Summer thins out every gym floor in the UK and Ireland, and it always has done. Not famous for our weather, people are keen to get (or jet) away. And even those that stay home face disruption, whether it is school breaks and childcare cover or just longer evenings and a full social calendar.
Each of these Summer factors help to pulls your members away from their normal routine at around the same time each year.
But none of that means those members are necessarily on their way out.
So, how do we tell? Well today we are going to be sorting through the signs and working out which members are just having a wild July, which ones might be at risk, and most importantly of all, how we keep all of them as engaged as possible during these sunny summer months.
The Member Summer Dip, Structural or Symptom?
Attendance often falls for reasons that have nothing to do with how good your club is. It might be that members go abroad for a week, or three, or that parents take on extra childcare when school ends and drop sessions to make it work. Running, cycling and outdoor swimming start pulling people who’d normally be happy to train indoors. Shift patterns, well, shift and routines built up over the cooler months start to come apart at the seams.
Some years it feel like it happens all at once, across a whole membership base, and we have known a fair few independent gym and fitness club owners in our time who, understandably, start to panic a bit when they see those attendance figures drop.
But it is important to remember that none of this is necessarily a verdict on your PTs and instructors, nor your facilities, nor even necessarily the value members place on their membership. To some extent, it will happen every year. And while many gym owners would rather it didn’t, that does mean we have the luxury of being able to plan for it.
Not Every Drop Is a Warning Sign
As a data-driven business, we are always encouraging independent gym and fitness club owners to utilise their reports, their BI Dashboards and their attendance data wherever they can.
If your membership management software has the tools, it is foolish not to use them. But there is also reacting to every attendance drop-off the same, regardless of context. Theoretical Member A, who trains four times a week normally but has to drop down to twice while the kids are off school is doing exactly what you would expect them to do.
But Theoretical Member B, who trained consistently right up until three weeks ago and hasn’t set foot in the building since is probably more pressing. One is clearly taking a hit to their schedule for the team, the other might just be on holiday or busy, but a much higher priority for a check-in.
In the end, the response has to reflect the trends you are seeing from the membership. The members on a predictable summer lull need a light touch, which we will cover later in the article. Conversely, the a member’s attendance pattern has broken down entirely, the case for direct, human contact is much easier to justify in order to try and prevent a cancellation.
Trust Data Over Guesswork
As a company that has been providing membership management software for nearly 30 years now, we know that guesswork doesn’t scale well past a handful of members.
After a certain threshold, it is time to stop relying on anecdote and start utilising your attendance data. Rather than going on a general sense that the club feels emptier than usual, track each member against their own recent pattern. To use a variant of our previous example, someone who has gone from three sessions a week to zero for three straight weeks is a much more telling indication of an issue than someone who’s simply dropped from four sessions to two, especially over Summer.
This is where not only having faith in the accuracy of your data, but also the ability to filter, analysis and ultimately act upon it is vital. It can help contextualise the concern that comes with the Summer drop into tangible, workable, actionable data.
Building these sort of checks into your facilities weekly routine, ideally via a BI Dashboard, allows your staff to start identifying these drop-offs with certainty, rather than a vague recollection of who they have and haven’t seen recently.
Skip the Automation for the Members Who Matter Most
Once you have found who’s actually at risk, how you reach them can make all the difference. Fitness entrepreneur Alex Hormozi has made a version of this point that is well worth repeating: when an owner or coach spots a member’s attendance sliding, a personal voice note (if appropriate) or message from an actual human beats a scripted one, because members can tell the difference between the two.
It doesn’t need to be elaborate, the human factor is what counts here.
A short message from a PT or instructor who knows what that member is training for, and knows their story more than any data field ever will, that will do more than a scheduled email ever will.
Some independent gyms and fitness clubs have already started building this in: a personal check-in fires the moment attendance drops below a member’s own baseline, and a simple birthday message goes out automatically to every member across the year.
In an increasing isolated, automated society. Small human gestures carry are, perhaps sadly, an increasingly valued commodity.
Early signs from clubs testing Hormozi’s advice suggest it’s moving the needle on churn, though it’s still early days for most who are running it.
Give Members a Reason to Stay Front and Centre
Targeted outreach handles the urgent, at-risk cases. The rest of the membership needs something different: reminders that fitness is still part of their life, without leaning on attendance figures to make the point.
Membership retention isn’t all about last minute intervention, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the adage goes.
And in terms of prevention, a summer class timetable that actually reflects summer, rather than a straight repeat of the winter schedule, helps to tell your members that you are paying attention to how they want to train right now. We are all wary of stagnant businesses that are just ‘going through the motions’. It isn’t a good look, and it is a ‘feeling’ that many are very good at detecting from the businesses we frequent.
Short, time-limited challenges built around turning up rather than smashing personal bests give people something to aim for even when their normal routine has gone sideways. App notifications with quick sessions built for hotel rooms and garden spaces keep members moving without needing a visit to the club at all.
By tying your retention messaging to your members own goals, the chance it will resonate is much greater than a generic e-mail blast written for the entire gym. As we stated earlier when discussing Hormozi, personal and professional will always beat frequent and generic.
Demonstrate and Champion Member Progress
One of the most compelling reasons for any member to stick around through a slower patch is evidence their effort is paying off. Send that evidence back to them, whether it is attendance streaks, class metrics or milestones hit over the last few months can make a difference. A member who can point to something concrete they’ve achieved isn’t going to view a summer lull as a natural exit point.
While annual reviews can be fun, that isn’t what we are talking about here. Try and avoid a big set-piece moment. Small, personal reminds are more interesting than a generic annual ‘Gym Wrapped’ that everyone will receive.
Outside of stats and digitally communication, this can also be something that you encourage your staff, PTs and Instructors to do. Highlighting and reinforcing when success has occurred for members is vital, we are often slow (and sometimes the last) to see positive changes in ourselves, so an outside eye, especially one with authority highlighting progress can make all the difference.
What Owners Can Actually Control
So to end at the beginning, attendance will most likely fall this summer. That’s not something any independent gym or fitness club can entirely prevent, and it’s not a reason to worry about every member who’s trained a little less this month. What owners can control is how they separate a normal seasonal pattern from genuine disengagement, and how they and their team respond once they’ve made that distinction. Get both of these right, and those members should stay connected and motivated even when the floor looks nothing like it did in peak January.
Fair Rates For Fitness
If you are reading this, you’ll forgive us if we assume you are someone who cares about the UK’s fitness industry. If so, there is something we’d like to mention, something important to all of us who work and operate within our wonderful fitness industry.
With a change in Prime Minister now confirmed, it is an important time to make our voices heard.
Here at Ashbourne Membership Management, we have been proud to work in this dynamic, innovative sector for three decades. But at the time of writing the UK government has decided to increase business rates as part of the latest budget. While we are always happy to pay our way, we believe that these rates do not acknowledge the incredible benefit that independent gyms and fitness clubs bring to society.
Every party manifesto claims that they want the people of the UK to be healthier, happier, and more active. But when the time comes to match action to rhetoric, our industry is too often left out.
So, if you want to make your voice heard alongside the hundreds who have already acted, follow the link here to Fair Rates for Fitness, a campaign being championed by our partners over at the Gym Owner’s Forum.
