Spring Cleaning Part 1: Gym Membership Retention

The first day of spring has come and gone, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to do some sprucing up around your business. A project like this can be daunting – it’s only slightly terrifying to see materialized what you had been woefully ignorant to only hours before. But the net effect is something, well… zen. It also makes it much easier to maintain if you follow that old maxim: “A place for everything and everything in its place.”

So, with that spirit in mind, let’s explore how to freshen up your gym membership retention strategy in the coming months.

MEMBER RETENTION:

A satisfied member, who finds value in your training, instructors, and community will stay for longer. This is great for the member and great for you as the business owner. So, the question is: what practical things can you do improve the engagement and retention of your members?

Step 1: Keep a Pulse on Attendance

First, it’s important to keep a pulse on member attendance. To see who your top attending members have been, use attendance reporting in Zen Planner to look back at the last 30, 60 and 90 days. Conversely, you can use this report to see who has not been coming in as frequently.

An easy way to improve retention is to reward attendance consistency. Rewarding consistency can take many forms, but a simple shout out can be the easiest and most effective. Using a Zen Planner automation to recognize attendance milestones (ex. 25, 50 and 100 classes) is one easy way to engage with consistent members. You can even offer rewards in tandem with milestones in the form of a small retail credit or swag item.

Do you know which classes are performing well? What about the classes are performing poorly? Make sure to use Zen Planner reports to understand the popularity and attendance of specific classes as well. Are the differences in time of day, day of the week or subject matter of the class? Use these findings to experiment with your schedule, optimize ease of access for your members and improve the efficiency of your business.

Learn other ways to keep members coming back in our Gym Member Retention Guide

Step 2: Check in Consistently

Another key to member retention is consistently collecting feedback about their satisfaction. You won’t know where your business can improve if you’re not directly asking your members. Sending out a customer satisfaction survey is a great way to quickly gauge how members are feeling. We recommend setting up an automation in Zen Planner to trigger an email containing a survey link after the person has been a member for a defined amount or time or reached a certain number of attendances.

Quick Tip: Keep your feedback survey short and sweet. Close ended questions like yes/no, multiple choice or scaled questions work well to create quantitative data that can be analyzed quickly to determine trends. An open-ended question can also be helpful if the person would like to provide any other feedback that wasn’t prompted by your other questions.

Step 3: Learn from Your Loyal Members

When trying to crack the code on member retention, don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Find out which of members have the highest lifetime value and learn from their habits and actions. Start by running these two reports in Zen Planner:

Members who have spent the most money in the last 90 days
Members who have attended the most classes in the last 90 days

Cross reference these lists and then ask yourself, what do these members have in common? You can even reach out to these members for insight. Why not send out an email saying you noticed great strides in their training and asking them what about your gym has set them up for success?

Once you’ve analyzed your reports and feedback from members, use these new insights to emphasize your gym’s strengths, adjust your processes, delight your members and improve overall membership retention.

Check out Part 2 for ways to refresh your Marketing, Finances and more!