Recently, I was building a little woodworking project with my son, Adam.
Adam is 10 years old. He's incredibly inquisitive. And he's actually one heck of an engineer.
He also single-handedly assembled an entire Ikea bookcase without my help in two hours.
I don't think I could have pulled that off. I was pretty amazed.
And ever since then, I've decided to start including him on small woodworking projects that I do around the house.
I was recently teaching him how to use a handsaw and it brought up a great marketing lesson that I thought I would share with you.
I was trying to teach him how to start a saw on a line. To do this, you have to gently pull the saw slowly along the line, guiding it with your thumb.
Then, if you want to actually cut with the saw, you have to aggressively push the saw through the wood.
Now, you've got to be dead on line. If you're off even a little bit and you push hard, the saw will bend or it'll get bound up in a cut.
Doesn't sound like a big deal, but if you just slowly keep pressure on it and keep it lined up, you can cut through a board very quickly.
If however you do it like Adam was doing, trying to force it, it takes what should have been a one-minute job and turns it into 15 minutes of frustration.
I see people doing this all the time with email.
Email is an okay tool for marketing.
It does decent for holding information and assembling and alerting people to the information you need.
However, it doesn't fulfill all the roles like it should.
It's important to know how to get email to work and what to use it for.
And I think a great way to do it is: a lot of people use their email inbox as their repository of information.
They keep confirmation numbers, and reservations and whatnot in there…
…and then pull it up when they get to the hotel or restaurant or auto parts store.
But it doesn't work great to push people through a process.
What I mean by this is: when I look at the most successful clients I've had, the ones that really fill their gym up quickly,
it becomes very obvious that
they're using something other than email
as a way to push people into the gym and through the onboarding process.
Whether it is for
- a challenge,
- or weight loss program,
- or even a golf assessment,
email just doesn't have the timeliness to be a good reminder.
Text messaging is a great solution for this.
And it's why we built Clinic/Gym Connect, which is a text messaging solution for Clinic/Gym Hybrids.
It also provides some other marketing automation, but we'll talk about that later.
Anyways, much like pushing the saw too hard doesn't work, using email to force your clients to come in is just a horrible method of doing business.
Again, email is a great reminder, but not a great way to push.
A better way to push is to text.
Because if you were trying to get a friend to come over to your barbecue, you would probably text them and send some motivating texts and keep it short and sweet,
…rather than writing a long email that's frustrating to them and you as a way to force them over to your barbecue.
Anyways, I highly recommend thinking about texting for your office.
I think it's the way that the world is moving in the future.
And it's also the way that humans connect to humans these days.
So we'll dive into that a little bit more this week.
With that, have a great day and try not to force anything.