One of the biggest challenges facing gym owners and fitness professionals is how to retain members. Attracting new clients is important, but keeping them is essential for long-term success. In this article, we will explore the fundamentals of member retention. If all of these are in play, you’ll never need a gimmick!
Create a welcoming environment
The first step to retaining gym members is to make them feel welcome.
Ensure that your facility is clean, well-maintained, and equipped with the functional fitness gear (it need not be the latest).
Make sure your staff is friendly, approachable, and knowledgeable about the gym’s offerings. Encourage them to greet members by name and take the time to answer their questions.
Keep it fun and engaging
Working out can be tough, and clients can easily get bored or burnt out.
Mix things up with fun and engaging activities, challenges, and special events.
Offer themed workout classes, fitness challenges, and social events that bring members together. This will help to build a sense of community and motivate clients to stay on track.
Communicate regularly
Communication is key to retaining gym members. There are two aspects here:
1.) Community centric where you keep in touch with your clients through newsletters, emails, and social media. Good content is where you share success stories, fitness tips, and upcoming events to keep them all engaged and informed.
2.) P-PRO which stands for Personalized Positive Reach Out – a term coined by one of our clients and friends – Doug Spurling. This is more geared towards driving personal interactions with every member outside of the gym (popularly known as the ‘Other 165’).
In our experience, some good themes to keep in mind for this category revolve around celebrations, accountability and personal interactions.
Celebrations could be so much more than just celebrating milestones such as a PR, weight and fat loss. One could give them a pat on the back for showing up when they didn’t want to to even noticing their form to recognizing their energy and vibes was off the charts.
Accountability could entail reminding them why they started, keeping them informed of their goal of doing that half a marathon and how consistently showing up will get them to their goal.
And, lastly Personal interactions could entall checking in on how the family dinner went to how that big presentation they had at work turned out. Essentially showing them that you care and listen when they interact with you.
Remember to also constantly collect feedback and suggestions through forms, surveys or simple checkins.
Reward loyalty
Show your clients that you value their loyalty by offering rewards and incentives. All of us have budgets for marketing but surprisingly none of us worry about rewarding the very people that are paying to help us keep our business open and our livelihood depends on them.
So, we would highly recommend you keep a simple budget to wow clients.
These could be both structured rewards that we’ve seen a lot of great training gyms do – such as rewarding them with a swag (generally T-shirts when they complete 100 workouts).
They could also be unstructured where you gift them that supplement; or plant if you happen to go to home depot and see the flower that you know Ms Jones loves; to the coffee that she wants and learnt was out of stock in the nearby store and you happen to find it.
These small gestures go a long way in building strong relationships with your clients and truly showcases to them that you both listen and care about them. And, surprisingly it doesn’t cost much and the result is priceless!!!
Offer bonuses and discounts on new memberships, merchandise, and special services for long-term members.
Focus on member delight
Finally, focus on member delight. Take the time to truly listen to your clients so you can understand their needs and address their concerns.
Regularly review your programs and services to ensure they are meeting the needs of your clients. Encourage feedback and take action to address any issues that arise.
Sometimes we just need a reminder that it’s important to check in on our fundamentals to make sure they’re all in place!