First Visit Follow Up

Following up with a new client after their first experience is a common practice across all industries, and definitely an essential practice for fitness studios. This personal touch point will not only showcase your dedication to excellent customer service, but will serve as an opportunity to receive client feedback and help get your new client booked for their next class.

In this reference guide, we’ll talk through the automation build out for standard first visit follow up communications, as well as opportunities to follow up with clients after visiting a specific event type for the first time, or attending using a package for the first time, or building specific sequences if a first visit is attended using a specific type of package, such as a single drop-in, guest pass, ClassPass etc.

Similar to our First Visit Confirmation automations, we’ll want to take into consideration that a client’s first attended event could be either group class or appointment based. Building out automations for each will allow us to pass more dynamic information through merge tags, such as the instructor’s name, event name, event date/time etc.

If your studio offers both group class and appointment based events, you’ll want to have automations for both. The segmentation will be almost identical, but we’ll pass information for appointments through the merge tag category Last Appointment, and for group classes we can use either First Visit or Last visit.

Where First Visit Follow Up sequence fits in your client journey

• Prospect Sequence - Prospect creates an account on booking software -> Triggers your prospect sequence of automations based on how many days after creating their account, and no events attended or scheduled for the future.
• First Visit - Confirmation - Prospect books their first event -> No longer (currently eligible for Prospect automations), and will trigger automations for First Visit - Confirmation confirming the date/time of their first booking, and delivering important information to streamline first visit, such as what to bring, when to arrive, what to expect, and link to complete a liability waiver.
• First Event Missed - Prospect misses their first event -> Will trigger your First Event Missed series of automations, then fall back into your Prospect Automations until they reschedule.
• First Visit Follow Up - Prospect attends their first event -> No longer eligible to trigger Prospect automations, and will trigger your First Visit Follow Up automations.

Designing a good First Visit Follow Up

1. Keep it personal! - The reason we’ll divide first visits based on appointments vs group classes is so we can use this communication to strengthen relationship between our staff and client. Using merge tags that make the communication appear as if they’re being sent from an instructor, such as {{FIRST_VISIT_TEACHER_NAME}} , or asking about the experience with a specific event name such as {{LAST_VISIT_TYPE}} will make our communications seem more personal and genuine, and less “automated.”

2. Be specific with your Call-To-Action - This will relate to the verbiage you choose, and the outcomes you want to receive from this communication. If our only goal is to checkin on the client and receive feedback, a simple “how do you feel after your first class?” will suffice; however, our ultimate goal should be to get the client back in for their second visit.

   We often say that the content of a good automated text message should initiate a conversation, not end it. If you’re asking a client “how do you feel after your first class?” your response will likely be “it was great, my legs hurt.” If instead you use this as an opportunity to drive the conversation in your favor, a slight adjustment to your content (call to action) will go a long way “Hi {{First_Name}}, it’s {{FIRST_VISIT_TEACHER_NAME}} with {{STUDIO_NAME}}. You were excellent in class today, how do you feel? I’d love to get you scheduled for your next visit with us. Does tomorrow same time work for you?”

3. Keep it simple - You don’t need to build out specific first visit follow ups for every intro offer. Just one standard follow up for all clients will suffice. The only exception to this would be if you want to upsell a drop-in or guest pass to an intro offer. We’ll provide instructions on how to do so below.

4. Provide a way to remove a member from this sequence - As with any other well planned automated sequence, you’ll want to be able to prevent these automations from triggering for specific clients. Imagine a client walks out feeling sick from their first class, but your instructors have kept their attendance as “signed-in”. The last thing we’d want to do is follow up asking for feedback on the client’s first experience, as it likely wasn’t the best. To do this, you’ll use a dedicated Stop Tags for this automated sequence. If you’re not familiar with “stop tags,” here’s your chance to catch up.

First Visit Follow Up Segment Breakdown

Before we dive into the full segmentation, we’ll outline the common “conditional rules” and “trigger points” as understanding how the rules work will allow you to create more unique first visit follow up communications.

For example:

• If your studio offers appointments and group classes, you’ll want to have automations for both.
• If you want to remove drop-ins and guest passes from your standard first visit follow up automations, and build specific “up sell” automations for those clients, you’ll need to understand conditional rules.
• If you want to add more creative touch points that follow up after a client attends a specific class type for the first time, understanding these conditional rules will be key.

The filter’s you’ll want to familiarize yourself with are:

• Client Tag - We’ll use this to prevent triggering automations for people that have a specific tag
• Booking Count - We’ll use this to validate the person has only visited one time, OR has visited before but today’s visit was for a new class type OR we’ll use this to say a client has never visited using a specific package.
• Booking event start date - We’ll use this to become our effective “trigger” point.
• Booking event end date We’ll use this to add a slight buffer after the event ends before sending our automation.
• Booking event type - We’ll use this to determine if a client’s first visit was a group class or appointment so we can leverage the proper merge tags.
• Booking event name - We’ll use this if we want to send communications to someone after attending a specific class type for the first time (vs sending after their first ever visit to any event).
• Package count - We’ll use this to prevent upsell automations from triggering to people that have purchased something we’d want to upsell to the client.
• Package Purchased - We’ll also use this to prevent upsell automations from triggering to people that have purchased something we’d want to upsell to the client.
• Contract Purchased - We’ll also use this to to prevent upsell automations from triggering to people that have purchased a contract. No need to sell someone on your Intro Offer if you have already converted them to a membership.

Conditional Rules

In plain english, the conditional rules we’ll apply to these automations will either be:

• Has only attended 1 event
• Has never attended using a specific package (if we want to prevent someone from triggering our standard first visit follow ups based on their package, so that we can create unique follow ups for drop-ins, guest passes etc).
• Has never purchased a specific package (again, if we want to upsell a drop-in to an Intro Offer, we’ll want to make sure they haven’t already purchased one)
• Has never purchased a contract (no need to upsell someone to our Intro Offer if they’ve already purchased a membership)
• Has attended before, but only 1 time to a specific event name (if we want to create unique follow ups based on attending a specific class type for the first time)

Once we piece this together with the “trigger point” which we’ll outline below, it will become clear that our target audience is “has done this thing” and “this thing was done today” such as “has only attended one time” and “that one time (ie - first visit) was today”

Has only attended 1 event

This will be the most common “conditional rule” and will be present in our standard First Visit Follow Up automations.

Rule (contains 2 filters):

• Booking count = exactly 1
• Booking status = attended

Rule described: Person has been marked as “attended” to only 1 event.

This rule might seem perfect as is, triggering when someone has attended their first event; however, in order to prevent your automation from triggering for clients that may have attended 1 event years ago, we’ll need to add an additional “trigger point” rule.

Has never attended using a specific package

If you want to create specific “upsell” automations if someone attends their first event using a drop-in, guest pass, ClassPass etc, the first step will be preventing these people from triggering your standard First Visit Follow-up automations. To do this, we’d apply the following rule to your regular First Visit Follow Up automations:

Rule (contains 3 filters):

• Booking count = 0
• Booking status = attended
• Booking using package = [select all drop-in, guest pass, ClassPass packages]

Rule described: Person has never attended using one of the selected packages.

Has never purchased a specific package

Building on top of the conditional rule above, if we’re setting up automations to upsell a drop-in member to our Intro Offer, we’ll want to make sure they haven’t already purchased it.

Rule (contains 2 filters):

• Package Count = 0
• Package purchased = [select all Intro Offer packages]

Has never purchased a contract

Further building on the two conditional rules above, there’s likely no need to upsell a drop-in or guest pass to our Intro Offer if they’ve already purchased a contract. This would be a very rare case, but the beauty of a well built automation is we can account for all of these edge cases:

Rule (contains 1 filter):

• Contract purchased = no contracts

Has attended before, but only 1 time to a specific event name

If we’re building automations that don’t trigger after a client’s first attendance, but trigger after the client attends a specific class type for the first time, we’ll need to add 2 conditional rules. The first will confirm the client has visited something before, the second rule will confirm the client has only visited this class type once (and when we put this together with the trigger point, it will become “This person has attended something before, but their first experience with this class type was today”

The first rule we’ll add is:

Rule 1: (contains 2 filters):

• Booking count = more than 1
• Booking status = attended

Rule 1 described: Person has attended at least 2 events (meaning, at least one attendance before today’s)

Rule 2:

• Booking count = exactly 1
• Booking status = attended
• Booking event name = [select class name]

Trigger Point Rule

Now that we understand all of the conditional rules above, it’s time to outline the trigger point, which will take these conditional rules such as “has only attended one time” and turn the segment into “and that one visit was today”

The majority of First Visit Follow up automations trigger immediately after someone’s first visit; however there are things we will want to consider:

• Late event times and Automation Delivery Windows - By law, automated SMS communications cannot be delivered later than 9:00pm. We’ll want to apply a delivery window to our automations to make sure we’re compliant, but we’ll also want to send follow up communications to clients that might have an event ending late in the evening. To do this, we will use the filter operator in the last 1 day instead of today
• Add a slight buffer time after class ends - This serves two primary purposes:
  • Provide your staff some extra time to make sure everyone was correctly marked as “attended” or “absent,” making sure no accidental follow-ups are sent
  • Prevent a client from receiving your text message immediately after class while they’re talking to your staff at the front desk. This would be a very clear indicator that your messages are automated!

Rule (2 required filters, and a few optional filters):

• Booking status = attended
• Booking event start date = in the last 1 day
• *Booking event type = [Group Class or Appointment] (optional, but required if your studio will be setting up unique automations for appointment vs group class)
• • Booking event end date = in the past (validating the client was not only marked as attending, but the event has already ended) - optional, but a best practice
• • Booking event end date = not in the past 60min (adding a 60min delay after the event ends. Again this is optional but a best practice)

Rule described: Person’s attendance was in the past 1 day (1 second ago to 24h ago, accounting for late class times and automation delivery windows). If we add in the optional filters, this becomes (and the visit was a group class/appointment which ended sometime longer than 60min ago).

First Visit Follow Up Automation Setup

Reading the “trigger points” and “conditional rules” above may sound confusing out of context; however, once we put these rules together to build our full automation segment, it will become very clear why we’re adding each rule, and how granular (and personalized) this allows our automations to become.

Everything we’ve referenced so far can be added to your account from our Automation Catalog; however, we’ll talk through each automation build out below to provide you with more segmentation training.

First Visit Follow Up (Group Class)

Automation which triggers after someone attends their first event, only if that first event was a group class. For the content of this automation, we can either use merge tags for First Visit or Last visit.

You can add this catalog automation to your account here: First Group Class - Follow Up - Text

Rule 1 (contains 2 filters):

• Client profile status = active (filter added to all segments by default)
• Client tag does NOT have = [select opt-out tag for this category]. In our templates we use First Visit Follow-up: Opt-Out

Rule 1 described: Person has an active profile on booking software, and does not have a tag in their profile that would prevent them from triggering this automation.

Rule 2 (contains 2 filters):

• Booking count = exactly 1
• Booking status = attended

Rule 2 described: Person has attended only 1 event. When we add this logic to the logic of the next rule, we’ll see that this one attended event was their first, that it was a group class, and add a few extra targeting parameters for buffer time following class.

Rule 3 (3 required filters, a few optional/best practice filters noted with *):

• Booking status = attended
• Booking event start date = in the last 1 day
• Booking event type = group class
• *Booking event end date = in the past
• *Booking event end date = not in the last 60 min

Rule 3 described: Person attended a group class in the past 1 day, which ended sometime outside of the last 60 minutes.

***Optional Rule 4** (contains 3 filters): Only apply this rule if you plan on having specific “upsell” automations targeting clients that visited using a drop-in, guest pass, or other specific package.

• Booking count = 0
• Booking status = attended
• Booking using package = [select all packages that you’ll create separate follow ups for, such as drop in, guest pass etc]

Optional rule 4 described: Person has never attended using one of my selected packages. If someone did visit using one of these selected packages, remove them from this automation as I’ll have other automations specifically targeting clients that attend their first class using one of these selected packages.

The segment above explained: Trigger this automation for someone that has attended only 1 event, where that attendance was in the past 1 day, was a group class, ended sometime longer than 60min ago, and (if applying optional rule 4), did not attend that class using a drop in/guess pass etc.

Example First Visit Follow Up (group class) screen shot

First Visit Follow Up (Appointment)

Automation which triggers after someone attends their first event, only if that first event was an Appointment. You’ll notice this is almost identical to the segment above for group classes, we’ll only change one filter in the entire segment booking event type . For the content of this automation, we will leverage merge tags in the Last Appointment category.

You can add this catalog automation to your account here: First Appointment - Follow Up - Text

Rule 1 (contains 2 filters):

• Client profile status = active (filter added to all segments by default)
• Client tag does NOT have = [select opt-out tag for this category]. In our templates we use First Visit Follow-up: Opt-Out

Rule 1 described: Person has an active profile on booking software, and does not have a tag in their profile that would prevent them from triggering this automation.

Rule 2 (contains 2 filters):

• Booking count = exactly 1
• Booking status = attended

Rule 2 described: Person has attended only 1 event. When we add this logic to the logic of the next rule, we’ll see that this one attended event was their first, that it was an appointment, and add a few extra targeting parameters for buffer time following the appointment.

Rule 3 (3 required filters, a few optional/best practice filters noted with *):

• Booking status = attended
• Booking event start date = in the last 1 day
• Booking event type = appointment
• *Booking event end date = in the past
• *Booking event end date = not in the last 60 min

Rule 3 described: Person attended an appointment in the past 1 day, which ended sometime outside of the last 60 minutes.

***Optional Rule 4** (contains 3 filters): Only apply this rule if you plan on having specific “upsell” automations targeting clients that visited using a drop-in, guest pass, or other specific package.

• Booking count = 0
• Booking status = attended
• Booking using package = [select all packages that you’ll create separate follow ups for, such as drop in, guest pass etc]

Optional rule 4 described: Person has never attended using one of my selected packages. If someone did visit using one of these selected packages, remove them from this automation as I’ll have other automations specifically targeting clients that attend their first class using one of these selected packages.

The segment above explained: Trigger this automation for someone that has attended only 1 event, where that attendance was in the past 1 day, was an appointment, ended sometime longer than 60min ago, and (if applying optional rule 4), did not attend that appointment using a drop in/guess pass etc.

Example First Visit Follow Up (group class) screen shot

First Visit Follow up (for specific group class type)

This automation will trigger for someone that has already attended events at your studio, but today they’ve attended a specific class type for the first time. These automations are a great way to follow up with clients requesting feedback on their experience with that class type vs others they’ve attended previously. This level of customer recognition will also help showcase your studio’s amazing dedication to customer service.

You can add this catalog automation to your account here: First Visit Follow up (for specific group class type)

Rule 1 (contains 2 filters):

• Client profile status = active (filter added to all segments by default)
• Client tag does NOT have = [select opt-out tag for this category]. In our templates we use First Visit Follow-up: Opt-Out

Rule 1 described: Person has an active profile on booking software, and does not have a tag in their profile that would prevent them from triggering this automation.

Rule 2 (contains 2 filters):

• Booking count = more than 1
• Booking status = attended

Rule 2 described: Person has attended 2 or more events (meaning, the attendance we’ll reference in the following rules was NOT their first ever attendance).

Rule 3: (contains 3 filters):

• Booking count = exactly 1
• Booking status = attended
• Booking event name = [select class name you’d like this automation to trigger for]

Rule 3 described: Person has attended only 1 event that I’ve selected (when adding this to the next rule, we’ll deduce this 1 visit was “today”)

Rule 4 (contains 3 required filters, 2 optional filters noted with *):

• Booking status = attended
• Booking event name = [select class name you’d like this automation to trigger for]
• Booking event start date = in the last 1 day
• *Booking event end date = in the past
• *Booking event end date = not in the last 60 min

Rule 4 described: Person attended the event I’ve selected in the past 1 day, the event already ended sometime longer than 60min ago.

The segment above explained: Trigger this automation for people that have attended something before, but today they attended a specific class type for the first time, the class already ended sometime longer than 60min ago.

Example First Visit Follow up (for specific group class type) screen shot

First Visit Follow up - Upsell Drop-In to Intro Offer

Automation designed to trigger for clients that attend their first event using a specific package, where you would want to upsell that person to an Intro Offer (such as drop-in, single class, guest pass etc).

Important

If you add this automation to your account, you MUST add the following rule to your regular First Visit Follow up automations to prevent a client from receiving both automations:

Rule to add to your other First Visit Followup automations (contains 3 filters):

• Booking count = 0
• Booking status = attended
• Booking using package = [select all drop-in, single class, guest pass packages you'll be selecting when adding this automation to your account]

You can add this catalog automation to your account here: First Visit Follow Up - Drop-In Upsell to Intro Offer

Rule 1 (contains 2 filters):

• Client profile status = active (filter added to all segments by default)
• Client tag does NOT have = [select opt-out tag for this category]. In our templates we use First Visit Follow-up: Opt-Out

Rule 1 described: Person has an active profile on booking software, and does not have a tag in their profile that would prevent them from triggering this automation.

Rule 2 (contains 2 filters):

• Booking count = exactly 1
• Booking status = attended

Rule 2 described: Person has attended only 1 event. When we add this logic to the logic of the next rule, we’ll see that this one attended event was using our selected drop-in packages, and these are the clients we’d want to upsell to an Intro offer.

Rule 3 (contains 3 required filters, and 2 recommend filters noted with *):

• Booking status = attended
• Booking using package = [select all drop-in, guest pass, ClassPass packages]
• Booking event start date = today
• *Booking event end date = in the past
• *Booking event end date = not in the last 60 min

Rule 3 described: Person attended an event in the last 1 day (combined with logic of rule 2, this was their first event), using one of my selected drop-in packages (and I want to upsell these people to an intro offer). The event has already ended sometime longer than 60min ago.

Rule 4 (contains 1 filter):

• Package purchased ONLY = [select all drop-in, guest pass, ClassPass packages]

This rule could also be written as:

• Package count = 0
• Package purchased = [Select Intro Offer names]

Rule 4 described: Person has not purchased any other packages aside from the one they used to attend their first event.

Rule 5 (contains 1 filter):

• Contract purchased = No Contracts

Rule 5 described: Person has not purchased a membership (no need to upsell this person to an Intro Offer if they already converted to a membership).

Example First Visit Follow up - Upsell Drop-In to Intro Offer screen shot

Automation Catalog

Need help building your First Visit Follow Up automations, or want to add a few more touch points? We have plenty of templates in our automation catalog to get you started:

1. Click on Automations -> Catalog
2. Locate the categories First Group Class - Follow Up , First Appointment - Follow Up , and First Visit - Upsell
3. Select the automations you’d like to add to your account.