Consider what someone needs to get started successfully: a clear introduction, a suitable first session, help choosing a class, or a plan for the first week

You could finish January with a full list of leads and cost per signup that looks great, and yet still have very little clarity about what you actually bought on that six or seven-figures in spend. 

How many people showed up? How many joined after the introductory offer? How many have come back? What did those members contribute after the discount, advertising, and cost of serving them?

Those questions belong in the campaign plan before the first ad runs and before a single dollar is spent. Otherwise, you can end up optimizing for a result that looks great in platform but does very little for the business.

At Lower Cross, we advise our clients planning a January membership push to start with the member they want to have in March and then work backwards. That changes the creative, the offer, the booking experience, and the numbers the team should pay attention to.

Give people a reason to join beyond the calendar

“New year, new you” tells someone when to buy. It tells them almost nothing about why your gym, studio, or product fits their life.

Someone returning after a long gym break may want to have the reassurance that they can step right back in. Someone with an unpredictable schedule needs to understand how classes fit not just into their week, but also their lives. Someone who has never lifted weights may need to see what working with a coach actually looks like and what those transformative moments could be.

Those are different creative concepts. And each concept has an almost unlimited amount of angles, formats, variations, and specific avatar activations. 

Make the next step, match the ad

If the creative and messaging are about getting comfortable with strength training, sending someone to a generic membership page makes them immediately start the decision all over again.

The landing page should answer the question the ad raised. What does the introductory offer include? Who is it for? What happens next? What does it cost, including required fees and the price after an introductory period? What’s in this for me?

For a campaign built around an introductory visit, let people see real availability and book it on their phone immediately. If they need to submit an inquiry first, tell them when and how someone will respond. Assign a person to that follow-up. Give staff the context of the offer that generated the inquiry.

Then walk through the entire process yourself. Click the ad, complete the form, and try to make the booking. Find out what happens when someone misses the call or needs to reschedule. That is part of the acquisition system, and it deserves the same amount of attention as the ad account.

This goes beyond paid acquisition, creative, web, and lifecycle — this is what you should do as the CMO or as the head of growth. We eat dog food at Lower Cross for every single one of our partners, and we recommend you should, too.

Build the offer around a useful start

There’s no issue with a discount that makes economic sense. But the discount cannot do 100% of the work.

Consider what someone needs to get started successfully: a clear introduction, a suitable first session, help choosing a class, or a plan for the first week. An offer can make those things easier to understand and access. It also needs to be something your team has the capacity to deliver.

Model the economics before launch. Include the promotion, media cost, follow-up work, and incremental cost of serving the new member. Establish how much you can afford to spend and how quickly the acquisition needs to pay back. Expected future retention should not become an excuse for a cash problem today.

Once someone joins, make the handoff clear. Who helps them get started? Who notices if they never book? What happens after the first visit? Marketing should know those answers before it promises a great experience.

Measure the people behind the conversions

A cheap lead is not automatically a bad lead. An expensive lead is not automatically a valuable member. You need to follow what happens next and understand the value across different stages of the funnel, as well as the value of that specific customer segment.

Track leads through booked visits, attendance, paid membership, and continued participation. Compare acquisition groups by offer and campaign where your data supports it. Keep the cost of acquiring a paying member visible, along with cash collected and the contribution that group generates over time.

January gives you useful early signals. Bookings without attendance call for a different investigation than visits without joins. Members who join but never get started deserve attention immediately. Check those patterns with the people running the front desk and coaching the sessions before deciding the answer is another audience or another ad.

This is part of the strategy and forecasting modeling we do at Lower Cross, so we can always connect performance both immediately and downstream to understand the full picture.

Plus, March is your checkpoint, not a reason to wait. Use these early signals to fix obvious friction now, then use actual retention and contribution to judge whether the campaign delivered valuable members.

Our goal is to build a January acquisition plan that your business can afford, and that your team can fulfill and execute on. Give people an irresistibly compelling reason to join, make it dead easy to begin, and measure what happens beyond the sale. Then incorporate those learnings and signals into the next campaign. And keep pushing.

That’s how Lower Cross thinks about performance, growth, efficiency, and scale as the private growth office for some of the world’s leading brands and businesses.

Jonathan Geller is the Founder and CEO of Lower Cross, a digital growth and strategy firm partnering with DTC brands and private equity portfolio companies in the $5M-$250M revenue range. Lower Cross works with leading companies across apparel, fitness, consumer electronics, health and wellness, and B2B, specializing in contribution margin-driven growth across all marketing channels.

Previously, Geller founded Boy Genius Report (BGR), building it into one of the largest technology news destinations on the internet before selling BGR to Penske Media Corporation. His work has been cited by Ad Age, ADWEEK, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNBC, Fox News, and hundreds of other major outlets.

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