3 Tips to Help You Develop a Successful Gym Referral Program

92% of people trust recommendations from their friends and family. This just is one of many reasons is why referral programs are an excellent, low-cost method for recruiting new members at your gym, studio or school. If you’re still not convinced, here are a couple additional stats from ReferralCandy supporting why word-of-mouth is so valuable:

• Word-of-mouth generates more than two times the sales of paid advertising
• Word-of-mouth influences every single stage of the consumer’s journey
• A high-impact recommendation from a trusted friend is up to 50 times more likely to trigger a purchase than a low-impact recommendation from a stranger

Your members are an integral part of the community you’ve worked so hard to build. You’ve developed strong relationships with them and have helped them achieve fitness goals they may have never thought possible. Why not utilize these happy influencers to spread the word about your business?

If you don’t currently have a referral program in place, you’re in luck. We recently developed a simple guide to help you develop and promote your own referral program. Our 7-Step Guide to Creating a Successful Referral Program, features essential tips, such as:

• Developing a reward structure: When thinking about launching a referral program, you need to first decide who will be rewarded. Your members? Your new referrals? Or both parties? Combined rewards result in a higher rate of referrals as they create a shared experience and give the prospect a greater incentive to give your gym, studio or school a try.
• Keeping it simple: It’s important to keep your referral program, along with the messaging you use to support it, simple. When programs contain numerous stipulations or multiple steps, they become incredibly confusing, leaving your members less likely to participate.
• Measuring success: Famous management consultant, Peter Drucker, said it best with “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Long before launching your program, you need to figure out how you’ll track referrals. It’s ideal to have software for gym management in place to do the work for you. By creating a referral lead source, you can run a weekly report to see how many new referrals you’ve received. This will enable you to measure what’s working and determine what isn’t, allowing you to make adjustments as needed.

Get your copy of our free guide to find out the remaining four steps for developing a successful, long lasting referral program.