How Ox Ridge Grew Membership Leads by Fixing Its Message
When leads slow down, the budget usually gets the blame.
Ox Ridge fixed the message instead.
Ox Ridge Riding & Racquet Club in Darien, CT, offers a lot under one roof: riding, squash, padel, racquet sports and an active social calendar. Before we started working together, it had never run a digital ad campaign. Its membership page led with pricing instead of what it’s actually like to belong, and prospective members had one general inquiry form to fill out.
We built and ran the Facebook and Instagram campaign, the membership landing page and the inquiry form, and Ox Ridge’s membership team handled every conversation from there.
The first year didn’t go in a straight line.
A Page Built Around Belonging
We replaced the pricing-first page with one built around the experience of belonging to the club, with clear calls to action throughout and a short inquiry form that asks what each prospect is interested in. For a premium club, that shift matters a lot. When price is the first thing people see, they start comparing, and when the experience comes first, they start picturing themselves there.
The Club’s First Ad Campaign
We launched short video ads on Facebook and Instagram aimed at adults within about 25 miles of Darien. Inquiries started arriving that summer, and by last fall the page was bringing in about 12 to 15 membership inquiries a month from people the club had never reached before.
When Membership Leads Slowed Down
This spring, the club needed to move most of its ad budget to summer camps, which is a trade-off every club faces at some point. With the membership campaign running at a fraction of its budget, inquiries slowed by about a third.
The smaller budget explained part of that, but when we looked closely, we found something more important. Our ads had leaned heavily on squash, which had worked well early on, while the landing page talked about the whole club, riding included. So the people still clicking an ad about squash were landing on a page that didn’t match what they’d just seen, and that kind of gap quietly costs leads at any budget.
Ride. Play. Connect.
So rather than simply turning the budget back up, we rebuilt the campaign in late summer around one theme that captures what Ox Ridge really offers: Ride. Play. Connect. Riding, racquet sports and the social life of the club now show up together in the ads, in the landing page’s headline and photography, and in the inquiry form, so a prospect sees the same club at every step.
We also cut the form down to the essentials: name, email, an optional phone number and one question about which membership they’re interested in. Every field you remove is one less reason for someone to leave before they hit submit.
Before: the ads focused on squash. After: one theme for the whole club.The Results
- September 2026 was the best month yet, with 21 membership inquiries, up 40% from the same month a year earlier
- Interest broadened across the club. Before the rework, squash led most months, and since then riding inquiries have surged, which is what you’d expect once the ads showed the whole club
- Meta’s dashboard counted 99 leads, while the form itself received 138, so the platform missed more than a quarter of them
For a private club where one membership is worth thousands of dollars a year, a single new member covers months of advertising.
Before we had SignUpEngine’s landing page, new member leads were just trickling in. Now we’re seeing a steady stream of qualified inquiries and it’s become a reliable system for bringing in prospective members.
Sarah SchwarzGeneral Manager, Ox Ridge Riding & Racquet Club
Check the Message Before the Budget
When leads slow down, the natural reaction is to spend more. Sometimes that’s the right call, but a lot of the time the real problem is a mismatch between what the ad promises and what the page delivers. Someone who clicks an ad about squash and lands on a page about riding isn’t sure they’re in the right place, and plenty of them leave. Putting more money behind that mismatch just buys more people who leave.
Fixing it costs nothing but attention. Make sure the ad, the page and the form tell the same story, and every dollar you spend works harder, whatever the budget is.
The Big Takeaway for Clubs
Ox Ridge went from never having advertised to a steady flow of membership inquiries, hit a slowdown this spring, and came out of it with its best month yet.
Before you spend more, make sure the ad and the page say the same thing.
Want to Know What Your Ads and Pages Could Do?
Whether your ads aren’t producing leads or registrations, or you’ve never run them because you weren’t sure where to start, we’ll look at it with you. Book a free landing page audit, and we’ll walk through your page, your ads and your registration flow together on a 30-minute Google Meet, then tell you what we’d fix first.
Read More from
