If you wait until a member cancels to find out why they left, you might gain an answer but you have still lost a member. It is better than nothing but it is a reactive, not proactive approach. Leavers surveys are a great tool to understand what went wrong but here at Ashbourne we want to help gym owners make an immediate difference to their retention rate. The challenge is identifying the members who are most at-risk of leaving before they actually do.
But anyone who has run an independent gym or fitness club for any length of time knows that it is a business that can be as personal as it is manic. And when you are managing a busy club or even multiple sites, it can be impossible to keep that personal tab on everyone. Keeping track of individuals by intuition and face is not a solution that scales easily.
But that doesn’t mean we should just accept this as an inevitability. Here at Ashbourne Membership Management, we have been arming independent gym and fitness club owners with the tools to spot the warning signs before that cancellation email lands in their inbox for over two decades.
Attendance Trends And Retention
Catching attendance drift before it becomes membership cancellation
A drop in attendance is rarely the reason someone cancels, but it is almost always the symptom.
Momentum is easy to lose and hard to recover. Life gets in the way, a new job, a couple of stressful weeks at work, a holiday. Once the habit is broken, the cancellation might not be far behind.
Here at Ashbourne, our software is designed by gym owners, for gym owners, meaning that it enables you and your staff to identify who is in danger and which members are starting to drift in real time.
After twenty five years in the fitness industry, we know the signs, and we built out our easy to use reporting and retention tools to cut through the noise and show you the information you need to know about your most at-risk members.
Our membership management software comes built-in retention tools to do the heavy lifting for you and your staff by flagging members deemed to be at-risk. This can be as simple as members who haven’t attended within a period of time, or based on attendance patterns instead.
It isn’t just about capturing which of your members are swiping their access pass, it is about identifying which members have stopped. Our retention tools allow your staff to spend less time digging through spreadsheets or trying to remember who they have seen and more time reaching out and making a difference.
“I haven’t seen ‘such-and-such’ in a while” might work when you are starting out, but retention tools help you target those drifting members without making it someone’s full time job.
A Call in Time
Once you have identified who your drifting members are, you have a window of opportunity. Unfortunately even our retention tools can’t tell you how large that window of opportunity is, but better to err on the side of caution and act quickly.
We aren’t talking about bombarding people with marketing spam or generic ‘we miss you’ emails. Our tools allow you to be precise and that allows gym owners and their staff to be genuine when reaching out.
The data has told you who to contact, but only you know your members. For some members, a phone call will be greatly appreciated. For others it is the last thing they want to receive. If this is a particular concern, jump down to our section on Customer Relationship Management below.
Everyone loves a bargain though, and an e-mail with a free class or a voucher can often go a long way.
As with all things customer service and satisfaction, it is a balancing act. It is about making your members feel supported without making them feel pressured.
With the data easily accessible and readily available, it ensures you and your staff have the best chance to make that call or send that e-mail at the time where it will matter most.
BI Dashboards, Analytics and Reporting
Retaining members should always be the priority, but it is just as important to understand why they are drifting. Their reason might be purely personal, or it might be an issue with your service. This is where our system’s built-in BI Dashboards come in to give you the big picture at the touch of a button.
With your entire membership now laid before you, it is possible to identify trends. Are people who take a certain class more likely to cancel? Or perhaps members who joined for a specific reason (such as long distance running training) have a cancellation rate three times higher than average.
Maybe the data shows that new joiners who don’t book an induction within the first 48 hours are five times more likely to cancel in their first month. That would be a clear call to at the very least review your onboarding process. This process of identifying trends can help gym owners and their staff isolate issues that might be otherwise invisible or escape notice when everyone is focused on their respective duties.
With live, accurate and reliable data, our partners are able to understand what is happening in their facility. It transforms retention from a purely reactive endeavour into a proactive, data-driven strategy.
Keeping the Door Open
Or using Customer Relationship Management Software for prospective members and former members
Of course, despite your best efforts, some people will still leave. And that is okay. But in the fitness industry, “former member” shouldn’t mean “stranger”.
That is where our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software comes in to bridge the gap and help you keep track of that history. Whether it is prospective members and leads or ex-members, treating membership like it is either ‘all’ or ‘nothing’ risks leaving a significant amount of business on the table.
Circumstances change and members might leave an independent gym or fitness club for one reason that feels like a distant memory half a year later. Keeping records via CRM means you don’t have to treat them like a fresh lead. You already know their history and with the right offer you might be able to welcome them back with very little admin.
After over two decades operating in the fitness industry, we know that retention isn’t about building a wall to keep your members in, it is about building a gym that people want to stay in.
Members will inevitably drift and their attendance will suffer, but by using your data effectively, you can ensure that you and your team notice when members are trending towards cancellation. This gives you that all important opportunity to prevent their cancellation and learn the cause of their lapse.
Don’t just take our word for it, listen to our partners. We’ve been going around the country interviewing our partner gyms and learning how our software, hardware and services have helped them take their facilities to the next level.
We recently talked to Base Gym, based out of Bristol and Yeovil, about how our systems helped significantly reduce membership drop-off, supported by our payment collection service which has saved them the effort of either chasing every member that doesn’t pay or just letting them go.
Just across the Bristol channel in Wales, we talked to Quest Fitness in Caerphily, another prime example of a gym’s team who have been using our CRM’s retention tools to identify at-risk members and boost their retention margin.
If you are an independent gym or fitness club owner or manager and you want to learn more about how Ashbourne Membership Management can help transform your business and boost your retention rates, click here and book a free demo with our in-house, UK based demonstration team today!
