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.




























