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How to Improve Client Retention and Your Fitness Business’ Bottom Line

If you’re starting to feel like the fitness clients that walk through your doors never seem to last long, it may be time to improve your customer relationships.

What Does Member Engagement Mean?

Engagement refers to the relationship your business has with its clients. Specifically, it’s the process of creating and nurturing your connection with each client, and ensuring that they have positive experiences with your staff and your gym or studio. Feelings of acknowledgement and encouragement in your clients impacts how long they will stick around to pursue their health and fitness goals. In fact, a sense of acknowledgment is so important to clients that the Global Health & Fitness Association reported that members at risk of canceling were 45% less likely to cancel after receiving just a single “successful commitment interaction” in the course of a month.

What Causes Customers to Stop Attending the Gym?

According to USA Today, 67% of people don’t use their gym memberships. This includes those who signed up for a membership and never began attending, or at some point stopped regularly visiting their gym or fitness studio. Here are some of the reasons that your members may stop attending:

  • Members aren’t seeing the results they’d hoped for
  • They don’t feel a sense of belonging or community at their gym
  • The gym is disorganized when it comes to booking systems, payments and/or equipment
  • Members don’t feel that their achievements are recognized

What Are the Barriers to Increasing Member Engagement?

Discovering what’s stopping your clients from taking full advantage of their membership isn’t the only thing to consider when working on your engagement. Finding the time and resources to dedicate to reaching out more often can present its own set of challenges. Many gyms and studios find it difficult to touch base with clients and check in on them when they’re already busy attending to administrative tasks and equipment maintenance. This coupled with a general lack of knowledge in how to effectively re-engage members can leave owners and managers feeling lost at where to begin.

Developing an Effective Member Engagement Strategy

Creating a comprehensive plan is crucial to attracting new clients and retaining your highly valuable existing ones. While there are some barriers to accomplishing seamless member engagement there are also heaps of strategies that gym and studio owners like yourself can use to develop effective member engagement and retain clients. In our free guide, we share super simple ways to engage members. Here are 6 of the key strategies we discuss:

  1. Specializing your member onboarding experience
    Bringing on a new client should be about more than filling out paperwork. It’s a great opportunity to make your client feel heard and valued right from the very beginning of your relationship, all while tailoring a plan that will help them see results.
  2. Developing personalized relationships with clients
    Getting to know the wants and needs of your existing clients allows them to form loyalties to your gym and enables you to create customized fitness plans for them. The right management software can take the hard work out of it too.
  3. Keeping up with member communication in a way that feels authentic
    Our eGuide features email and text message templates to take the guesswork out of direct customer communication. Our membership management software allows you to reach far and wide with group emailing, broadcasted texts, events, and landing pages.
  4. Identifying at-risk members and re-engaging them before they decide to quit
    Setting up automatic messages to reach out to clients when they haven’t visited in a while, as well as notifying your staff of these members so that they may reach out and re-engage will help you to keep clients around for longer.
  5. Creating exciting challenges to keep your clients motivated
    Planning engaging events will allow your members to try new activities, get to know their fellow gym-goers and give them a boost of motivation. Keeping things fresh also gives your members a reason to check in on your social media more often and stay engaged.
  6. Saving time and money while increasing engagement through automation
    Our gym management software can do it all: automate your marketing efforts, manage payroll, organize classes, schedule appointments and much, much more. All of the time saved by using a system that works for you and your staff can be put toward the most important thing: growing and maintaining your business.

 

Engaged members are more likely to stay the course and achieve their health and fitness goals. They are also more likely to take advantage of your other classes or services and encourage family and friends to join them. Fostering a strong community by keeping in touch with your members and showing interest in their achievements will pay dividends and help to get your business to where it needs to be.

To get more information on improving your member engagement, make sure you read our free guide . It will give you more insight into how to best engage your members and convert them into studio evangelists. For more information about the Xplor Triib solution, please get in touch or book a demo.

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