- Get all of our current members to switch to ACH. Or at least all of those that would be willing to switch.
- Renegotiate our current credit card rates with PaySimple so any members who still needed to run their payments through credit card would still cost less per transaction.
- Batch retail and monthly payments as much as possible to minimize total transactions and therefore limit transaction costs.
For the first objective, we felt it was best to be honest with our members and to be sincere about asking for their help, knowing that it would ultimately benefit them as well in the long run. Ultimately, your members want to see the business succeed so why not be clear about how this is going to help the business as a whole. Also, I would highly recommend putting some sense of urgency to what you are asking. We used the Black Friday sale as a way of encouraging the members to help us fund our next equipment purchase, and it got a lot of them excited about bringing in their checks. You could even take it a step further and make a competition out of it.
Just like with any announcement, I would suggest using several forms of communication so everyone sees and hears the message multiple times. We sent out an email (which you can find below) separately from our normal bi-weekly newsletter, and we also mentioned it briefly in the next 2 newsletters. We posted a similar message to our private CFPB members Facebook group, and had our coaches include the ACH announcement in most of the classes for about a week. Below is a copy of the email that we sent out to our members. Feel free to steal this and modify it to fit your situation.
“Happy Wednesday CFPB fam,We have a HUGE favor to ask from each one of you. The good news is, it won’t take much time or effort on your part, but it will help us out in a REALLY BIG way, and allow us to return the favor.Over the last year alone, we have paid over $18,000 in credit card fees for processing monthly membership payments and retail charges. Recently, we found out that we could save about 75% of that, if we are able to process everyone’s payments directly from the bank account, rather than having to use credit cards.In addition to the huge cost savings, this will dramatically cut down the amount of administrative hours that we spend replacing expired or stolen credit cards, especially as identity theft becomes more and more prominent.We want to continue to spend our time, money, and energy to improve your experience at CFPB, and transferring everyone over to direct debit, is one of the easiest ways we can do that. With the holiday season coming, this is the time of year a lot of our equipment suppliers offer special deals that we can take advantage of. Almost all of our D-Balls came from a Black Friday sale last year (I know, yay, more torture devices). We would love to be able to get everyone switched from credit card to checking accounts by November 1st, allowing us to re-invest the added savings into new barbells, plates, kettlebells, D-balls, bikes, and rowers.What do we need you to do?Just do 1 of the 3 options below.1. Bring in a check and write “void” across it. You can leave it with a coach or at the front desk.2. Call us with your routing and account number. I’d say email too, but I don’t really trust email with your personal info. Voicemail should be safe enough if you want to leave it on a message.3. Sign in to your Zen Planner member page and change your payment info. This is probably the easiest if you have used the Zen Planner app for workout tracking and payments before. The website is crossfitpalmbeach.sites.zenplanner.com and you can login with your username and password.Thank you so much for taking the time to do this!”