Even when you're away from your desktop or laptop, you can use your iPhone, Android or other web enabled phone to check in on how your SDAconnect email campaigns are going. All you have to do is visit your normal login page from your phone, and we'll try to automatically detect that you're on a mobile device and give you a special mobile version to look at.

What's included in the mobile version?

Mobile devices have small screens and limited input options, so we've kept things nice and simple - you get fast and easy access to campaign reports for your own campaigns. The design and layout has been built specifically for mobile browsing, so it's light, fast and easily readable. Here's how it looks on an iPhone:

Can I still use the full version on a mobile device?

Yes, if you ever want to go back to the full version of SDAconnect you can click the 'switch to full version' link on the bottom of the page.

To start using the mobile version on your phone, go to http://email.sdaconnect.net and login with your username and password as normal.

Daily Digest

It's now easier than ever to find out what's happening using the Daily Digest report. The Daily Digest sends an automatic email to any subscribed user, displaying key performance information from the previous day. This is a great way to get a quick 'heads up' and keep your finger on the pulse of your business. Using the Daily Digest you can get instant answers to such questions as:

• How many members joined?
• How many contact records were edited?
• How much revenue was taken from bookings?
• How many activities were completed?
• What was my income from Point of Sale?
• How many members currently owe money?

It's also possible to have the email exclude KPIs with zero values if this is required, as well as configure the time when the email is sent.You could add the information received to other reports or it could act as a trigger to run more, in-depth reports if you see something that needs further investigation.

Social networking with TwitterConnect

LeisurePoint can automatically post (or Tweet) directly to a member’s Twitter page every time they check-in, turn up for a booked session or make a booking. These Tweets can be seen in exactly the same way as any other Tweet posted by the member themselves. Once Twitter Connect is activated, messages based on the member’s selected preferences will be sent to Twitter and a history entry will be added to their record in for future reference and reporting.

 Continuous Authority Credit Card Payments

In 3.3 we've added the ability to register a credit card for continuous authority. This means a card can be registered once and used multiple times and will allow you to:

• Resubmit and collect via Credit Card any Direct Debit payments that have been rejected. Your collection rates will increase dramatically with this new functionality.
• Offer Credit card as a payment method for recurring membership fees for those people who don't want to use Direct Debit.

Also, because we use a token system and no longer store Credit Card details the system is much more secure. This token is linked to the gateway of our PCI compliant Credit Card partner, Commidea, who process the payments and return the results back to ClubCentric. This service is available for a low monthly fee and will transform your payment processing and collections efficiency.

ClubCentric 3.3 is available now. For any customers who would like to see a detailed preview of Version 3.3, please contact us at sales@sdasolutions to sign up for the upcoming webinar and training course. 

With LeisurePoint it's now easier than ever to find out what's happening using the Daily Digest report.The Daily Digest sends an automatic email to any subscribed user, displaying key performance information from the previous day. This is a great way to get a quick 'heads up' and keep your finger on the pulse of your business.

The 39 available measurements cover the following areas:

• Leads
• Prospects
• Members
• Organisations
• Users
• Edited Records
• WebAccess
• Activities
• Notes/History
• SDAconnect
• Point of Sale (POS)
• Financial
• Bookings

Using the Daily Digest you can get instant answers to such questions as:

• How many members joined?
• How many contact records were edited?
• How much revenue was taken from bookings?
• How many activities were completed?
• What was my income from Point of Sale?
• How many members currently owe money?

It's also possible to have the email exclude KPIs with zero values if this is required, as well as configure the time when the email is sent.You could add the information received to other reports or it could act as a trigger to run more, in-depth reports if you see something that needs further investigation

The Daily Digest is available in LeisurePoint 3.3 and can be configured in the Settings area, under 'Daily Digest'.

Twitter is constantly in the news right now and continues to grow at an incredible pace. According to internet research company Hitwise, UK Internet traffic to Twitter has increased 10-fold over the last 12 months, and is now in the top 300 visited sites in the UK – no doubt helped by celebs like Stephen Fry and his 50,000 followers.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, in a nutshell it’s a very simple way to keep friends, family and important contacts updated on what’s happening in their life – with a limit of 140 characters per message ’tweet’.

We had a good look at Twitter and realised that it’s also a great way for members to connect with their Club using a message transport system that’s tried, tested and best of all, absolutely free! With Twitter connect for LeisurePoint you can now setup your members to automatically send Tweets about what they’re up to at your Club, providing a genuinely useful service that you, your members and their followers will love – here’s how it works…

How Twitter Connect for LeisurePoint works.

LeisurePoint can automatically post (or Tweet) directly to a member’s Twitter page every time they check-in, turn up for a booked session or make a booking. These Tweets can be seen in exactly the same way as any other Tweet posted by the member themselves.

Example Tweets include:

After checking in:

• Just checked in at <<SITENAME>> (<<LOCATION>>).
  Example - Just checked in at Big Wave Fitness (Leeds).
  
  
• Just checked in at <<SITENAME>> (<<LOCATION>>) for <<ACTIVITY>> (<<LOCATION>>).
  Example - just checked in at Big Wave Fitness (Leeds) for Personal Training (John Adams).

After making a booking:

• Booked <<ACTIVITY>> at <<SITENAME>> (<<LOCATION>>).
  Example - Booked BODYPUMP class at Big Wave Fitness (Leeds).

A Tweet from LeisurePoint looks like this in Twitter:

This service can be switched on in one of two ways:

1. By the member setting it up themselves using the new Twitter page in WebAccess:

2. Or by a staff user setting it up directly in the LeisurePoint member record.

Once Twitter Connect is activated, messages based on the member’s selected preferences will be sent to Twitter and a history entry will be added to their record in LeisurePoint for future reference and reporting (see above).

What can you do with Twitter Connect for LeisurePoint?

Without doing very much you have another useful channel for generating new leads, creating wider awareness of your club, promoting loyalty and retention and, finally, promoting your products and services online.

For Members - If members follow each other on Twitter they can see when each other is checking in to the club – useful if they arranged to meet up. If they have a booking for say, tennis, the member can also see their partner has arrived and what court the booking is on – no more mix-ups! Friends and family following the member can see when a check-in happens and Tweet encouragement for keeping the exercise habit, perfect for new year’s resolutions.

For Instructors, Personal Trainers and Coaches - Staff can follow their clients on Twitter and be notified immediately when they check-in. This is really useful for retention interactions, PT motivation or just knowing that the member is in the club and will be turning up for their Tennis lesson or PT session.

Twitter Connect for LeisurePoint is available now, please contact us at sales@sdasolutions.com if you would like to know more.

Bookings

Make bookings for other members - Primary members can now make bookings for associate members on their package. For example, a member may want to book a tennis court for their child or partner. A primary member can also amend and cancel bookings on behalf of their associate.

More flexible booking intervals - Previous versions only allowed bookings to be made to be made on a fixed interval (such as every hour). The new version allows you to set an interval in which the next booking can be made so that available time throughout the day can be used up more efficiently.

 New booking rules manager - Bookings rules in ClubCentric are handled by a rules engine which checks all the rules and conditions before allowing a booking to be made or not. This engine has been improved to make it quicker and easier to manage existing rules and add new ones in future. New rules are available to limit bookings based on such scenarios as:

• Duration of a booking at peak times e.g. Member can't book tennis for more than an hour at peak times.
• Amount of time booked for an activity in a period e.g. no more than 10 hours of tennis can be booked in a 7 day period.
• Number of bookings in a period e.g. no more than 2 personal training bookings in a day.
• No shows in a period. e.g. Remove booking rights if more than 3 no shows in the last 5 days.

Instant synchronisation for new members - Previous versions would synchronise new members with Bookings every 15 minutes or so. 3.2 performs this synchronisation instantly, enabling a new member to join and make a booking straight away. Particularly useful if you want to sign up a member and book them in for an induction or PT session immediately.

Reorder how resources are displayed - If you want to display your resources in a non-sequential way you can now do this. For example, you may want to put under-used resources first to encourage these to be booked before more heavily used resources. Using tennis as an example, you may want to display your courts in the sequence 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4 etc as this is the same as the physical layout of your courts.

Apply a default price for a booking - If you have lots of sites and resources it can take a while to add your prices. 3.2. contains a default price which for all items in the booking group, without the need to update each item individually. You can still change prices for individual items without affecting the default price for the other items.

WebAccess 2.0

The internal architecture of WebAccess has been completely redesigned so that you can now:

• Run WebAccess as a standalone web application as before.
• Integrate individual WebAccess elements into your existing website with exactly the same look and feel.
• Integrate with SitePoint, SDA's new service for dynamic hosted websites.

Cancel or amend a booking online - previously, a booking could be made online but could only be changed by contacting the club directly. Now you can cancel a booking or make changes to an existing booking. As you cancel or amend you will be advised of any cancellation fees or price changes, which can then be paid by credit or debit card immediately.

New online booking wizard - the process of making a general booking (Personal Training, Racquets etc) has been improved. Customers can view available slots in a day calendar and quickly make the booking or use the search filters to find other days and times. This can be combined with payment either by credit/debit card or on account.

Generate booking confirmations and reminders - At the end of the booking process the customer can choose to receive confirmations and reminders by email or SMS text message at a user-defined time e.g. 2 hours before the booking is due to start.

Improved MyBookings area - Previous versions contained a list of all pending bookings. This is now extended to include the ability to amend or cancel a booking from the list as well as new filter options to see previous bookings by status (completed, cancelled, no show etc) to get a full view of bookings past, present and future.

Run Live timetable across multiple domains - Now you can publish your class timetables onto multiple websites domains so that your members can view and book classes from virtually anywhere.

Add or remove optional items in a booking - A member can now make a booking and add or remove any optional items related to that booking. For example, a Member could book a tennis court and add a ball machine and speed gun at the same time.

Book for an associate online - A member can quickly go online and make a booking for one of their associates at any time. This is very handy for parents who want to book something for their children, for example.

Capture leads and prospects online - Easily create a data collection form on your website for new enquiries. You can choose the fields and style the form to fit your existing website design. All the details from the form are sent into ClubCentric with automatic activity scheduling and email updates to the salesperson. This feature will save hours of tedious data entry from email and disconnected forms.

Join online - A joining wizard is now available which can guide a joiner through the entire joining process including BACS setup and automatic address entry. The configuration also allows you to limit which packages are sold online.

Forgotten password reset - Previous versions required users who had forgotten their password to contact their club. The generation of a new password is now completely automated and requires no input from the site at all.

More control - You can now controll all aspects of WebAccess look and feel, which tabs are displayed and the order of any favourites. Personalise your system exactly how it suits you.

General

Email and letter templates can now be filtered and deleted - For those with long lists of letter and email templates you can now filter templates on their status and delete templates that are no longer required.

Advanced Find search on member contact preferences - You can now search on all contact preferences so that you can find all people who do not allow contact by SMS, for example.

More retention management features - Advanced Find now contains a range of searches for finding and contacting low and non-attenders. For example you could find all members who have attended less than 2 times in the last month and send them an email, letter or SMS. New, professionally written, retention templates are available to chose from in the templates list.

Improved integration with SDAconnect - It is now possible to sync the results of an Advanced Find query with SDAconnect, SDA's subscriber email campaign system. This will allow you to produce highly targeted campaigns for general information, special offers and retention management. For example, you could find all the low users, send an email campaign with a link to a special offer and track the number of people who clicked on the link.

Issues Fixed

Over 30 issues have been fixed in this release.

ClubCentric 3.2 is available now. For any customers who would like to see a detailed preview of Version 3.2, please contact us at support@sdasolutions to sign up for the upcoming webinar.

When you setup a new campaign in SDAconnect, you can now choose to run a standard campaign, where every recipient receives exactly the same email, or an A/B campaign. This page explains more about what A/B testing is, why you might use it and how it all works.

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing is a way of working out which of two different options will be the most effective. This can help you decide which email will the best one to send to your subscriber list from two different options which are labeled A and B.

The basic idea is that you send Version A to a small number of your subscribers, and Version B to another small group. The results (opens or clicks) are measured, and a winner is chosen. Then that winning version is sent out to all the remaining subscribers.

Why use A/B testing?

A/B testing offers a simple way for you to get the most opens and clicks from your campaign. With A/B testing you could:

• Test two subject lines, to see which one results in the most opens or clicks.
• Test two completely different designs to see which one gets the best results.
• Test a "Trial membership" promotion versus a "1st month free" promotion.
• Test two different "from names" to see which generates the most opens.

For any campaign, there are three different areas you can test. The subject line, the 'from' name and email address and the actual email content itself.

1. Subject line test - Taking a small subset of your recipients, for example 20%, you'll send half of them an email with one subject line, and the other half a different subject line. Then you can watch the results come in for as long or as short a time as you feel comfortable with. Once you know which one performs the best, you send the email, with that winning subject line in place, to the remaining 80% of your subscribers.

2. Email content test - You'll create two different emails to test and send them both to a subset of your recipients. Then (automatically or manually) the winning version is sent to the rest of your recipients. You could have only slight design differences, or something more major, depending on what you want to test.

3. From name and from email test - In this test, the content and the subject are the same for each email, and only the 'from' name and the 'from' address differ. Whichever gains the most opens or clicks (at your choice) wins, and is sent to the rest of the list.

What do A/B test reports look like?

While your A/B test is running (before the time period you set expires, or you manually declare a winner) there is a special A/B test report you will see. It looks like this:

You can easily see which version is performing better according to the measurement you chose, and you can also see the time remaining for the test. Notice the link in the top right to manually choose a winner. You might choose to do that if one version is clearly better, so you don't have to wait for time to run out. That's all there is to it!

Once your winner has been decided, the remaining recipients will receive the winning version and you'll be able to see your normal campaign reports. You can still access the A/B results too, in case you want to revisit them when designing your next campaign.

A/B testing is available for any current SDAconnect user – if you’re not a current user and want to know more or sign up to SDAconnect, go to www.sdaconnect.co.uk or email us at sales@sdasolutions.com.

Operate in multiple countries on the same system

Version 3.1 has been one of the biggest and most complex releases of ClubCentric for quite some time and has affected every single line of code in the system. The reason? ClubCentric is now completely international. Multi-currency operation has always been possible in the system but now you can:

• Run different countries and languages in the same system.
• Switch between languages by site and user.
• Setup and maintain localised names for all your sales and membership items e.g membership packages and POS items.
• Add payments methods based on the financial rules of each country.

More options for BACS processing

For UK operators, BACS is the principal method of collecting money owed from customers and members. Version 3.1 contains two new options for BACS processing:

• Hosted BACS - no software to purchase or install. You use the software on a hosted server and pay a small monthly fee and per-transaction charge.

• Albany Software Connector - For existing users of Albany BACS software you can now connect this to ClubCentric and perform integrated BACS processing.

 Go paperless with digital signature capture for membership contracts

If you want to reduce the paper in your organisation, then signature capture is the way to go. In version 3.1 you can complete the whole joining process electronically - saving the membership agreement and capturing a legally binding digital signature against the member record for future reference and retrieval.

Go cashless with improved handling of payment 'on account'

The existing 'on account' features in ClubCentric have been substantially improved to make it even easier and more efficient to offer 'cashless' payments for your members. Moving to 'cashless' transactions encourages greater spend per head and reduces the problems associated with cash handling. Because each transaction is associated with a member you can quickly see your highest value spenders. Using the new 'on account features in ClubCentric you can:

• Improved 'on account' setup for each member with more options and greater security for setting spending limits.
• Change spending limits for multiple members in one go.
• Advanced Find now contains search parameters for 'on account' to find members based on spend and payment status.

• When a POS terminal is in 'ClubSAFE' (disconnected) mode POS items can still be purchased 'on account'.

 POS enhanced for restaurant operations

As well as being able to handle FrontDesk POS, you can now run food and beverage restaurant operations from within ClubCentric. Without the need for a separate POS system you can track member spend and credit limits in 'real time' and do away with complicated and error-prone data import or synchronisation - everything is safe, secure and easy in one system. Using ClubCentric F&B POS you can:

• Create orders, complete with table numbers and multiple items.
• Switch between orders as new items are added to open orders (drinks, dessert etc).
• Set up and apply modifiers to an order (no mayo etc) and automatically send instructions to a kitchen printer.

• New and improved POS layout for F&B operations.

 WebAccess improvements

Members using WebAccess can make bookings, view their personal details  and track attendance online 24/7. The latest version now includes an area for members to view their financial statement for the current month, view previous months and print out statements for future reference. Allowing members to view their statements online will drastically reduce staff time dealing with queries and disputed transactions. 

Activities improvements

This release contains two useful enhancements to activities:

• Confirm appointments by SMS - when an appointment has been scheduled, there is now an option to confirm the appointment via SMS. This should help to increase show rates and allow you to capture accurate mobile phone numbers for future use.

• Delete activities - previous versions allowed activities to be deactivated but they remained in the database. If some activities have been made in error or ar no longer required they can now be deleted  from the database.

 Issues fixed

Over 37 issues have been fixed in this version.

Product/Module: Membership & Admissions
Product Area(s): Joining Wizard

If you want to reduce the paper in your organisation, then signature capture is the way to go. In version 3.1 you can complete the whole joining process electronically - saving the membership agreement and capturing a legally binding digital signature against the member record for future reference and retrieval.

Product/Module: WebAccess
Product Area(s): Statement View

Members can now view and print their OnAccount statements online using ClubCentric WebAccess. They can see all the charges to their account and look back in history at previous statements.

• Reduces number of calls to staff from members who query charges.
• Lets member keep track of their On Account usage.

Version 3.1 has been one of the biggest and most complex releases of ClubCentric for quite some time and has affected every single line of code in the system. The reason? ClubCentric is now completely international. Multi-currency operation has always been possible in the system but now you can:

• Run different countries and languages in the same system.
• Switch between languages by site and user.
• Setup and maintain localised names for all your sales and membership items e.g membership packages and POS items.
• Add payment methods based on the financial rules of each country.

This version has been localised for Belgium (French), Holland (Dutch) and Spanish (Castilian and Catalan). Other languages will follow in future versions.