On May 24th, 2019 we connected with Valerie Craig about how they are finding success using SMS and how the medium has become a big part of their engagement strategy.

Valerie told us, “We are a full-service health club and have two locations. One branded as Raintree Athletic Club and the other is Alive by Raintree. We use Textmunication for both clubs. I am the Marketing Manager here. I oversee a pretty small team and anything as far as advertising to our members, prospects, and people in the community. We do a lot of community events as well, so a lot of times the team is in the community to build our membership base and build connections.”

We wanted to know more about the implementation process for Raintree Athletic Club and learn if there were any challenges along the way. Valerie stated, “As far as members go, we use a lot of the Auto-SMS features like birthday alerts and have several new member alerts set up. We also have anniversary alerts set up for the current year. We have been sending a lot of communication through our campaigns and using it to send and bring awareness to ongoing offers. We haven’t started to brand our keywords around the club just yet, but it is apart of our implementation road map for our prospects in the future. We really plan to use the software in every way we can. As of now are really leveraging the benefit of the automated capabilities that Jonas Messaging offers. When someone signs up they get a follow-up series of text messages. It is one of the ways we begin the relationship with members.”

This insight by Valerie really supported the uptime the software integration delivers because of Textmunication’s app connection with Jonas Compete. This gave Valerie and her team the ability to divide their focus and put more time into developing their multi-channel promotional strategy. That is one of the huge benefits of text messaging and how it can be leveraged to empower all other ongoing marketing efforts.

“We do use manual campaigns quite a bit for prospects. We’ll do end of the month pushes during the last three days of the month, where we will offer $0 enrollment to a certain group of prospects that have visited in the last month or in the last 6 months. Over at our Alive by Raintree club, we do a promotion once in a while called choose your enrollment, where the enrollment fee that the new member pays goes directly to a local charity of their choosing. Like we actually have one coming up this month in May called the Vegetable Connection that does crop shares and connects families in need who don’t necessarily have the budget to get fresh vegetables that are farmed locally.”

Raintree Athletic Club understands that brand creation is more than about spotlighting health club features. It is also about finding ways to align with the community and they are using SMS messaging to support their corporate social responsibility. She adds on by saying “It is something that really sits within our purpose and company culture here. It is about building those relationships and giving back. If we can use it to get members in the door then we can use it to give back to the community. Might as well do both.”

Jonas messaging comes with a full array of out of the box features for marketing teams to leverage, but we find it inspiring that there are always certain ones that resonate a bit more from operator to operator.

Valerie told us, “We like the automation feature and we really like the dashboard as well. We like how we are able to immediately see what has been going out and the data of the text program that is being tracked. We do use the campaign feature a lot and out of all the areas of the software probably what I have used the most because the auto is auto. It kind of just goes to work for us and we review the reports.”

Talk about set it and forget it.

Valerie told us, “Our Purpose at Raintree and Alive by Raintree is to inspire growth and impact lives. Everything we do is with that purpose in mind.”

At Textmunication we think this is an important question to ask because we believe that performance and numbers are not the only reason why marketing teams seek our product, it also has to do with how our brands can come together to help them fulfill their promise.