Full Episode Transcript

Stop Losing Leads: 8 Ways to Build Your Fitness & Wellness Business List

CASEY: Right now, you're paying to meet people you'll never talk to again.

You're listening to Wellness Means Business with Casey Conrad.

I'm Casey Conrad, and I've spent more than 35 years helping fitness and wellness businesses grow. If you've got expertise, a product, a program, a service, a wellness modality, or some combination of those, but need to build a better business around it, you're in the right place.

Wellness Means Business gives independent fitness and wellness entrepreneurs practical strategies to attract more clients, increase sales, grow revenue, and build stronger, more profitable businesses.

So let's get down to business.

I am so excited about today's episode because we have a very special guest.

In our last episode, Episode 5, we talked about the mistake that so many solo entrepreneurs make, and that is renting their list instead of actually building one they can capitalize on.

And our guest today, Lisa Diamond, is gonna bring the goods because she's gonna coach us on how to get out of that trap and ultimately make more profits.

Now, let me tell you a little bit about Lisa.

And by the way, hello, Lisa. Thank you for being here.

LISA: So excited to be here, Casey. Thank you.

CASEY: Lisa, you and I have crossed paths over a number of years.

Lisa actually spent years running her own wellness studio, so we're not talking about a guest today who's just theory. It's actually practice.

What she realized during her practice was that she had to wear every single hat in order to be successful, and that's a lot.

Then, tragically, breast cancer changed her life—and really, not just her life, but her relationship with her own time and her health.

Now, we're happy to see here that Lisa is a 13-year survivor, and she wrote about that journey in her bestselling book, Shine Beyond Cancer, which she also had a podcast with.

Today she's the founder of Vibrant CEO, where she's helped literally hundreds of entrepreneurs reclaim their time by building a done-for-you system that responds to every lead within 60 seconds.

And I am one of Lisa's clients. Lisa is my coach in this space.

She told me that she's here to give you the exact playbook that most owners are never taught.

So Lisa, tell us: How does a wellness studio owner end up obsessed with systems and CRMs?

LISA: Those first five years in my studio literally nearly broke me.

And I was going through cancer treatment at the same time, so imagine that.

Every July and August, my studio would just go silent.

I was in Naples, Florida. It's very seasonal there.

Every year I would do the same thing. I'd pour money into ads, and then I would pray that they worked and that I'd have some new people walk through the door.

It just never worked.

I was reaching people, but I wasn't capturing them.

In 2019, I was like, "I am just not doing this anymore. I'm either gonna close my studio July and August and call it a day, or I'm gonna do something about it."

Casey, as you know, hiring a coach is the fastest way to accelerate your life and your business.

I went with Alex Hormozi, who is the founder of Gym Launch.

Going through his process, what hit me the most was the system.

It was not only getting the people in the door, but speaking to the right audience with the right language, and then actually capturing that lead where you had the information.

Then you nurture them until they book.

Once I went through that whole system and it worked—that was July and August of 2019—then we all know what happened in March of 2020.

I got shut down just like the rest of the world, and I actually had the time to build these systems for my own business.

When I opened back up, I watched how much more efficient the business was.

So efficient that I was actually able to sell it because I had something to sell.

I just became obsessed with building these systems, and the rest, I guess they say, is history.

CASEY: Is history, yeah.

For people who may not know who Alex Hormozi is, he sold Gym Launch for $32 million and now he's onto coaching businesses in this space for hundreds of millions of dollars. He works with the big people now, not us smaller solo entrepreneurs.

But you said something there that really jumped out at me.

You said, "Capture the lead."

Last week, this audience and I talked specifically about the fact that your list is your single most valuable asset as a business owner.

Before we get into the tactics of that, I think we need to step back a little bit because I didn't talk to the group last week at all about a CRM.

What is a CRM? What's the difference in them?

Can you give us a little bit about that and why someone—no matter what business, whether it's brick-and-mortar, online, coaching—would want to have one?

LISA: Of course.

CRM stands for customer relationship management.

Every business on planet Earth is a database business.

If you think about Amazon, if Jeff Bezos ever sells Amazon for the billions of dollars that it's worth, they're buying the database.

There is so much that Amazon knows about us.

CASEY: Scary.

LISA: Right? What we bought. What we're gonna buy next.

They lead you to buy the next thing: "Oh, you bought this? You should probably take a look at this."

All of that is database stuff.

And think about Facebook.

Facebook is probably the most detailed relationship database ever built, and it rents that database to us as advertisers if you're advertising on it.

But you don't own that data.

You're basically borrowing it.

So whether you are doing classes, running ads, hosting events—you need to feed that database.

A CRM is really where that data lives.

That system can then remember for you every person. It can remember what classes they took or what products they bought from you so that you can speak to them in a better way.

I think you talked about, Casey, in your last episode, getting customers and then there were three things.

Getting customers...

CASEY: Getting them to make a bigger purchase...

LISA: Make a bigger purchase and then buy again.

Having that information in a CRM allows you to do exactly that.

CASEY: Just to circle back, last week I mentioned the example of the club owner where we launched massage therapy.

They launched a massage therapy program inside their club, not dissimilar to a Massage Envy.

When they did their initial launch, they did a coupon for an intro.

After that, anytime they wanted to promote massage, they didn't have to go to the whole club. They went to everybody who had downloaded that coupon.

Maybe they put some things up in the club, but what was amazing about it was if they had a cancellation, instead of the massage therapist sitting around twiddling their thumbs—who they're paying—they could send out a text message or an email immediately and fill that spot, even if they gave a $5 discount or something.

So that's the power.

Now, before we go any further, let's talk about the options.

I have so many clients who come to me and say, "Well, I have a free Constant Contact," or, "I have the $9.95 Mailchimp thing. Whatever it is, I'm good, right?"

Can you answer that for us?

LISA: I can.

People mix that up a lot.

Constant Contact and Mailchimp are good at what they were designed to do, but they're two different tools.

Constant Contact, Mailchimp, those kinds of platforms are great for broadcast tools, like the newsletter, where you're just sending out the same thing to everybody.

They have some ability to tag, but the automation part of it isn't there.

What we're talking about with a CRM is a marketing platform that can actually capture the lead, tag them in specific ways, and then complete that nurture process.

It helps you sort your list, just like in that massage example.

A lot of people think that having Constant Contact and Mailchimp is enough.

Basically, they own a megaphone.

What they really need is a net to capture the lead.

CASEY: The other thing is, I recently had a client—another small wellness biohacking center—and they had Constant Contact.

They also had their website that a webmaster created for them.

When we created the first capture mechanism, they had to go back to their web guy, and their web guy was gonna charge them like $500 just to put this opt-in page there.

It's like they're being held captive in terms of the capture mechanism.

So how does a fully integrated CRM change that for someone who isn't necessarily tech-savvy?

LISA: You actually have the ability to own your own space.

You're not waiting for somebody to get back to you. You're not waiting for them to approve whatever the change is.

That capture system allows you, if you come up with some sort of an offer that you wanna put out on, let's say, Facebook or Instagram, to literally build a single landing page for that very specific offer without people getting lost in your entire website and not knowing where to go or what to do.

CASEY: What they call a funnel, right?

LISA: A funnel. Yeah. A funnel, a landing page.

You can literally, in minutes, with zero tech skill, no developer, no waiting, create the exact pages that you want for your specific offers.

CASEY: I'll give an example here.

Recently I was at a conference. I was one of the speakers there, and the night before the conference, another speaker got sick and couldn't speak.

They asked me, "Can you step in?"

It was on a completely different topic than what I was speaking on myself.

Of course I said yes, but the capture mechanism that I had created for my seminar was not going to work with this other topic.

Literally, Lisa—and you helped me through this the first time, so then I was able to duplicate it—I was able to go in and, in about 20 minutes, copy, paste, set up a new capture mechanism.

When I spoke in front of that audience the next day, they were able to put up their phone, scan my QR code, and get into my list.

LISA: Yeah. And Casey, I'm gonna give everybody an example of that whole process.

Your listeners don't know it, but you asked me to do this yesterday. I worked on it this morning and built the exact same thing for your audience that I'm gonna give them later at the end of the call.

CASEY: Yeah. It's powerful.

Of course, I'm kind of giving the punchline here already. I'm literally an example of this.

But there are a lot of people listening who maybe don't even have anything. They're using Excel on their phone—which, we all started somewhere.

Where does somebody start on this journey to moving into the space of CRM and taking control of their lead capture?

LISA: It basically starts with one rule that organizes everything else.

Before you spend a single dollar or a single hour on any marketing, no matter what that is, ask:

What is the capture mechanism?

If you are attending some sort of industry convention, seminar or workshop and you have a booth there, what is the capture mechanism?

You're teaching a free class maybe in your gym or your studio. What is the capture mechanism?

CASEY: Hearing a theme there.

LISA: That's the main rule.

What is the capture mechanism?

If your answer to any of those questions is "nothing," then you're not marketing.

You're actually just paying for thumbs-up on Facebook or applause.

You're missing it.

Remember how I started this:

Speak to the right audience, capture the lead, and then nurture them until they book.

CASEY: My first lesson in this—of course, at that time we had fax machines and no internet—was Jay Abraham.

I gave him my phone number through a call to get an audio cassette out of a magazine on a Piedmont Airlines plane one time in 1994, I think it was.

They constantly called me. They constantly sent me direct mail until, guess what?

I spent $10,000 to go away for three days.

But they nurtured me.

They gave, gave, gave, gave, gave.

Got me to get something free first.

So capture, right?

We talked about this last week—the difference between networking and prospecting.

Let's dig into some tactics now.

What are some ways entrepreneurs, solopreneurs and small business operators can realistically get these capture mechanisms working?

LISA: I've got eight. We'll go through them one at a time.

Number one to me is a landing page.

It is one page, it is one offer, and you are asking them to take one action.

You've gotta keep it simple. KISS, right?

You send traffic to that one page, not to the busy homepage, not where they're gonna get lost or you have a video on there and they click out of it.

It is very targeted, very specific.

CASEY: So, example.

You have a small studio owner who does mat Pilates—not reformer Pilates, mat Pilates—and she goes out and does a Pilates class for free in town on a weekend where they're having a healthy community event.

She could pass out her card with a QR code to an at-home Pilates class.

LISA: Perfect. Great example.

When they come to the landing page, there's only one thing they can do.

There's no navigation buttons.

They either opt in to get the free video to be able to do that workout at home—which would be the same workout that she delivered—and then, of course, her offer would be to come back for more later.

But that's it.

CASEY: You're either gonna give me your name and email, or phone, or whatever it is we're asking for, or bye-bye.

LISA: Correct.

The second thing is make it low barrier.

You are not asking for their bio.

When you have a capture form on that page, any extra field is gonna cost you a lead.

You're actually gonna lose some leads the more you have them fill in.

Name and email—not even full name. Doesn't even have to be full name.

First name and email is the floor.

Then you can ask for a phone number if the offer earns it.

CASEY: Interesting.

Recently I have stopped, on some things—not all—but on some of my landing pages, I just put "name."

Not first name, not last name.

What's interesting is you already start to get some psychographics on your customer because some people put Casey Conrad. Other people put Casey. Other people put C.

The less you ask for, the easier it is for them.

Let's face it, we're all guarded.

I've got four different emails. I choose which one I use for offers, and I can know exactly when someone's sending me things because we don't wanna get burned.

So that's good.

You talked about, if the offer's good enough, you could ask for their phone number.

Talk to me more about that.

LISA: That is also one of the tactics. It's having the right hook, where you are matching the offer with how warm that audience is.

If it's a cold audience and you're giving a checklist or a quiz, less is more.

You're just getting name and email so you can deliver the free checklist or the quiz.

Let's say it's for a discount for a workshop. That warrants having the phone number.

Maybe it's a challenge. The six-week challenge I did in my studio—they were coming in for a free assessment. We needed their phone number.

That warrants a little bit more information.

But you want whatever that hook is to match where that audience is.

A cold audience isn't necessarily going to automatically sign up for your challenge or your workshop.

But they'll give you their email for a checklist if it's solving a problem.

CASEY: Right.

LISA: So the right hook matches where that audience is.

That's also why you really need that database, that CRM, so you're tagging and all of that helps direct that message to that individual.

CASEY: As you're talking through this, I'm recalling my own personal behavior.

The other day I was listening to a podcast. I liked the podcaster. I'd never heard the guy before.

His call to action was, "Hey, go get my free newsletter. There are lots of tips in there that I don't cover in my podcast."

I'm like, "Oh, okay."

I got to his funnel page, his landing page, and it asked me for just my name and my email.

When I filled that out and it said, "Hey, you're in," another box popped up and said, "Would you like to receive..." and he was offering an additional resource, a webinar.

No doubt it was an evergreen replay.

"If you give us a phone number, we'll send it over to your phone right now so you can watch it."

And I did it.

I was happy that I did it because it was great.

Again, it was value.

So I wasn't ticked off that I had given my number to somebody.

That hook—that whole concept—is super, super important.

LISA: Very much so.

CASEY: Fantastic. What's next?

You mentioned QR codes earlier.

LISA: Yeah.

COVID also gave us QR codes because they existed before that, but not a lot of people were using them.

It was kind of considered a techy thing to do.

I remember the first QR codes I made, I was paying a company $180 a year to be able to make them.

You can make them for free now in a lot of places.

Everyone's familiar with QR codes now, and they just turn real-world moments into leads.

You have a front desk? QR code.

Offer of the month? Discount of the month? QR code.

Google reviews? Super important.

A QR code at the front desk takes them to a landing page to do one thing—one offer, one action.

Maybe you have a class handout and you're handing out paper. QR code.

Booth banner? QR code.

On the back of your name badge at a conference? QR code.

Business card? QR code.

On your phone? One hundred percent.

And that QR code points to a landing page, never just your website.

You're less likely to capture on a homepage than you are on a very targeted landing page.

CASEY: A lot of people make that mistake.

They just put their website address there.

Now someone goes and clicks around and gets lost, the phone rings, and that's it.

We're done.

What about practitioners?

We've got a lot of practitioners in our audience.

Are there certain tactics that work really well for practitioners?

LISA: One hundred percent.

The quiz, survey or assessment.

You don't have to call it a quiz. You don't have to call it a survey.

People have been taking surveys from the beginning of time. They used to mail them to everyone's house, and people would fill them out and mail them back in.

Now it's all digital or online.

What I love about quizzes, surveys and assessments is that they're capturing and sorting at the same time.

CASEY: Expand on that for our audience.

LISA: When you're designing or building a quiz, based on the answer somebody gives to a specific question, the system can automatically sort them into a bucket.

I'll use an example of a client I have who has a practice with multiple modalities.

They have an assessment they use to get people to come have a free session.

Based on the answers, it actually says:

"These are the two or three modalities that you should book."

"Take a screenshot of your results."

Then the button is Book an Appointment.

Now you've given them an assessment.

They don't have to think about going to your website and looking at your services.

Especially for practitioners or wellness recovery centers that have multiple modalities, the general public isn't necessarily gonna understand what they need based on how they feel.

The questions on that assessment line up with maybe fatigue, low energy or stress.

Based on those answers, the system uses conditional logic to put them into buckets.

Before they get their assessment, they put in their name.

"Tell me where to send your assessment results."

Then they put in their email.

It's separate pages, so it doesn't even look like a form.

Then it comes back and says:

"Lisa, I've sent you your assessment. Based on your answers, these are the two modalities."

And then there's the Book Now button to specifically book those two modalities.

If they don't book, you've already captured what they're interested in.

Let's say they picked stress, tension and sleep.

Now you can have automated, targeted emails going to them, providing value about how to deal with the stress and fatigue.

And it goes automatically.

CASEY: My brain is really whirring right now because we're getting ready to relaunch one of our sleep programs.

From what you're telling me, we can use the survey or assessment.

If they say, "I wake up at night," or, "I can't fall asleep at night," or, "I snore," whatever the case may be, then we could specifically send out the results.

The logic could tell them which modality or modality stack is best for them.

And what you're saying is that the conditional logic tags that person into a certain bucket.

LISA: Yep. Exactly.

CASEY: That's really where the deep power of a CRM is. It's in the tagging, isn't it?

LISA: One hundred percent.

CASEY: Explain that a little bit more because I know you and I will talk lingo here, but people might not know what that means.

LISA: Tagging is one of the tactics.

Casey, honestly, when I was with Hormozi in 2019, do you know what our lead capture system was?

CASEY: I can only imagine. Probably an Excel sheet or something.

LISA: A Google Sheet.

We used an automation company called Zapier.

CASEY: Oh, I remember them.

LISA: Basically it would take the information from one app and zap it to another app.

Even if you don't have a CRM or an automation system, you can still tag, even if you have your list on a spreadsheet.

It's another column.

It's just more manual.

Inside of a CRM, tagging can happen automatically.

Somebody goes to the landing page for the coupon for the massage.

When they fill that out to get the coupon, the email or text goes to them: "Here's your coupon code."

Now they also get tagged massage coupon code.

So now you know who those people are automatically.

You're not manually putting that in there.

CASEY: Then when they buy, it gets another tag.

LISA: It gets another tag.

Let's say you wanted, in your example of the massage people, to run a special for Valentine's Day.

"Give your Valentine a massage. Get $20 off," whatever it is.

You can now create a smart list of everybody who has a massage tag.

Let's say you have a list of 500 people and 85 of those people have used your massage services.

Whether they got the coupon, whether they actually had a massage appointment—it doesn't matter.

We're just looking for anybody who has the word "massage" in any tag.

We're gonna market to those people.

Out of those 85 people, you're likely going to get a pretty good return on that very specific tag.

You can also do it if you're at a convention and people come to the booth and scan your QR code for the free thing.

Maybe you have an iPad there and they're signing up for your course that you're gonna give free afterward.

Now you can tag them for that particular conference.

Maybe it's a conference that you do on a regular basis.

Or maybe you're doing some local events in your town—health and wellness fairs—to get eyes on your studio, gym or practice.

You wanna know:

Did I get any return on my investment for being at that health fair?

So it's not even about the list. It's about the business itself.

Am I getting a return on my investment from that?

If I am, I'm gonna do it again.

Maybe it's a local health and wellness fair they do twice a year.

Now you can pre-market to the people you've seen there before:

"Hey, I'm gonna be back. Bring a friend. I'm gonna give you a coupon for..."

CASEY: Yep. Super powerful.

The tagging is so powerful.

You can use those tags to trigger other automations.

It's unlimited what you can do with that.

I guess it's limited to your imagination.

LISA: Yeah.

CASEY: I always say to people, have you ever sat there and thought:

"Gosh, if this could just happen in my business without me doing it..."

What is that?

You likely can automate it in some way.

And that's why you're the Vibrant CEO.

LISA: That's why.

CASEY: All right. We ought to be mindful of time.

What else is in your list?

LISA: I have to say, this is honestly probably the biggest lesson that I learned from Alex Hormozi, and that is speed to lead.

I'm going through this right now because my daughter got engaged in June.

We're reaching out to wedding venues and wedding planners, and we have to fill out a form on a website.

The amount of time it's taking people to respond!

There was a study done by Dr. James Oldroyd called the Lead Response Management Study.

The numbers are crazy.

The average business response time to replying to a lead on a form is 47 hours.

CASEY: Forty-seven hours?

LISA: Forty-seven hours. That's two days.

I will tell you from this very personal experience that we've been going through, she's like:

"Why aren't they responding to me? Why aren't they responding to me?"

CASEY: I've got my money right here. I wanna spend it!

LISA: They're busy. They're doing proposals. They're doing this. They're wearing all the hats.

And they don't have anything automated.

If you reach out to a lead and answer them within five minutes, they are 100 times more likely to be reached.

CASEY: One hundred?

LISA: One hundred times.

I'll have to go back and double-check, but I think there were 15,000 subjects in this particular study.

Seventy-eight percent of people buy from the first business that responds.

So the first reply wins.

Think about this for yourself.

Let's say you have a plumbing issue at your house.

You're looking for a plumber.

You're gonna Google "plumber near me," and you're gonna start calling.

The first one that answers is gonna get the job.

If I'm looking for a solution to a health and wellness issue, or I'm looking to lose weight, I'm Googling "gym near me," "health club near me," "wellness center near me," "massage near me."

If you're not answering, or they have to fill out a form on your website, you've lost them unless you're replying quickly.

CASEY: Wow.

And if you're running ads and not replying...

LISA: Stop.

CASEY: Stop. You're just wasting money.

Just burn it up.

So Hormozi's quote, "Speed sells"—speed to lead—and the numbers back it up.

That's incredible.

I know for me, I wasn't the most technical person in the world.

I'm much better on stage than I am behind a computer screen.

Realistically, I get that there are different skill sets, but how long does it take the average person before they can get comfortable doing some of the basics in a CRM?

LISA: We go through an onboarding period.

We do all the tech stuff, first of all. We take that off the table right away.

People are like, "I don't know how to do that. I don't know what a DNS record is."

You don't need to know.

We just do it.

Then we do the onboarding.

But before that even comes into play, it's:

What is the goal of your business? What are you trying to accomplish?

Then we build the system for that one thing.

You build on it.

It's not like you're getting avalanched with everything at once.

CASEY: So you build on it and say:

"What's the lowest possible hanging fruit that I'm leaving on the table for lead capture?"

That's the first bite at the apple, so to speak.

LISA: Correct.

CASEY: Great.

This has been fabulous.

To me, if somebody wants to make their small business work, this is the one thing they have to wrap their arms around.

Sometimes people get like, "Oh, I don't know whether I can do that."

Look, five years from now, you're still gonna be in your business, especially if you've got a lease somewhere.

But even if you work online or work out of your car, whatever it is, assuming you're passionate about what you do—whether you're a personal trainer, a gym owner, a chiropractor, a wellness practitioner, a dietitian—that's your passion.

That's your job.

And five years from now, you're probably still gonna be doing that if you love it.

The only difference is gonna be:

Do you have an asset—a list—or are you just spinning the wheels every single time you need new business?

It really is that simple.

So take us out, Lisa.

What's your encouragement to this group?

LISA: I'm gonna throw out a dare.

I say a dare because that's how I felt when I was hiring Alex Hormozi.

I was like, "Okay. It's either gonna work or it's not. I'm just gonna have to do it."

So here's the dare:

Do not go rebuild your whole business.

You will get frustrated and overwhelmed.

But take one marketing thing that you are already doing the most in your business.

Whether that is running an ad in the local paper, running Facebook ads, or you have your card on the bulletin board at Starbucks—whatever it is—take just that one and add one single capture mechanism.

And do it before Friday.

That's it.

Like, one net.

Let's take the simplest of what I just said.

Let's say you're on the bulletin board at your local Starbucks and you have your business card on there.

Go get a business card made with a QR code that goes to one page for a coupon.

That's it.

That's the whole assignment.

CASEY: And they can take that one thing and put it on their phone, just like I do.

When I meet someone, they scan my QR code. It basically says, "Where did we meet one another?"

They fill in the blank, put their information in, I've got a little reminder, and now everybody goes into my system.

That's good.

A small bite.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

There's gonna be people who listen to this and say:

"Can Lisa help me?"

"How do I get in touch with her?"

Go ahead and let our audience know how they can reach you and how you might be able to help them.

LISA: I have a gift for everybody if they'd like it.

It is literally a 60-second scorecard called Capture Score, and it's gonna ask you four questions.

There is absolutely no cost. There is absolutely no obligation.

You're gonna answer four questions about how you're capturing leads, where they go and what they do, and then you're gonna get a score.

Then you're gonna get my entire Capture Kit.

It is a playbook on all of the tactics that Casey and I have talked about—how to use it, where to use it and when to use it—so you don't even have to guess.

If you're not familiar with landing pages, it's gonna tell you exactly when to use it, how to use it and where to use it.

Same thing with the QR code.

All of the tactics.

Then you get a checklist.

Before you do any marketing, before you spend any amount of money or time—because time is money, by the way—there's a checklist as part of the Capture Kit.

If you can't check off all those boxes, you need to stop before you go on with that marketing technique and get your capture mechanism.

Because none of it matters if you're not capturing.

CASEY: Fantastic.

For all of our listeners on an audio podcast, go ahead and give that URL again, please.

LISA: It is CaptureScore.com.

CASEY: CaptureScore.com, just like it sounds.

LISA: Yep. Just like it sounds.

CASEY: Awesome.

That sounds like a great resource. Value added there, so everybody go get it.

For those of you watching via video, we've put the QR code up here—or at least the URL—up here for you.

Lisa, thanks so much.

We'll have to have you back in a future episode where we dive into some more marketing.

You have been a phenomenal mentor and coach for me and helped me really wrap my hands around this whole process of capture mechanisms and my CRM.

So thank you for all that you do in our field.

And for everybody else out there, remember:

Make a difference. Make a profit. Wellness means business.

Until next time, this is Casey Conrad.