “and we'll go over the equipment they have, how I want the workout done for them, if they have any extra exercises, or sometimes we just catch up. I can just see how their life is going, spend a few minutes just talking (via text). It’s really cool because I’m getting to know some of the members a lot more personally than I ever had before. That’s kinda fun,” she said.
After being closed for more than a month, Claire said they’ve had about five cancellations. She said being able to easily communicate with them via UpLaunch helps.
“We are trying to do everything we possibly can to give our members the best experience even though we aren’t in the gym,” Claire said.
She admits that not knowing how long their closure will last is scary. She often wonders what the members are thinking about her gym.
“Are they thinking, I could do this for this amount of time? Or this is awesome I could do this as long as I need to? That’s just the unknown. Every business is going through it now,” Claire said.
For now, Claire and her team will do everything they can to stay connected with their members and delivering as much value as possible.
To help gym owners stay in touch with their members, UpLaunch increased the SMS credits for all accounts in the U.S. and Canada from 1,000 credits to 2,000 credits through May 2020.
“The added 2,000 messages was really helpful because we are doing so many (messages),” Claire said.
“The priority is to maintain who we have. If we grow that’s great, but not at the sacrifice of our current people,” she said.
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