How Gyms Win Back Members After Summer

How Gyms Win Back Members After Summer

The Summer drop-off may feel inevitable, but it certainly isn’t permanent. For many members it is a gap in attendance, not a decision to leave for good. So today we will be looking at how independent gyms and fitness clubs can start to close that gap if they move quick enough. Because the members who drifted over July and August haven’t necessarily written off their gym yet. There is still most likely a habit, interest, and routine to be salvaged, and all it can take is the right message at the right time to salvage it.

The best pitch and plan of action the fitness industry has ever seen won’t move the needle if a gym doesn’t know which members have gone ‘quiet’.  

It isn’t enough to know that footfall has dropped, it is about finding out who cancelled and when, which members froze their membership and when, and who has stopped turning up but has kept on paying. Not only that, it is also useful to understand who enquired across Summer but never signed on the (virtual) dotted line.

These are four different groups that will each need a different message to maximise retention, re-join and uptake. This sort of effort can be time consuming if an independent gym has to run or compile their reports manually, but with sophisticated BI dashboards that shows attendance trends and membership status at a glance, it stops the process being both guesswork and busy-work. Instead the gym’s team is able to quickly understand and isolate members and lapsed members into specific categories in the space of an afternoon.

Members who Cancelled

Cancelled members are the most clear-cut group but also the easiest to get wrong. Contact them too late and the moment’s gone. Contact them with a generic discount and you lower the value of your brand while essentially telling them they were right to leave. What works is to talk about what has improved, what has changed and what is on offer.

It is important to remind lapsed members why it was a service they used and how that service has improved over the Summer. Whether it is new classes, new equipment, or just new branding, lead with the stories that are most likely to make lapsed members think ‘I should check that place out again’.

Low/Lapsed Attendance

Because members keep paying, lower attendance can be easily missed for many gym owners. But evidence shows that a member who is paying but not showing up is usually a few weeks from cancelling anyway. Most gyms only notice once the cancellation request lands, but our goal here is to get ahead of the curve and support these members before they click that cancel button.

This is where retention tools can start to make a real difference to those retention rates come the end of the year. Any system that can flag a member’s fall in visit frequency can give a manager the chance to reach out before that happens.

And if a member is on the books, it is generally much easier to convince them to stay. Not only do you have an existing relationship to justify the call, the attentiveness can go a long way. Just make sure to respect their preferred contact methods. Increasingly people don’t like to be called, so if someone has made that clear, a phone call from the gym they haven’t visited in three weeks might not endear them to a facility.

Frozen Memberships

Frozen memberships are a different problem entirely to the previous two.

These are members who’ve already told the gym, in effect, that they intend to come back. That intention has a shelf life. Every month a member doesn’t go to the gym is a month that the habit starts to fade. Obviously most freezes are taken for very valid reasons, be it injury, a lack of money, travel, or work.

But a freeze can quickly become a cancellation once the member gets used to not paying and not attending. Some gyms (very sensibly) have a limited time that members can freeze their membership for. If this is the case a direct message near the freeze’s end date can help convert members from frozen to active.

This process represents one of the easiest wins for independent gym and fitness club managers in the article, and given the average number of frozen memberships in our partner gyms, can often be resolved in an afternoon or two.

Prospects

Prospects are very easy to forget. After all, they aren’t current members, former members or frozen members. They are the only group in our list today which falls entirely outside of a gym’s membership database. But that doesn’t make them any less pertinent, and that doesn’t mean they can’t be a fantastic boost to an independent gym’s revenue if properly managed.

Because a member that was interested at the beginning of Summer is someone you know was motivated. Because these members can’t exist in a database with your members, this is where the value of a prospect management system becomes apparent. Keeping enquiries visible rather than letting them disappear in an inbox lets a gym follow up months later.


Much like with our lapsed members, this is where an independent gym should start saying what has changed and why it is worth attending. Just like before it can be anything from new classes to new equipment, but unlike lapsed members, the gym can also introduce their other core services. Cold outreach to a name from a spreadsheet rarely works. Warm outreach to someone who already showed interest works far more often than gyms expect.

Rejoin Campaigns: The Verdict

The throughline has been that discounts will work, but they come at a cost. A quite literal cost to the bottom line. Where possible, targeted communication trumps slashing prices. New classes, rooms and facilities are worth promoting more than many independent gyms realise.

People in the area like to see their local businesses increasing their offerings. A company saying ‘Now is a great time to come back’ for no reason is vexing. A company demonstrating their relaunched timetable or a new piece of equipment is an actual update and a legitimate reason for a mail-out. Think about how many times a company saying ‘we miss you’ has got you signing back up, probably not many.

 

The type of rejoin campaign we are talking about is targeted, not blanket, and after nearly 30 years in the fitness industry, we know that that targeted beats blind every day of the week. A mass mailout is quick, but it isn’t effective. And with modern tools, the amount of time required to enact a targeted campaign has dropped dramatically.

 

Of course, none of this matters if the return journey itself is too complicated. As we talked about last month, the goal is to remove barriers to entry. Every member, whether they are lapsed or new, should be able to sign-up in just a few clicks, and with as few details as possible.

It is probably safe to assume that the cancelled member you are trying to win back isn’t your most enthusiastic fan. Winning members back requires a combination of timing, convenience and desire. Desire is the one we have the least control over, but convenience and timing is exactly what we’ve been looking at. So if you are engaging in a rejoin campaign, make sure the logistics behind a member rejoining are as smooth as they can possibly be.

Sculpt

Sculpt Gym has built its whole reactivation approach around this kind of filtering. Founder Adam Collard puts it plainly: the value isn’t just in the software itself, it’s in being able to filter through customers, segment by when they signed up, and act differently depending on what that segmentation shows. Referrals get promoted to the members who are already engaged. Discounts and win-back offers get reserved for the ones showing signs of falling off, rather than blasted out to everyone regardless of where they actually stand.

As we’ve reinforced throughout the article, that last part, the targeting is where the real profit margins are defined. A lot of gyms run one offer for the whole database, the equivalent of throwing stuff to the wall and seeing what sticks.

Sculpt does the opposite, timing a referral prompt to a member’s cycle rather than sending it cold, and holding discounts back for members who are genuinely at risk rather than devaluing the offer by handing it to everyone.

Collard is also candid about the learning curve, which is something many independent gym owners we talk to think is beyond them, but it’s not. The prospect management system wasn’t something he arrived with any expertise in, and he didn’t pretend otherwise. “You start a gym because you are passionate about fitness,” he says. “Your forte is not tech.” What changed things was hands-on support rather than being left to work it out alone, to the point where he now says he doesn’t need to understand what’s happening in the background, only what he needs to do to keep the gym running effectively.

This is the practical version of the theory we discussed above. The tools that identify who’s cancelled, who’s gone quiet, who’s frozen, who’s still warm from an old enquiry, only matter if someone at the gym actually uses them to filter and act. Sculpt’s experience suggests that doesn’t require a technical background. It requires a willingness to ask, and a bit of support figuring out where to look.


And here at Ashbourne, we’ve supported thousands of independent gym owners like Adam to get the best out of their systems. Our fully trained, in-house, UK-based support team has received glowing praise from Adam and many others over the course of our near-30 years of experience in the fitness industry.

So if you want a system that not only does it all, but has a team behind it willing to help you make the most of it, perhaps it is time to get in touch.

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 us here.

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.

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.

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.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club,
the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

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Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Back to Routine: Why Autumn Drives Better Consistency

Back to Routine: Why Autumn Drives Better Consistency

September changes the routines and habits of members before they’ve noticed it happening. Whether it is the school run starting up again and alarms getting set an hour earlier, or the regular commutes settling back in, the end of Summer brings change.

For a gym, this is the best kind of shift, because it is a type of encouragement that doesn’t cost a penny in marketing. Members are more likely to walk back through that facility door because their lives have started shifting, and we will work out how any independent gym or fitness club owner can make the most of this trend.

Because for the last few months, Summer has been working against habit and routine for many members in clubs up and down the country. Holidays break up what was once a normal week, school runs disappear and weekends get booked up quickly. The fixed points of the week that allowed time for a quick workout or a class are suddenly adrift in a sea of commitments and exceptions.

Independent gyms and fitness clubs can usually feel this on the gym floor before it even shows up in the data. Classes start to thin out a little as everyone goes on holiday and cancellations can start to add up when members realise they will be away for half of the month. A class that was full in June starts looking half empty by August. The worst part for the data-minded out there is that there’s no single reason for it, just a hundred small reasons spurred on by more free time and more sun.  

For most independent gyms and clubs it isn’t even a sign that anything’s gone wrong. Just part of the ebb and flow of the year.

And while we have covered many ways to make the most of these shifting patterns across the Summer, as August draws to a close it is time to look down the path to Autumn.

The Autumn Shift

Autumn means that life slows down for a lot of members. Children return to school and parents get their mornings back as a result. Offices fill up again after a quiet August and that means the rhythm  of the commuter population is restored.

For some members (or ex-members), this means the gym slots back into the day the same way it did in May. In some ways September is like a little January but without the pressure of new year’s resolutions pushing in members that are likely to fall away. All of this can make September a strong month for gyms that know how to use it.

The darker evenings matter more than some owners realise when it comes to their members habits. Once the clocks go back and the afternoons lose their light early, the members who ran outside or walked after dinner are likely to start looking for somewhere else to spend that hour.

A warm, well-lit gym becomes increasingly appealing in these circumstances. Owners who think ahead about their lighting and their class times stand to appeal to these seasonal preferences and reap the reward. This effect can be compounded by communicating this plainly in messaging, drawing attention to the evenings and the comfort of a fitness facility is an easy way to speak to prospective and ex-members. It can be hard to see into the head of a member, but we all experience the same weather and the same seasonal trends. Speaking to the common desires those trends heighten is an easy win for many gyms. 

If New Year and the January Joiner phenomenal is a focus on ‘break with the old, bring in the new’, September should be marketed as ‘get back to old habits’. The 2/3rd mark of the year isn’t the point where someone wants to reinvent themselves, but they might want to get back on track. And someone who fell out of the habit in June or July doesn’t need convincing that training matters. They need a reason to get back into the groove this week instead of putting it off again.

September is a good chance to shout about what has changed over Summer at a facility. Over the last few months we put out many articles about how independent gyms and fitness clubs could put the summer lull to good use.

And if a gym has been following that advice, there should be plenty to shout about. It isn’t enough to just say ‘we are still here, come join us’, it is about showing off what has changed, and what is still as good as it ever was. Make your ex-members curious, make them want to stop in and see what has happened since their last visit in May.

For the members who never clicked cancel, challenges work well to engage them. These are the members who just had their attendance wane but kept on paying. Just because they are still on the books, doesn’t mean they are to be neglected. Members don’t magically stop leaving the gym just because we’ve hit September, and a member with spotty attendance is still a risk.

An eight-week programme that takes you up to November/December can provide an incentive for those members looking to be at their best in preparation for the Christmas gauntlet. Goal-based messaging has proven time and time again to be a great way to engage and re-engage members and the seasons invariable govern the concerns and priorities of members. The headlines will always be ‘Summer Body Ready’ or ‘January Recovery’ but that doesn’t mean they are the only instances of seasonal-member focus.

So rather than pushing a discount, gyms that talk about building consistency before winter, or preparing for a specific event in November or December, are speaking to what many members are already thinking about. Let your messaging meet members in the headspace they already occupy, it will work better than any attempt to force them into a different headspace.

Rejoining

Rejoin campaigns work best when they’re timed against individual timelines rather than sent out as a single blanket push in early September. A member who paused in April is in a different place than one who cancelled outright in July, and treating every lapsed name the same way flattens an advantage that’s actually there in the data. Gyms that segment by how long someone’s been gone, and by why they left if that’s recorded anywhere, can send something closer to a real conversation than a standard mail-merge. Someone who froze their membership before a holiday needs a nudge to switch it back on. Someone who cancelled after losing a routine needs a reason to believe this time will hold.

The timing of a message can be as vital to its success as the message itself. A rejoin campaign that lands in the first week of September, while school runs and commutes are still settling into their new shape, catches people while they’re already rebuilding a routine elsewhere in their life. Wait until October and that window’s mostly closed. The habit has either reformed around something else or it hasn’t reformed at all.

Onboarding is where a lot of that early advantage gets lost. A returning member who books a class in her first week back and finds it full, with no clear waitlist or alternative offered, has just had her first experience back confirmed as friction rather than progress. The gyms we’ve seen hold onto the most rejoining members are the ones that check in after the first visit. Not just with a ‘how was the visit’ survey, but an e-mail, a text, or a call, depending on their preferred method of contact. It is normally just a quick message asking how it went, but it can make a strong impression on a joining or rejoining member.


Key Takeaways

One of the most common mistake gyms make in autumn is treating it like January. The messaging gets copied over with a little find and replace on a few keywords, the same discount structure gets carted out, and no-one capitalises on the actual seasonal motivations the members are feeling

September members aren’t chasing a radical change, they are trying to get back to normal. And many prospective, ex, and current members will respond better to the messaging that reflects that.

September isn’t a time of seismic shifts, it is a time of readjustments and getting back on track.

The second mistake is focusing entirely on winning back lapsed members while letting current ones drift. Retention doesn’t pause just because acquisition looks easier this month. A member who’s been quietly attending all summer still needs the same attention as the one being coaxed back through the door, and a gym that only has eyes for the comeback story will find its steady members eventually stop being so steady.

Autumn hands gyms a genuine advantage, and it is an advantage that can be obtained only be recognising how the seasons effect the flow of members lives. Through a combination of data, feedback and intuition, any independent gym can turn September into a net-gain month.

 

Across nearly thirty years in the fitness industry, we’ve helped thousands of gym owners turn months that should’ve been a net-loss into a net-gain. Here at Ashbourne we don’t just provide a membership management system, we provide a team that can help you take your independent gym or fitness club to the next level. 

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 us here.

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.

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.

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.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club,
the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Why Flexibility Builds Loyalty, Not Loopholes

Why Flexibility Builds Loyalty, Not Loopholes

Every independent gym owner we talk to wants to boost their retention rate and reduce cancellations, but one of the most effective solutions out there can feel surprisingly counterintuitive. Some owners assume that by offering their members the ability to pause a membership, they are almost inviting them to break their existing habits and leave entirely.

It is an understandable concern. The logic goes that if you give members an inch of flexibility, they will take a mile, freezing accounts whenever the weather turns or a holiday comes up, until half the membership base has worked out how to pay less for less. But while it is a reasonable worry, it is also built on a misunderstanding of what flexibility actually is and should be.

There is a real difference between completely open-ended flexibility and offering a defined set of options with clear limits attached. Open-ended flexibility is a member being told to let the gym know if anything changes, with no structure behind that promise. While it might work for a while at a small scale, that open-endedness is where the potential for abuse creeps in. It relies on the good will of the member, and while that would be a lovely thing to be able to rely on, there will always be people operating in bad faith.

By contrast, a defined freeze policy, with a clear maximum length, a minimum notice period and a visible cost attached, is a different proposition entirely. This gives our theoretical member a path that keeps them attached to the club, instead of their only option being to head for the door.

If we take a look at the reasons that members actually ask for flexibility,  the patterns will become obvious.

  • A member goes on holiday for two weeks every August.

  • A member tears a calf muscle during a five-a-side match and cannot train for six weeks.

  • A member gets made redundant and needs to cut costs for a few months without cutting ties altogether.

  • A member’s shift pattern changes at work and their favourite 6am class is no longer a viable option in their new schedule.

  • A member has a baby and their training life disappears under an avalanche of feeding schedules and broken sleep.

  • A student that goes home for the summer and knows they won’t be back in the area until September time.

These are not chancers, just ordinary people going through the ups and downs of everyday life. Many are the sort of thing that any member could run into on a long enough timeline. If a gym’s only answer to any of it is cancel now and rejoin later, it has pointed the member to the door and told them exactly how to use it. Most will use it. Once a member has cancelled, restarting their membership and their direct debit becomes a decision they have to consciously seek out and make, and there is little to stop them from trying a different gym in the area instead.

Considering that most independent gym and fitness club owners would agree that cancellation is something best deterred, the reluctant for flexibility becomes surprising.  

In order to get a gym’s revenue back up, a cancelled member has to be replaced, and replacing them often costs more in advertising and joining offers than a month of frozen fees would have cost the gym. A member who pauses instead of leaving keeps their direct debit records intact and their locker key in the drawer. They might come back a little changed by whatever happened to them in the meantime, but they come back. A member who cancels outright has to be won over from nothing, most likely against every other gym in the area that is running a January offer.

It is when we start adding structure and stricture to flexibility that it stops being a potential leak and starts being a potent retention tool.

An open-ended freeze just delays the cancellation by a few months and adds paperwork along the way. A pause triggered by a text message, with no record of when it started or when it is due to end, gets forgotten by the member and by the gym in equal measure, until neither side can say what is owed or when training was meant to resume. The clubs that make flexibility work put a shape around it. A freeze runs for an agreed number of weeks, confirmed in writing, with a restart date already sitting in the calendar. A membership change, dropping from an unlimited package to two visits a week during a lean month, is treated as a formal process rather than a casual workaround, so the front desk can see at a glance who is on what and why. It is important that if financial hardship gets special treatment, it is with a short-term solution, not an indefinite discount that nobody ever looks at again.

Injury is worth focusing on because it is one of the most common and clear cut scenarios a gym owner will deal with. A member with a torn ligament who is told their options boil down to either paying full price for a gym they cannot use, or cancel, will unsurprisingly almost always pick cancel. A medical freeze with a doctor’s note and a fixed return date protects the relationship instead. The member stays a member throughout the injury, and a physio referral or a modified programme waiting for them on return does more for loyalty than any discount could.

Work and family changes are often outside of a members control and deserve the same treatment. A new job with rotating shifts changes which classes a person can get to. A parent who has to take on the school runs loses the early morning slot their routine relied on. These things crop up and if one thing has to give, it’ll be the rigid gym membership.

A membership that can be downgraded, upgraded or rescheduled around a new routine keeps the person inside the club while their life resettles around them. A membership that cannot bend simply loses them, and loses them for good, because by the time their circumstances stabilise they have usually found a substitute, a cheaper gym down the road or a home set-up that does not need a membership at all.

Students bring their own version of this problem every summer. Term ends, they go home for twelve weeks, and the gym they have trained at all year goes cold on them until September. Build in a pause that starts automatically when term ends and picks up again in the new academic year, and there is no June cancellation to chase, no re-signing exercise to run every autumn. The membership just holds and starts again.

Winter asks for something similar, if less predictable. Attendance drops when it is dark by five and cold on the walk over, and a club that treats that dip as a discipline problem is arguing with the calendar. Offer a reduced-visit tier or a short planned pause instead, and the books stay honest about who is actually training rather than who is still paying and drifting away.

 

This only works with paperwork behind it, the part owners are most tempted to skip. A freeze that states how long it runs and when it ends gives a member far less room to push at it than one held together by a text message and a vague promise to sort it out later. Write the terms down, and apply them the same way to the member who has just had a baby and the one who is off to Ibiza for a fortnight. Do that, and flexibility becomes the reason members stay instead of the excuse they use to leave.

The clubs that get this right tend to talk about their cancellation numbers less, not more, because there is less need to. Members who know their gym will work with them through a rough patch do not go looking for a way out the moment life gets complicated. They ring the front desk, sort out a pause or a change, and stay.

For gyms wanting to put this into practice without creating an administrative headache, managing freezes, pauses and membership changes properly comes down to having the right system behind the front desk, one that tracks start and end dates automatically rather than leaving them to memory or a scrap of paper.

Ashbourne’s membership management platform is built to handle exactly that. We have been helping independent gym and fitness club owners scale for nearly thirty years, no matter if their goal is to go from 50 members to 500, or 500 to 2000. 

Whether it is managing and chasing membership payments, installing innovative access controls, or creating, setting up, and maintaining their websites, we have ensured that thousands of gym owners have been able to spend more time growing their business.

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.

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.

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. 

More to Read...

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club,
the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

How to Re-Engage Lapsed Members Without Discounting

How to Re-Engage Lapsed Members Without Discounting

In an industry obsessed with chasing new members and new leads, it is important for independent gym owners to look at their ex-membership, why they decided to leave, and most importantly, whether they can be won back.

While it might feel good to engage in a massive outreach campaign in an area your gym has never targeted before, it is vital that we never underestimate the benefit of a warm lead.

Because at the end of the day, cold leads have to be convinced of everything. The facility, the price, whether the gym’s service is worth their time at all. A lapsed member already made the decision to join once, and unless a club really dropped the ball, there is every chance they might again.  

Because unlike every other cold lead our theoretical gym is targeting, we know these ex-members once picked this gym over the others and kept showing up. And we also know that life has a habit of getting in the way.

Bringing them back becomes less like closing a sale and more like touching base. Not only that, it is an invaluable tool for gathering feedback. If a former member is so put off by a gym’s service that they will never, ever consider coming back, most gym owners should be very curious and keenly want to know why that is the case.

And if they aren’t that put off, then there might be a chance to get them back on the books.

Now obviously this is highly specific. If an independent gym or fitness club had a rough period, whether it is a bad manager or staff-shortages or significant repairs. There is every chance that many members might not fancy a re-do. But if nothing dramatic has happened, there is every chance that many of those ex-members just had life get in the way.

Don’t Devalue Your Brand

Most independent clubs still default to an offer when a membership lapses: half price for the first month, or a free trial disguised as a welcome-back gesture. It’s an easy card to reach for, and it can produce a short-term bump in reactivations and retention.

But it is a short term solution to what might be a long term problem. Discounting a returning member is a tacit admission that the gym was never had that much faith in the original price, and it slowly teaches the wider membership base to try their luck rather than stick it out.

Suddenly the message to anyone still paying full price seems to be that leaving and coming back beats staying put. It encourages the wrong behaviour and risks turning a gym’s membership roster into a revolving door that will be spinning constantly. This can be especially detrimental when we consider that not everyone leaves because of, or has issue with, membership price, but if they spot a chance for a bargain they’d be a fool not to take it.

The better tactic is relevance. A win-back email addressed to “valued member” and offering 20% off reads as generic and usually gets deleted before the target has read past the subject line. No-one has  ever felt like a valued member because someone put it in the first line of an e-mail.

But an e-mail that references the classes someone actually attended, or notes that the amount of time since their last visit. That reads as though a person paid attention to them rather than just a system working through a list. This is where independent gyms and fitness clubs have an advantage. Even if a chain actually put the time to go through these lists, many members would assume it was still a cynical ploy, but people want, hope and expect their local businesses to be paying this sort of attention. And facilities that meet that expectation might find some familiar faces back on their gym floors.

Structure, Storage, Systems

Most independent gyms should already have a lot of this information in their membership management software. Whether it is attendance history, preferred classes, hopefully even the reason given at cancellation if an exit survey was sent and answered.

The information doesn’t need to be exhaustive, just enough that they can tell this was an e-mail written to them and not a generic mail blast.

To this end, tone matters as much as content. A message that opens by asking how someone has been getting on, rather than leading with a discount, can work better depending on a gym’s brand identity.

If a gym fosters their image as a local gym that is invested in their members journey, this sort of e-mail feels much more believable than a gym that has gone for a sleek, detached image. Not to say either of these are wrong, of course. Each appeals to a different type of person, but a gym’s brand identity should, of course, inform how these messages are composed.


Time also gives clubs a legitimate reason to get back in touch that has nothing to do with price. Whether it is a new class being added to the timetable or a new area/feature opening up in the facility, there are many genuine reasons someone might consider rejoining a gym.

An e-mail that says “here’s what’s changed since you left,” and actually knows when the member left is a genuinely piece of engagement. Of course, it does require something to have actually changed in a facility, but even changes to class offerings and equipment can be enough. Not everything has to be big news about a rebrand or refurbishment.

Speaking of time, time should necessarily change the content of these messages. A member who cancelled four weeks ago still remembers the layout of the changing rooms and what classes are running. It would feel strange to send them the same message as someone who quit eight months ago. A short note, nothing more than asking whether everything’s alright, usually does the job.

A member who left a year ago is a different case. Whatever routine replaced their gym attendance is probably a firmly established part of their life by now, and a generic invitation to return is unlikely to make them return.

It is important to remember that Summer disrupts routines for almost everyone, through holidays or a change in childcare. A lapsed member who left in June or July usually fell out of a habit that might have lasted without the disruption.

To that end, messaging built around getting back into an autumn routine taps into something the member is likely already feeling, and is likely to be that much more effective for it The same logic applies again after Christmas, though January is likely to be a more competitive time, given the number of gyms that run January marketing campaigns.


Barriers to Entry

Finally, adding complexity risks killing off a members desire to join before it has finished forming.

Asking a lapsed member to dig out a forgotten password or ring the front desk during office hours is a barrier to entry we don’t need to be putting up.

A rejoin link that already knows their name and member profile details is the beginning of a smooth journey back into your books. It might feel like a small detail, but just like online joining, it is important to underestimate the power of convenience.

Needless to say, once a gym has undertaken this kind of ex-member re-engagement, it is vital to understand the success rate of this re-engagement. Reactivation rate is the most obvious and visible metric for success, but it is worth tracking how long returning members stay the second time round, and how quickly they came back after being contacted. A campaign that brings people back for six weeks before they lapse again is not the sort of return on investment most gyms will be looking for.

As with any campaign, it should be a living process, innovated and adapted based on the successes, failures, and feedback it receives along the way.

Making membership cheaper is the easy and costly way to win members back. But giving them relevant reasons to return, delivered at the right time, with an easy way for them to act on it, can deliver a great deal more value for your business. Relevance, timing and ease do more work than price, and they protect the value of your membership rather than eroding it.

For clubs managing this at scale, keeping track of who has lapsed and when they are likely to respond is difficult to do from memory or a spreadsheet. Ashbourne’s Prospect Management and Marketing Support tools help independent gyms segment lapsed members and time these campaigns without adding to the front desk’s workload.


And here at Ashbourne Membership Management, we have been helping independent gym and fitness club owners protect their revenue and boost their margins for nearly thirty years now.

 

Whether it is managing and chasing membership payments, installing innovative access controls, or creating, setting up, and maintaining their websites, we have ensured that thousands of gym owners have been able to spend more time growing their business.

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, it is likely that you are someone who is invested in the wellbeing of the UK’s fitness industry. With so much change at the top level of the UK’s government right now, there is something we’d like to mention, something important to all of us working and operating within the fitness industry.

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.

Andy Burnham has already proven he is willing to use Business Rate cuts as a tool to stimulate growth for ‘social’ businesses. Well we ask, if the fitness industry isn’t a social and beneficial sector for the UK as a whole, what is?

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.

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Real Retention Wins During Traditionally Slower Months

Real Retention Wins During Traditionally Slower Months

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. 

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club,
the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

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Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

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Keeping Members Engaged When Attendance Drops

Keeping Members Engaged When Attendance Drops

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. 

More to Read...

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Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

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Want to discover how? Let us show you.

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Why Summer Isn’t a Write-Off (If You Plan Properly)

Why Summer Isn’t a Write-Off (If You Plan Properly)

As temperatures rise, every Independent gym and fitness club owner knows that footfall is going to either dip, slow, or collapse depending on the month and what spin they want to put on it.  

But just because some form of dip is inevitable, doesn’t mean that summer is a write-off. In fact, it is that very predictability that allows us to prepare, adapt, and attempt to address this slowdown.

So in order to avoid collapse in August, we are going to start planning now. The independent gyms that come out the other side of August with strong retention figures and a clear Q4 pipeline are the ones that started planning now.

We all know summer changes member behaviour because it changes nearly everyone’s behaviour. Daylight is plentiful, the weather is (often) quite charming. Attendance drops, routines loosen, and some members put their goals on hold because a good time is calling.

None of this should be new information, but what determines whether an independent thrives or just survives this period is the quality of the systems, communications, and timetable that were put in place ahead of time.

So without further ado, let’s take a look.

Recognising patterns through historic data

Summer attendance shifts often follow a few consistent patterns, usually based on demographic and location. Families with school-age children rearrange their weeks from mid-July as the holidays kick in, commuter-area gyms lose footfall during August when city centres empty out at the same time gyms near universities often see student members disappear home. Meanwhile, gyms in coastal areas or tourist hotspots may see different forms of pressure, including irregular usage from short-term visitors who inflate short-term numbers without contributing to retention.

The first step we’d always recommend is to pull any historic attendance data that an independent gym or fitness club has from the previous summers and identify exactly when dips started in each, then identify how severe they were, and finally whether those dips follow a consistent weekly pattern.

This data shouldn’t just be limited to who is going through the turnstiles, class attendance is an area where data-driven analysis and action can save a significant amount of time and money. Because if the data shows that specific classes start emptying out from the last week of July, make tweaking and rearranging the class schedule a priority.

The usage of historic data here shouldn’t be complicated. Any good membership management software should be able to reduce a report covering a basic breakdown of attendance by day, time, and class type across June to September at a moments notice. These reports will help tell the independent gym owner where the real pressure points are.

Agile Timetable Management Isn’t Just About Marginal Gains

A common mistake gym owners and managers make is maintaining a year-round non-seasonal timetable through summer out of a sense that cutting classes sends a bad message out to their existing members.

But stubbornly sticking to a class timetable that is out of sync with the season isn’t a hill worth dying on. The consequence any independent gym manager who does will face is paying instructors to take sessions with four attendees, which damages both the instructor’s morale and your payroll position.

Being proactive with a class timetable isn’t a sign of weakness, and once it has happened one year, your members will understand that this isn’t a sign of decline, but proactive decision making.

Reducing class frequency in slots where historical data shows low summer uptake or drop-off is a surefire way to run a tighter class schedule with less wasted time and resources. This can often be achieved by focusing on morning sessions, which tend to do better in the summer months when compared to evening slots.

Meet with instructors and class-leads to ask and ensure that they are running seasonally appropriate classes. This can double-up as a marketing mission, finding classes that your team wants to brag about and that they believe is pertinent to summer (example: something that aids getting ‘summer body ready’) is a great thing to shout about on your socials in June and July as people do their panicked prep for the holidays.

Of course, any timetable changes that you make should be communicated at least three to four weeks in advance. This is where you get to set the story, reinforce that this isn’t a scaling back due to a lack of popularity, but a seasonal measure.

Collect any comments that are made on these posts, whether positive or negative, to determine how your membership base is reacting to the changes. Members who understand your reasoning are less likely to perceive a reduced schedule as a negative.

Keep Members Engaged Without Devaluing Your Membership Or Your Brand

Independent gyms and fitness clubs under pressure in summer often reach for discounts. Flash sales and cut-price short-term memberships can fill slots and relieve some pressure, but they carry a real cost. Any members who join at a promotional rate frequently churn when those prices start to normalise, and existing members who paid full price notice when new joiners are getting a better deal.

Challenges are a low-cost engagement tool that can help with retention, community building and brand reinforcement, vital for any independent gym wanting to solidify their existing membership during a disruptive time.  

Challenges will give some members a reason to keep coming during a period when their routine is likely to soften. Not only that, it creates a social element that, if done right, will strengthen their attachment to any independent gym or fitness club.

Options we’ve seen work well include:

  • A class count challenge, such as completing 10 classes in 30 days, with a visible leaderboard
  • A team-based challenge where members form small groups and accumulate collective attendance
  • A choose-your-own-goal format where members set their own target and check in at the end of the period
  • An attendance competition over a defined period, where the member who attends the most sessions wins an actual prize, no half measures!

Crafting the challenges to be well designed matters. This isn’t a matter of throwing a ten word question into ChatGPT and seeing what it blurts out.

You know your facility and your membership. The robots don’t.

A challenge that is too easy generates no real engagement. One that is too demanding puts off the members who are already attending infrequently. A 30-day format that feels achievable for someone coming in three times a week is a reasonable benchmark.

Bring a Friend months are a separate consideration, but worth considering nonetheless. It is a tried and tested method for independent gyms to fill the quiet spots, introduce new faces and strengthen the retention prospect of existing members. However, with all that said, the conversion rate from summer guest passes to long-term memberships tends to be lower than it is in autumn or January.

If you decide to run a refer a friend programme, be careful with how you word and market it. Specify that the reward, whether a free month or otherwise, applies only when a friend signs up for a membership of a defined minimum length. Without that condition, you are running a free trial programme rather than a referral scheme.

How Independent Gyms Can USE The Quiet Periods

Sometimes a hat is a hat and a quiet month is a quiet month. But reduced footfall does come with a few consolation benefits. The first being it allows access to your facility that can be difficult during peak months.

Whether it is maintenance and repainting, equipment checks, deep cleaning, or reconfiguring the layout of the gym floor, all significantly easier when your fitness facility is not at capacity.

A structured summer refresh, even if it means shutting off sections at a time rather than the whole facility, shows that your brand is still attentive and taking every chance it can to improve the member experience.

Rather than the word of mouth being ‘the gym was quiet this summer’, it can be ‘they are doing so much work down there at the moment’. Same attendance numbers, different perception.

If it becomes clear that your refresh will require the gym be completely closed for any length of time, communicate it well ahead of time with a clear reopening date while laying out what you and your team are planning to accomplish.

Members are generally tolerant of closures that result in a visible improvement. They are less tolerant of closures that happen without explanation and leave the gym looking unchanged.

This can also be a useful period for staff training, process reviews, and assessment of any systems that have been creating friction. Problems that are tolerable in a busy January become easier to address when the diary has some space.

Recovery and Wellbeing as a Summer Offer

Whether it is due to historic heatwaves, holiday or social commitments, your members may not be able to maintain their usual training volume, but some will still be interested in staying active in a lower-intensity and lower-commitment way.

Over our 30 years in the fitness industry, we have seen some independent gym owners approach this with an ‘All-or-nothing’ mindset. But the bottom line is that a member who remains engaged with your service and your facility is better than a member who doesn’t.

Independent gyms and fitness clubs that are willing to expand their recovery and wellbeing offer during summer, whether through stretch classes, mobility sessions, or more structured rest day programming, give members a different type of product to engage with at what is likely to be a disruptive time in their calendar.

It might be a wedding, a holiday, or a sporting event, Summer is a season where it is most likely your members have goals with a fixed deadline. Short-term personal training packages and goal-specific programming, marketed clearly with the season in mind have often performed well in June and early July when that motivation (or perhaps grim determination) is highest.

Striking a Balance With Summer Communication

One of the most common mistakes we have seen independent gyms and fitness clubs make over summer is what we call the ‘I’ll leave them to it” approach.

Summer is a time of disengaging, so why press the issue and risk coming across as pushy or even desperate? It is a valid concern but members who do not hear from their gym during a period when their own attendance starts to falter are likely to draw some conclusions from that silence.

We have all rolled our eyes at an ‘We Miss You!’ e-mail from a company, but when it comes to gym memberships, it is often the lesser of two evils.

But an independent gyms summer communication plan doesn’t need to consume a significant amount of time and energy. It can be as simple as refocusing the monthly newsletter to address and cover the disruption.

In addition to all the usual newsletter topics, but sure to communicate any changes to class timings, upcoming challenges and events, facility updates, community building, or any new classes that will be run. Not only does this give members a connection to the club even during weeks when they are not attending, it communicates that the gym is still populated, active, and engaging.

When communicating directly about summer absences, the framing matters. It is important to reinforce that summer is a natural change of pace for a lot of people, rather than a problem to be solved. This approach is more likely to keep members feeling positive about their membership, no-one enjoys being guilted, least of all gym members.
Gyms that treat reduced summer attendance as an emergency and communicate accordingly can accelerate the behaviour they are trying to prevent in a sort of Streisand effect.

Your Summer Performance Has Consequences

The issues we have been tackling today don’t magically disappear when the days start getting shorter. Retention through summer is not just an August problem. The members you keep engaged between June and September are the members who renew in October, who referred their friends, and who are most likely to remain members through to next year.

A gym that loses 15% of its membership every summer and rebuilds in autumn is spending more time acquiring members and less time growing their repeating revenue base. This is truly what makes retention so important in our industry.

Track churn by cohort. Members who joined in January or February (and still remain active) are reaching their next potential exit point in summer. If your data shows that first-year members are churning at a higher rate in July and August than in other months, that has to be considered a key retention intervention point, not just a seasonal pattern to accept.

The unfortunate truth is that the independent gyms and fitness clubs that fail to plan for summer are planning to fail. Summer might be a time for coasting for many, but not for us.

Independent gyms that plan for summer properly, by adjusting the services they provide, rethinking how they engage with their members, and communicating effectively do not outperform the market because they were born under a lucky star.

They outperform because the enemy of retention rates has always been inflexibility and apathy. Your challenge for this summer is to avoid both. So stay flexible, stay engaged, and, if you can, stay cool.

 

Here at Ashbourne Membership Management, we have been helping independent gym and fitness club owners not just survive the summer, but thrive under pressure for three decades.

Whether it is managing and chasing membership payments, installing innovative access controls, or creating, setting up and maintaining their websites, we have ensured that thousands of gym owners have been able to spend more time growing their business.

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, 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 are someone who cares about the UK’s fitness industry. If so, we ask for another minute of your time as we discuss something important to all of us within the fitness industry.

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.

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. 

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club,
the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Retention Tools That Matter Most During Disrupted Routines

Retention Tools That Matter Most During Disrupted Routines

Members that consistently attend the gym are less likely to quit. It is a simple premise and the foundation of our article today 
 
Throughout the year there are periods where our members are likely to have more disruption in their schedule. These are the times where members are most likely to quit, as they figure that the momentum is gone or that life is too busy and they aren’t getting enough value from their membership.  

Whether it is a new job and the accompanying commute, an injury, the school holidays or just a change to the schedule that no longer fits the class timetable. These things can happen to anyone and so we must assume they are likely to happen to a section of your membership.  
 
And so, as Summer approaches and these disruptions become more likely, we are going to look at what independent gyms and fitness clubs can do to minimise this disruption and therefore boost that all important member retention rate.   

These tools have become more widely available in the fitness industry over the last 20 years, and they can make all the difference for an independent gym trying to minimise their attrition rate throughout the year.  

Membership Tiers and the Power of Flexibility

Offering gym members fixed-term contracts made more sense when they were used to less flexibility from the fitness industry at large. But the market has changed, now members have more options and, as such, less patience for inflexibility. Holding someone to a direct debit they cannot justify to themselves is rarely a retention strategy. Locking members can, at worst, cause resentment towards your brand, it is an engine for churn, only with a slight delay built in. 

The independent gyms and fitness clubs that are doing this well have not only built some leeway into their membership structures, they have also made it part of their core appeal.  
 
This could be anything from a pause option to a shift to a different membership tier. The ability to pause without having to phone up, explain yourself, and wait for someone to process a form empowers the member and removes frustration.  

Tearing down barriers and inconvenience isn’t a bad thing and doesn’t mean you are leaving money on the table. It shows your members that you are sensitive to their financial concerns and flexibility, as opposed to communicating that your main concern is trying to extract as much money as possible from them.  
 
Better still, you keep them in the system and paying something rather than nothing at all, while still building and maintaining that goodwill.  
 
The process goes from a combative one to a collaborative one, making all the difference when circumstances change and the member thinks of recommitting to a fitness facility and a more structured fitness routine again.  
 
What matters is that the option exists and that accessing it does not require more effort than just cancelling. 

A paused membership is still a membership. Their profile, and therefore their data, is intact, their relationship with your gym or club is intact, and when their circumstances change again, they are one step away from being active rather than three steps away from being rejoining.  
 
The difference that can make to your retention rate and those margins at the end of the year can’t be overstated. The power of giving your members more freedom, not less, is valuable to any independent gym or fitness club that has faith in the value of the service they provide. 

The Problem with Sending the Same Message to Everyone

Most independent gyms and fitness clubs don’t lack ways to reach out to their members. Whether it is weekly and monthly newsletters, check-in emails and class reminders, or social media posts, motivational messages, push notifications and satisfaction surveys. One way or another, they get their message through.  
 
But communication isn’t a matter of quantity, it is a matter of quality. One pertinent, timely message is worth five indiscriminate mass-mailouts. For many independent gyms it is about laying the groundwork to make that timely communication possible.  

Some facilities fall into the trap of their member communication being scheduled around what is convenient for them, not what is happening to the member receiving it. The monthly update goes out on the first Tuesday regardless of whether the member has shown up in the past three weeks. The win-back email lands six weeks after someone stopped attending, by which point their routine has completely changed and their direct debit feels like an oversight rather than a service they are receiving.  

There is where it is good and necessary for an independent gym to treat their communication like a broadcast, but in order to have an impact, sometimes it has to be more of a personal response.  

Let’s take two examples, a member who used to train four times a week and has now not been in for eighteen days and then another member who joined six months ago, has visited eleven times in total. Sending them the same message at the same six week mark is not useful for either. One needs to get back on track, the latter needs some form of onboarding as they were never ‘on track’ to begin with. 

None of this requires a dedicated team constantly hovering over the data, it requires a system that connects membership status and behaviour to prompt communication and outreach.  

The messages still need to be written by a member of staff who understands what your gym members actually respond to, of course. First-name fields are not enough to rescue a message that reads like it was drafted by a compliance team. What the automation handles is the timing and the targeting, allowing a personal message to be sent with the right prompting, at the right time, but the right members of staff.  

Data Quality and Data Visibility

There is a version of gym management where the owner walks the floor every morning, knows most members by name, and notices when a familiar face has not been in for a while. It is a lovely ideal and point,ade only possible for an independent gym of a specific size. 
 
That model works up to a point but it does not scale, it struggles with staff turnover, and if successful, will quickly find itself in need of a more structured, systematic approach.  

Independent gyms and fitness clubs that have real-time visibility over attendance patterns are in a fundamentally different position. They can see which membership tiers are showing the sharpest drop in visit frequency at which times of the year and they can identify the point in a member’s lifecycle where drop-off is most likely.  

This kind of visibility is only possible if attendance capture is accurate and reliable in the first place. Clubs with gaps in their access data, because their sign-in is inconsistent or manual, are working from a partial picture. This is an operational problem, not a data one. Consistent capture through access controls and biometric entry is vital for making sure that an independent gym owner can trust the data they are working with.   

Once that foundation is solid, data can start to do the heavy lifting. Class attendance trends inform scheduling decisions. Visit frequency by join date reveals whether new members are forming habits or drifting. Drop-off rates by membership type flag products that are not working as intended.  
 
The best part is that none of this requires a specialist to interpret, all it requires is a dashboard that is built for gym owners and managers, allowing any team to use these tools. 

Where to Start

Most independent gyms and fitness clubs have some of this in place, but with many of the problems being interconnected, it can feel daunting to know where to start. 

Introducing flexible membership options without the right membership management system can quickly become an administrative nightmare. Communication segmentation requires accurate data, which means the attendance capture question will need to come first. 

Luckily Ashbourne Membership Management has been supporting independent gyms and fitness clubs across the UK and Ireland for nearly three decades now. And whether it is installing the turnstiles and fingerprint scanners that can give you faith in your data or the BI dashboards to access that data easily and effectively, we can help provide hardware, software, and technical support from a UK team. No separate modules to piece together, no competing providers and no outsourced support team. Just the one service provider. If you want to find out more and book a demo with our in-house, UK-based demonstration team click here. 

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club,
the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Why Members Train Differently as Summer Approaches

Why Members Train Differently as Summer Approaches

Gym attendance patterns change in summer. Morning sessions fill earlier, evening classes lose numbers, and of course, member consistency can suffer. Today we will be looking at whether treating this as a retention crisis is to misread what is actually happening and what we can do to boost retention rates at this critical point in the fitness calendar. 

We all know that despite the attendance stats, members and potential members are not becoming less active during summer months. As the days get longer and temperatures rise, it is simply that a greater proportion of their activity is able to happen outside the walls of a fitness facility.

As such, it makes some sense that your gym’s share of their time might decrease. So the real question is what can be done to make sure this disruption doesn’t become membership cancellation?

The Member Groups Behaving Differently and Why

Of course not every member and potential member will act the same way over the summer, so it is important to identify which categories your members are falling into and in what number. Today we are going to look at three distinct summer members archetypes that are likely to see their pattern shift.

 

Socially goal-oriented members

These are the ones training towards a holiday or an event…Not a sporting event mind you, we will cover that group later. This is more ‘getting in shape for the wedding’, the classic ‘summer bod’ rush. They often increase the intensity and frequency of their training in the weeks before their deadline, then disengage sharply once it passes. Their motivation is undoubtedly high but the timeframe they set themselves can sometimes be a little unrealistic.

Without a new goal to move towards, dropout after the holiday/event/wedding can be pretty swift unless they have really enjoyed your gym. These members respond well to structured programming and clear progress tracking during their active window, but either need something to move towards afterwards or to be taken in by the sense of community and value your facility offers if you want to retain them.

 

Members with Sporadic/Disrupted Attendance

Often these members aren’t even dissatisfied with your service.

Their day-to-day options for both fitness and socialising have expanded as the weather has improved and the gym is no longer their default. Some members get caught up in the rush of Spring and might keep their direct debit rolling over without actively thinking about it. Some have a summer full of travel, events and other disruptions to contend with. 

Your attendance reports will highlight that these members are at real cancellation risk when they realise that they are paying for a service they are not using and have not heard from you in weeks.

 

Members Training for Sporting Events

This time we mean sporting events, not weddings. Whether they are charity runs, triathlons, cycling events,  are often training more than they usually would in summer, not less. What they want is to know that your facility is providing the programming and expertise that will support their goals. Not only that, they should feel that they would struggle to get elsewhere, especially if they were to switch to either outdoor or home-workouts. Appealing to these members is a case of convincing them they are in the right place to achieve their goals. 

Scheduling and Programming

If your class timetable has not changed since October, look at whether it still reflects when members actually want to train. Early morning demand increases in summer as members try to complete training before work and preserve their evenings. Sessions running at strong capacity through winter may be losing numbers if they now conflict with how members want to use their time.

Trial changes based on what your booking data is telling you. A 6am session that would not have been filled in January may run at capacity in June. An evening class at 6:30pm may be directly competing with the outdoor time members now want to protect.

On programming, the complementary relationship between gym training and outdoor activity is straightforward to communicate and easy to act on. Runners benefit from lower body strength work and injury prevention programming. Cyclists benefit from hip flexor mobility, upper back strength, and, of course, core stability. Swimmers benefit from shoulder health and pulling movements. For those goal-oriented members we covered earlier you can easily broaden your appeal by a combination of targeted messaging (as we will cover in the next section) and appropriate class offerings. 

Building programming blocks around well-attended local events gives members a specific outcome to work towards. A six-week strength programme tied to a local 10k or event in September, starting in July, provides structure and purpose at a time when motivation can otherwise become unfocused. If done right it can create a community of members with a shared goal.

Communication

Communicating when attendance drops is vital. Members who feel included during periods of lower activity are significantly more likely to re-engage in autumn than those who have drifted quietly and now face an awkward return to a gym that has not been in touch.

It isn’t enough just to reach out, the content of the message matters. Promotional messaging about membership deals is poorly timed for a member who is already paying and simply training outdoors more. The first and most obvious principle should be to make sure the content is actually useful and pertinent to them, whether that is discounts and offers, training advice for maintaining gym progress alongside outdoor activity, or even event preparation tips keep you engaged with your members even as their habits shift. 

Personal contact with members who have not visited in four to six weeks remains one of the most effective retention tools available to independent gyms and fitness clubs looking to retain members. It is much easier to manage this through a combination of reports and Customer Relationship Management software.

What Your Data Can Tell You

If you are reading this, you are likely someone who cares about the UK’s fitness industry. If so, we ask for another minute of your time as we discuss something important to all of us within the fitness industry.

Here at Ashbourne Membership Management, we have been proud to work with dynamic, innovative independent gyms for nearly 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.

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.

Fair Rates For Fitness

If you are reading this, you are likely someone who cares about the UK’s fitness industry. If so, we ask for another minute of your time as we discuss something important to all of us within the fitness industry.

Here at Ashbourne Membership Management, we have been proud to work with dynamic, innovative independent gyms for nearly 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.

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

More to Read...

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club,
the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

How Gyms Successfully Prepare for Seasonal Behaviour Changes

How Gyms Successfully Prepare for Seasonal Behaviour Changes

The independent gyms that hold their numbers through summer are the ones that planned for the changes it brings. The ones that didn’t were just reacting as attendance levels dropped and patterns changed.

Today here at Ashbourne we will be looking at the difference that planning for each season can make. And as Summer is around the corner we will be focusing on how planning for Summer can make and how independent gym and fitness club owners can strengthen their retention figures, revenue, and enter Q3 in the best possible form. 

Summer is a predictably unpredictable time for a lot of demographics. Parents of young children understandably find it slightly harder to manage their schedules in the summer months. Members who joined in Q1 so that they had somewhere to train while it was dark, cold and miserable now find themselves in a different world altogether, one of longer evenings, warm air and cool breezes. All of this reduces the pull of an indoor facility. But these patterns repeat every year, which means there is little excuse for being caught off guard by them.

Put the Full Year on Paper Before January Ends

A 12-month activity calendar is the most straightforward tool available to independent gym operators, and one of the most underused in our experience. Map out your seasonal campaigns, member challenges, referral drives, and events month by month. Plan for activities like summer body challenges and events for May. Schedule a family charity fundraiser for your local area’s school holiday period. Book in a back-to-routine push for September to get people engaged even once the ‘summer body’ motivation has started to fade. 

When these things are planned ahead, two things happen. First, it stops the Monday-scramble for new, hastily thrown together ideas. Second, members begin to expect and anticipate that there will be events, it helps inform the culture and expectation for your independent gym. A gym that runs the same summer challenge every year builds expectations around it. Whether it is members that remember the event fondly or others that saw advertisements for it around town or on your social media feeds. That consistency is a retention mechanism in itself.

The calendar also gives you room to adapt. Adjusting your plan within an existing framework is far less disruptive than building one under pressure in June when member attendance and retention rates have already started sliding in the gym.

Change Your Timetable to Reflect How Members Actually Train in Summer

Pulling your historic class attendance data and going through it month by month will ensure your plans are being informed by your members and an indication of their preferences. If your 6am sessions filled consistently from May through August while your 7pm slots dropped off, your timetable should reflect that. 

Morning demand typically strengthens in summer. Members prefer to train before the heat of the day, minimising disruption to their evening social schedule. Afternoon classes will often thin-out in most areas, though late-evening classes can become more viable given the increased daylight hours.

All this to say that if you are running the same timetable in August that you ran in February, you are most likely misallocating resources and missing demand.

Some independent gym and fitness clubs add shorter formats specifically for the summer: 30-minute high-intensity sessions in the morning to attract members who want to train hard and be out quickly. Where space allows, outdoor-format classes keep members engaged without competing against the draw of exercising outside. Neither requires significant investment, though arranging outdoor spaces can often require a not-insignificant amount of planning to start with.

Your Data Already Tells You Where the Risk Is

Your gym management software holds the information needed to make these decisions accurately. The question is whether you are using it before summer starts or after the damage is done.

A BI dashboard that shows member engagement, class attendance, PT bookings, and sign-up rates broken down by month will surface the same patterns every year. PT bookings fall in July. New member acquisitions spike in the second week of January and again in late April. Attendance among members who joined more than six months ago starts declining in June. These are not estimates; they are your own historical data.

Use it to identify the member segments most likely to lapse. Parents of school-age children are an obvious group. January joiners who are now six months in and losing momentum are another. Members who have already dropped from three sessions a week to one are a third. Target these groups specifically, before they cancel, not after.

Community Is What Keeps Members When the Weather Improves

To some members, the practical value proposition of a facility will be reduced in summer. Members who joined partly because they needed somewhere sheltered and structured to train in bleak midwinter will naturally feel less of that same pull in June. The gym itself hasn’t changed but their motivations and reasons to be there have.

One of the things that won’t change in that time might be a sense of belonging. Members who feel genuinely connected to a gym, its staff, and other members, return to that. They don’t just return to equipment, they return because they’ve come to enjoy the space, the people and the events. 

Whether it is hosting a member’s only breakfast/coffee morning or setting up a running club to keep your business associated with outdoor activities, small events can make a big difference when it comes to a member considering whether they are still getting the same value from their membership in the summer as they did in February. 

Referral schemes also perform better in summer when community feeling is high. A member who feels part of something is more inclined to bring someone else into it. A structured referral incentive running through June and July can offset some of the natural footfall reduction while expanding your membership base at the same time.

Send Fewer Messages, But Make Them Count

A common mistake during a quiet summer is to increase communication frequency. More emails, more push notifications, more social posts. Members who are disengaging do not re-engage because the volume went up. They disengage faster when the messages feel irrelevant to them.

Segment your communications by behaviour, interests and urgency to increase member retention. I think we can all agree that the member who hasn’t shown up for three weeks during July might require a different communication package to the member who is still attending four times a week. In summer, our former member could simply be on holiday, dealing with their children, or any number of things. The prompt doesn’t need to be heavy-handed, but it is important to target your retention efforts towards at-risk members. 

Your Customer Relationship Management system already holds the visit frequency data needed to do this. The segmentation is not complicated. It just requires using the data you have rather than defaulting to a blanket newsletter.

Staffing and Hours Need the Same Review as Everything Else

A gym running the same opening hours and staffing rota in August that it ran in February is operating on inertia, not evidence. Check your footfall data by hour and by month. If early morning traffic increases from May and evening attendance drops from June, your hours and staffing should move accordingly.

Running a full evening shift for low attendance is a cost that does not need to exist. Understaffing your busiest morning sessions is a member experience problem that will start to eat away at your member satisfaction and retention rate. Neither is inevitable if you look at the numbers before the season starts.

Summer Prep Starts Now

Late spring is when the operational decisions for summer need to be made. Campaigns require an appropriate amount of lead time and planning. Timetable changes need to be communicated early to avoid confusion and member dissatisfaction. Staff scheduling adjustments need notice. If you wait until you notice a June dip to start planning, it might already be too late to make a meaningful impact on the numbers that matter. 

Gyms that find summer arriving with plans already in place retain more members, spend less reactively, and carry better momentum into autumn. The preparation doesn’t have to be complex, it is just a matter of doing it before the season starts, rather than while you are in the thick of it.

If any of the tools and systems we’ve mentioned during this article feel like assets that would make running your independent gym or fitness club easier, reach out to us and book a demo today with our in-house, UK-based team.

Ashbourne has supported independent gyms and fitness clubs across the UK and Ireland for nearly three decades. From membership management software and BI dashboards to access control hardware and technical support, Ashbourne gives operators the tools to understand their members and run their clubs with confidence year-round.

 

Fair Rates For Fitness

If you are reading this, you are likely someone who cares about the UK’s fitness industry. If so, we ask for another minute of your time as we discuss something important to all of us within the fitness industry.

Here at Ashbourne Membership Management, we have been proud to work in this dynamic, innovative sector for nearly 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.

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

More to Read...

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club,
the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

Get your club in shape.

Want to discover how? Let us show you.

Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.

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