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6 ways Zapier can save you time and automate your customer experience

Admin

May 26, 2022

7 min read

Studio owner, Hayley Coe shares six ways Zapier helps her automate her admin and communication while maintaining a close relationship with her members.

One of the hands-down best integrations included in your TeamUp account is Zapier. To sum it up Zapier connects your TeamUp account with all of your favourite (3000+) marketing apps and tools. Zapier works by creating triggers also known as “Zaps” that will make it easy for you to create a workflow, automate a lot of repetitive tasks, improve your customer communication, and sync your TeamUp customer data with your preferred marketing tools and platforms.

While Zapier is a fan favourite and has helped many fitness business owners streamline their communications and improve things such as customer onboarding, marketing, and the overall member experience with automated workflows, we've realized many people either don't know enough about Zapier or know how to use it to its full potential.

We asked our friend Hayley Coe, owner of CoeActive Fitness, and a Zapier pro to give us some insight into why and how she uses Zapier in her business and the Zaps she's put in place that you'll find useful in your own business too.

Hayley Coe and the Coe Active team

How did you hear about Zapier?

I started using Zapier after switching to TeamUp from Mindbody. I've known about it for a while. I'm in a few coaching groups. I reckon someone's mentioned it at some point. I used to be with Mindbody and they had a third-party platform called Brand Bots that were supposed to do basically the same thing as the Zapier integration but Mindbody would send a trigger to Brand Bot and then Brand Bot would do what you needed to do. Unfortunately, it never did what it was supposed to do.

What are the ways you use Zapier in your business?

I wanted one way to be able to automate tasks, for example, to email all of our members and set up a newsletter. To be able to collect all of our client's email addresses that were coming through TeamUp.

Sending out emails and newsletters

Creating processes such as sending a newsletter out just to members or non-members, and send reminders, it's great. I can set up a newsletter and say send it to anyone tagged with newsletter and it will just go out. I use my platform Drip (similar to TeamUp integrations Constant Contact and Mailchimp). I really like the way you get set up TeamUp and Drip to talk to each other with Zapier in the middle connecting the two platforms. Whenever we get a new customer who signs up through TeamUp, instantly a trigger (zap) from Zapier gets sent to Drip and simply tags that customer with the tag “newsletter”.

In Drip you can send emails to different groups of people with different qualities. I can then just write my email and send it to anyone tagged with the newsletter and it will go out.

If people sign up for memberships, they get tagged with the membership type in Drip. Maybe I want to get someone going up or upgrading a membership, I can just target the people on a specific membership tag, type, and send them an email. Or if I want to upsell a membership or a different type of product.

Using tags to segment members and communication

One of the things is that you can do several things on your email platform. One of the things we do is when a customer joins us they tagged with the membership type.

We have three membership types. In Drip, people are tagged with the membership type, if they are members, and what type of content they should receive.

Collecting business reviews

If they have been with us for four months, and they'll get an email from us saying “Hey, you've been with us for four weeks, would you mind writing us a Google review?” We are able to then collect all the Google reviews by automation and wouldn't have to chase people to get them. You can do that with Facebook reviews too, you could do anything.

Upselling services and memberships

If you want to set up a campaign, for example, to upsell any service and to send out information you can set up tags with the membership types so I can upsell a higher membership or product to them.

Automating the onboarding experience

When new people join us and have been with us for two weeks we can send out emails asking how they are getting on. It's all automation, but you're touching base with your customers and you don't really have to do anything and think about it. But they're getting that experience and they're getting the information they need.

Automating SMS updates and text messages

We use TextMagic. It's a desktop platform, not an app. You apply a credit to your account and then you can send text messages out to clients effectively. You can send group texts and then I can ask the response to come back to my actual work phone. We ask Zapier to add someone's phone number to a members list. When they join us, their mobile number gets added to our members' list. We send our members Monday boosts, and reminders about the week and what we have coming up. My virtual assistant can send that text message to all my clients and their responses will come back to my work phone. It's great. When someone cancels Zapier will take the number out of the list. It's always up to date.

How do you still keep your customer experience personal with automation?

Personal touch and personal connection with someone are imperative for making them feel good and comfortable and having longevity and retention.

The language you use in your messages

First of all, when you write an email and I also use Zapier for text messaging, as long as the email is within your language, you can absolutely make it sound as if you've sent the email privately to them.

I personalise all my emails such as, “Hey Jessica. How awesome you've been with us for a couple of weeks. I just wanted to check-in, in and see how you were. It's Haley here. We've spoken a couple of times.”

I know I've spoken to all newbies coming through the door. I know I've spoken to them a couple of times. As long as the language in your email is very much tailored to you and that person feels like you have sent it to them, that's huge and you'll get a lot of responses.

Automation saves you time and resources

Second of all, I totally understand automation can feel quite weird because you feel you can't handle the fact that this is going on without me doing anything. I have felt quite unsettled by that because when you're self-employed you always feel like you have to do everything and make sure everyone's okay. But automation is there to save us that headspace.

A lot of it is just information, reminders that a booking 14 days in advance, giving members information that they will need about your business, which is really helpful. You don't have to keep worrying if it's going out or if they are informed. I understand the unnerving feeling of wanting to touch base with each of your customers, but quite often an email is enough. No one needs that huge kind of big gesture. We don't have the time or headspace to do it all.

It helps you do the most without doing the most

Email is more than what most businesses are doing anyways. We underestimate sometimes how well we run our businesses compared to how other people do it. The fact that we're even sending out emails, thinking about Zapier, making those touchpoints, and following the customer journey, it's more than what most businesses are doing. Be the business that does care and does reach out and get engagement.

What should all fitness business owners know about TeamUp and Zapier?

TeamUp has a lot of automation built-in. I have had loads of Zaps, really technical ones and that's how I've managed to streamline loads of those down because TeamUp does more now alongside Zapier.

Thanks for sharing Hayley!