Member reactivation, custom lead fields, improved discounts and more

February was a short month, but we still got a lot done. We have a bunch of product improvements we’d like to show you, so let’s dig in –

Member Reactivation / Unfreeze Enhancements

COVID has created a new paradigm for gyms, where constant freezing and unfreezing of member accounts, sometimes in bulk, is a common day-to-day occurrence. We’ve been hearing your feedback on what would make your life easier, and we’ve been hard at work coming up with solutions.

Reactivating frozen members can be tricky to do automatically, and especially in bulk. Different payment schedules and membership types, how to handle the time the member was frozen in but already paid for, how to deal with the initial payment to resume their original payment schedule amongst, and a bunch of related edge cases.

For this reason, up to now we’ve offered a relatively straightforward reactivation flow, where you can pick the next payment date and that’s it. That’s relatively simple to implement for bulk activations, however it leaves some manual work for customizing memberships and payment afterwards.

We’re always striving to have the software help you with day-to-day operations, and seeing as COVID has made status changes a common thing, we’ve implemented the following options when reactivating a member, either individually or in bulk –

When you select members in bulk for reactivation, or using the “Re-Open Gym” option in the schedule, you’ll now end up on this screen. There’s several new options here, as well as a preview of the payments that would be created below, allowing you to confirm exactly how your members payments would be set up following reactivation.

• Schedule Next Payment – You can select to charge members immediately their membership dues, or you can select “Continue Original Schedule” instead, which will set the next payment date to the same schedule it was before the freeze (for example, the 1st of the month).
• Prorate till next payment – This option only shows up if you selected to continue the original payment schedule. You can have the system prorate the time left until the next full membership payment.
• Apply Credit – You can have the system credit members for the time they already paid for but spent frozen. For example, if a member paid for a full month, but was frozen after 10 days – they have 20 days of credit that can be applied towards their next payment. This credit will show up on their payment as a discount titled “Freeze Credit”.
• Extend Membership By Freeze Duration – This was the default before, but it’s now stated explicitly, and can be turned off if you prefer not to add the freeze duration to to the original membership expiration date.

These same options are available when you unfreeze a member through their profile, or when you schedule them to be unfrozen on a specific date.

Making this happen, and especially in bulk, was a lot of work, head scratching and testing – so we hope you find it useful!

Lead / Prospects Enhancements

We’ve been building out the data you can store for leads – you can now add emergency contacts for a lead, such as their parents or family members, as well as any number of custom fields.

Similar to the option available to members – you can now create custom fields for leads for any information you would like to capture or import for them. Those fields replace the custom fields in the lead capture forms – so instead of just capturing the information from the lead capture forms as a comment on the lead page, you can capture those fields as individual fields on the lead profile, which can later be used on their member profile as well.

You can add custom lead fields by going to “Marketing” -> “Settings” in your account. Your existing lead capture fields would already appear there, if you had any.

New automation triggers and manual activation of automations

We’ve added new automation triggers – for frozen and cancelled members, so you can continue to engage them automatically with a sequence of texts and Emails. Some of you have had success with reconverting a cancelled member when it’s a better timing for them to start training, and with engaging frozen members during their freeze – and now you can automate that part as well.

In addition, we added a special trigger type titled “Manually Triggered”. An automation created with this trigger type will never activate automatically, allowing you to create automations that are used based on your own discretion.

To facilitate that, you can now manually activate any automation from the member or lead profile.

You can select when the automation should start, and the messages will start sending based on the selected time.

Discount codes for the sign-up form

We’ve made a bunch of enhancements to the discounts section, with the biggest one being that you can now assign discounts to be used on the sign-up form.

This means you can now create promotional codes to give out for any promotion you run, and prospects will be able to use it on the sign-up form to receive a discount. The discount can be applied next to the membership selection, and applying a valid discount code will show the discounted rates right next to it –

There’s a few other enhancements we made to support this –

• Membership discounts can now be applied to just the first payment instead of the recurring payment.
• You can set a limit for the number of times a discount code be used and an expiration date to allow for limited time / use promotions.
• Those enhancements work with the discounts in the online shop as well. You can even use the same code for both the sign-up and the online shop.

Minor Enhancements

• We’ve added the option to change the status of a “Pick-up” order in the online store to “Picked-up”, so you can keep track of which orders have already been fulfilled.
• We are now sending the tax amounts and rates to Stripe in the payment metadata. This should be useful if you’re using Stripe as part of your accounting setup. Currently, only Stripe allows us to pass this additional metadata, but we’re working with our other providers as well to add this functionality there.
• By common request, we’ve restored the ability to control billing notification Emails on a per-payment and per-membership basis. You will now see the “Email notices” checkbox available under each membership. We were hoping that adding the members’ ability to unsubscribe from billing notifications would make such control unnecessary, but some of you prefer to have that ability and so it is now back.
  To clarify how that works – you can set the default setting for invoices, receipts and failed payments in the Email Notifications section of the billing settings. You can then override it on a per-membership / per-payment basis using the checkbox mentioned above. Lastly, members can unsubscribe from their end using the “Email preferences” section in their profile, which is also accessible through a link embedded at the bottom of those Emails. It’s a bit complicated, but it seems this level of control is needed to accommodate everyone’s use-case.

And that’s it for this update! Look forward to another batch of updates next month.