It should be no surprise that a new member’s first year in your gym is the most critical for retention. While focussing on your lead management processes is so vital to your business, it’s important to align them with a good gym member retention strategy so that all your hard lead generation work doesn’t go to waste! So what can you do to ensure your new member’s first year is the best year they have ever experienced with a gym, with the help of your gym sales software?
1. Get to know them
Look back at their journey from becoming a lead to a happy new member. How did they hear about you? Where did they come from? Which salesperson did they speak with, or did they interact with a few different team members? How long did it take for them to sign-up?
All of this data can be found in MyMemberSales gym sales software to help inform you a bit more about your growing member base. Not only that but collecting and retaining this data and analysing it can help you tweak your ongoing lead generation and sales strategy to close more sales than ever!
2. Deliver value
So often, gyms promise the world to their gym leads in an effort to lure them into signing a contract, then put little to no effort into them after that. Gym leads may be coaxed in with irresistible offers, reduced (or non-existent) joining fees, and freebies. But their journey with your gym doesn’t end with a squiggle on a dotted line. They need to be nurtured, noticed, and made to feel like they’re getting real value out of their gym membership, so they feel compelled to re-sign year on year.
With such a surplus of competition in the gym market, it’s crucial to keep your members just as happy (if not more so) than your gym leads. After all, your members are the ones spreading that valuable word of mouth to their networks to bring your fitness centre warm leads.
Some ways you could deliver ongoing value to your members are:
- Have your fitness staff check in with them once a month
- Communicate with them regularly
- Reward them when they attend your gym X amount of times within the month
- Have a member of the month
- Bring in experts from outside your gym to give nutrition or sports science advice.
3. Stay in touch
It’s so important to keep engaging with your members. Since there are so many gyms that operate 24/7 now, and therefore only have a few reception hours per day, it’s possible some of your gym members may never interact with your gym staff if they like to train in off-peak times. You need to make sure you’re keeping in touch with these members in other ways to continue to foster and build the relationship you have with them and ensure they continue visiting your facility. Afterall, a report by TRP found that every additional visit by a member in a given month, in turn, reduces the risk of that member cancelling in the subsequent month by 33%.
This same report found that email is a more effective means of communication than phone calls (across all membership groups). Make sure you’re regularly communicating with them each week via email and SMS with tips for their health journey, offers, notifications about gym events, and profiles on your gym staff so they can get familiar with the faces of your brand even if they can’t meet them in person.
