Real Advice Straight from the Gym Floor for Independent Gyms and Fitness Club Owners
While no independent gym owner enjoys checking their attendance and membership reports during the quiet months, that makes it all the more necessary. Depending on what choices are made, these are the months that can make a real difference to that all important retention rate come the end of the year.
We all know that January joiner gets the headlines, right alongside the pre-Summer rush. But today we are looking at those quieter times. Whether it is late February into March, the summer slowdown, or November and December. There is a desire to treat them as a write-off, periods that need to be endured or survived until the ‘better months’ return. But this sort of thinking is costing gyms members that they didn’t need to lose.
So today we are outlining the case for a different approach: attendance dipping across the club doesn’t mean individual members are dipping evenly. Some are cancelling their direct debit in month three because they are running out of motivation. Others might have been members for years, slowing down due to unavoidable seasonal factors. Some are likely to leave, others might have stayed with even a five-minute phone call or a reasonable option to freeze their membership.
The independent fitness operators that treat these months as inevitable risk losing these members. The ones that treat them as a retention opportunity regardless of the month might just keep them.
Spotting the Drift
Very few people decide to quit their gym membership in a single afternoon. The cancellation is just the paperwork, but the actual departure most likely started happening weeks earlier, in the widening gap between one visit and the next. And in the quieter months, often almost nobody was watching for it.
Most clubs focus too much on the certain numbers. Total membership, monthly revenue, class turnout. Each one can be a very telling metric, but these figures can look perfectly healthy while the club is losing exactly the members it can least afford to lose, one attendance gap at a time. A facility can be full on a Tuesday evening and still be losing loyal users, just because these numbers don’t tell the full story.
This isn’t a failure of attentiveness. Staff running the front desk are busy enough without any additional workload, their role was never supposed to be to hold four hundred separate attendance patterns in their heads.
That is where data has to step in to do the heavy lifting and help make what would’ve been logistically impossible 20 years ago into something easy even for a team that isn’t data savvy. When you can trust the attendance data being generated by your access controls and recorded by your membership management system, you can create a system built to notice the widening gaps while there’s still time to act upon them before those members have made the decision to quit entirely.
Effective, Targeted Communication
The instinct for most gyms and clubs goes one of two ways, either leave lapsed members alone and hope they resurface, or fire off the same automated “we miss you” email to everyone who’s gone dark for three weeks. While both can yield results, they aren’t optimal. Both approaches treat disengagement as a single event rather than a process with stages, and both arrive too late to matter or too generic to land.
A member ten days into a period of ‘slowing down’ needs something different from a member five weeks in. The former might require just a nudge. A growing trend is to get a coach, PT, or class instructor to send a voice note or message personally if it feels appropriate.
But the second situation needs to be dealt with more tact. Alerting a member they haven’t been in in six weeks might just be the prompt they need for them to cancel outright and remove it from their to-do list.
If a gym or club tries to collapse both of those scenarios into one templated message, you’ll get the response those templated mail blasts nearly always get. Nothing.
The gyms and clubs that hold on to members send a person, not a mail merge, and they send that person while the door is still open rather than after it’s swung shut. The goal should be to make sure we never reach that six week mark.
And once someone has already cancelled, you are not following up any more. You’re negotiating a win-back, and that’s a harder conversation to have every single time. That is why our approach is to always try and intervene at the first stage.
By being consistent and targeted with member communication, it is possible for a gym to boost their retention rate significantly. And in the latter half of this article we will be looking at how one of Ashbourne’s partner gyms did just that with our tools.
One of the easiest mistakes to make during a slower trading period is to scale back how much a club communicates, on the assumption that there are more important things to be focusing on.
But it isn’t about scaling back as much as it is targeting. Members don’t need to hear from their gym more often when their attendance slips, but the communication they receives needs to be targeted, timely, and if possible, personal.
What no-one needs during their Summer or Christmas disruption is an endless stream of 5% promotions and ‘We Miss You’ emails.
That isn’t to say that independent gyms and fitness clubs shouldn’t maintain the same rhythm of updates, class changes, new equipment, community events, regardless of how busy the gym floor looks that week. It is important to maintain these signs of life alongside personal, targeted member communication.
Consistency helps to communicate that everything is Business-As-Usual. Even if a member doesn’t read every e-mail about a new event or new equipment, they will notice if those e-mails stop. E-mail engagement isn’t all or nothing, part of the background noise we come to expect as consumers is a steady stream of communication from our service providers, and a gym is no exception.
In short, keep the mail blasts for facility updates and events, and keep the targeted communication for retention.
Using Data to Find the Pattern Before it Finds You
Every one of the actions we have talked about above depends on the same thing: knowing what’s happening with individual members early enough to act. That isn’t guesswork, and it shouldn’t rely on staff spotting a familiar face missing from the 6am class. It’s a data problem, and it has a data solution.
Ashbourne’s BI Dashboards give operators exactly this kind of early warning, surfacing attendance trends and at-risk members before the pattern becomes a cancellation. Rather than reacting to a drop in membership numbers at the end of the month, clubs using this kind of tool can act on the individual member level, weeks earlier, when a phone call or a freeze offer still changes the outcome.
Quest Fitness, one of our partner gyms here at Ashbourne, have seen this play out directly. While the full story can be found here in our case study, the short story is all about how the Quest used the retention tools built into their Ashbourne system in order to turn a common talking point into an operational habit. As Quest manager Ryan Nicholls puts it:
“The Ashbourne system now has a retention tool on it which is great. If they haven’t been using the club regularly, it will tell us and then we know they are at great risk of leaving. Allowing us to re-engage with them.”
– Ryan Nicholls, Manager, Quest Fitness
That single capability, catching disengagement early enough to do something about it, is precisely what separates clubs that hold their numbers steady through the slower months from clubs that watch them slide.
If that isn’t enough, Ryan was also quick to highlight how Ashbourne can be used for the sort of targeted communication we have focused on in this article.
“With the marketing system Ashbourne has in place, we can send out direct e-mails to members and non-members as well. The social media side is invaluable now to grow the business and to show what we do here, regarding the classes we run, the spa, the functional facility, the boxing facility, the new machines we’ve installed. The whole cycle is integrated from the Ashbourne system”.
– Ryan Nicholls, Manager
Quest and countless other Ashbourne partner gyms and clubs have proven that the months that look thin on the attendance sheet aren’t the months to switch off. They are the months where the work you put into spotting, following up and offering the right flexibility shows up most clearly in the numbers that matter at renewal time.
And here at Ashbourne Membership Management, we have been helping independent gym and fitness club owners boost retention rates, target customers and trawl through their data in a meaningful, precise manner for nearly three decades.
Whether it has been via installing and maintaining innovative access controls, chasing down non-paying members, or setting up a members mobile app, we have ensured that thousands of gym owners have the best tech, secured revenue, and fantastic customer service.
If you want to see how a company made by and for independent gym owners could help you deliver even more value to your members without losing any control over how your facility is run, don’t hesitate to book a demo with our in-house, UK based team today.
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 working and operating within the fitness industry.
Now that it is confirmed that the UK will find itself with yet another new PM with a different agenda to his predecessor, the time for the fitness industry to make our voices heard is now.
Here at Ashbourne Membership Management, we have been proud to work in this dynamic, innovative sector for three decades. At 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. Andy Burnham or whoever is to become the next leader of the United Kingdom will have tough choices to make, and it is our job to highlight that this common sense policy will have fantastic benefits for people up and down the country.
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.
