Most fitness club owners and managers dedicate most of their resources towards acquiring new members. While there’s nothing wrong with recruiting new members, you also need to find ways of retaining the ones you already have.
At the end of the day, if you keep losing clients at the same rate as you are acquiring them, your profits will stagnate. So, if you are looking to boost your fitness club’s profitability, run a more successful fitness club and take it to the next level, you will also need to work towards boosting your retention rates.
Fortunately, there are several strategies that you can leverage to boost your fitness club membership retention rates. In this article, we will explore various ways and strategies of boosting your fitness club membership rates.
Introduce Discounts and Other Incentives
A considerable percentage of fitness club membership cancellations are due to costs. The good news is that there are several measures that you can implement, to minimize cost-related membership cancellations.
First, you should consider introducing discounts to long-term members. For instance, one of your long-term clients may decide to cancel their membership, since they feel they can no longer afford the $50 monthly membership fee.
To prevent this situation, you can instead offer them a three-month discount at $25 per month, coupled with other incentives. By doing so, you will show this member that you value their membership and you are committed to helping them achieve their goals.
Second, you should consider introducing incentives like free personal training sessions, free meal plans, free body composition analysis or even free group classes. With these free add-ons, your members will feel they are getting the best value for their money, thus reducing the risk of cancellations.
Invest in Gym Equipment
Some of your members may also decide to cancel their memberships if your gym doesn’t have sufficient or modern equipment. No one wants to waste their valuable time, queuing for gym equipment. Also, if your gym equipment is outdated or in bad shape, some of your members may also decide to shift to another gym that has better equipment.
To prevent this issue, you will need to ensure your gym has adequate equipment. A simple survey will help you to identify the equipment that the majority of your members are using and address the shortages.
Also, the equipment needs to be in great working condition at all times. At the end of every day, you need to be conducting a physical assessment of all your gym equipment. Any equipment that’s out of proper working condition should be taken out of commission and fixed as soon as possible.
By ensuring you have adequate equipment in proper working condition at all times, you will increase member satisfaction, which can help to boost your retention rates. Besides, you will also reduce the occurrence of injuries, which may be occasioned by faulty equipment.
Run Fitness Challenges
A considerable number of gym goers cancel their memberships due to lack of motivation. And this is where fitness or workout challenges come in.
Running a fitness or workout challenge can help to keep your fitness club members highly motivated to accomplish their fitness goals and contribute to higher retention rates.
Besides boosting your retention rates, fitness challenges or workout challenges can also help to attract new members, further helping to grow your fitness club and increase your profit margins.
When it comes to running a fitness challenge, you have several options to explore. You can easily come up with many different kinds of fitness challenge ideas, just so long as you put your mind to it. They can help you boost your fitness club member engagement and maximize your retention.
- Running or walking challenges
- Charity challenges
- Weight loss challenges
- Healthy eating challenges
- Mileage challenges
- Team fitness challenges
Send Training Reminders Regularly
Studies show that only around 18% of gym members use their memberships regularly. And this means that approximately 82% of your fitness club members don’t come for sessions regularly.
As you may expect, this group of members who don’t visit regularly are also likely to cancel their memberships. After all, they are not using it and they may feel they don’t need to keep paying for it.
So, to boost your memberships, you will need to find ways of encouraging this group to keep coming in for their sessions. And, you can achieve this through various ways. First, you need to be sending out training reminders regularly. While sending these reminders, you should mention that you are here to help them accomplish their fitness goals.
Besides sending training reminders, you can also introduce incentives, specifically targeted to this group. For instance, you can offer rewards tied to attendance. And as long as your offer or incentive is worth it, you can expect to see an increase in attendance from this group.
In Short
Memberships are extremely vital to the growth and success of your fitness business. And by using the strategies that we’ve discussed in this guide, you should be able to reduce your attrition rate and increase your retention rate – leading to a more successful fitness business.