When it comes to running your gym, there is a mountain of data and analysis that you could potentially review to streamline and improve your gym.
But the reality is, no busy gym owner has time for that!
In this webinar, we’ll help you grind down the hundreds of data points, numbers and metrics that you could look at…and boil it down to the figures that are important, which you can use to grow your club as a very small team.
Watch The Only Metrics You Need To Grow Your Gym
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You can find all the free resources mentioned in the webinar to download below and start utilising your business’ data effectively, without drowing in data.
All of these strategies are designed for you to implement right now, with no extra spend and without overloading your staff with more work and responsibilities.
The 6 Metrics That You Need To Grow Your Gym Business
It’s important for us to clarify upfront that none of this is simply old wives’ tales. All of the data and information we talk about is sourced from real world examples of gyms and industry data collected over decades.
Everything we talk about is:
Tested by us in our own test gym – The Fit Club Redditch.
Sourced from the thousands of clubs that we partner with, as we frequently keep in contact with their strategies and provide advice for them to implement.
25 years of wisdom and industry knowledge.
METRIC 1: Review your prices – How much are you members paying?
Export a list of your membership and sift through it. Have a look at what they are paying. You might have a group of members paying nominal rates. This could be in comparison to more recent members, or as the result of previous promotions. Sometimes you forget how far you’ve come, and how little you used to charge!
You might even be under charging for the demographic in your area, or compared to local competition.
A quick method of growing income can be a price increase. Members who are paying under the odds / average are a good place to start.Sure, you may lose a few members putting a price up. But in some cases, you can actually be making a loss on individual members.
Take us at The Fit Club, we recently found a collection of members paying 10.99 a month! The remnants of previous owners and we were none the wiser. At this price, if the members choose to leave, we wouldn’t have been unhappy. Fortunately, none did, even when we more than doubled their monthly price
And now let’s talk more about those club improvements…
Perhaps you have made sweeping changes to the club in recent times. Again, this could be justification for a price increase. In these situations, as long as the price increase is an amount reflective of the changes you have made, then there can be little complaints from members. Although you’ll always get a few!
Make sure you make the most of a price increase. It’s not something you want to be doing regularly (chains like Virgin active seem to reevaluate prices once a year). So don’t bother with miniscule increases of £.50 etc – it will be much more likely to cause more problems than it solves.
If you are worried about how many sleeping members you might be hitting with a price increase. You could cross check the list that you export with a list of recent attendees, removing anyone that hasn’t attended in a while.
METRIC 2: Day / free pass conversions
The key metric to track here is number of day passes (or free passes if you do them) vs. number of conversions.
This metric won’t exist if you aren’t recording people’s details when they come into the club. Obviously it is vital, if you aren’t recording details for every visitor coming through then you are doing it wrong!
Contact these people with an offer!
At The Fit Club we have an automated follow up system.
We stopped giving out free passes. All day passes are £7.50. Member fills out a web form on arrival. This puts them into Ashbourne’s automated system and the member is followed up with an email asking them about their first visit, alongside a voucher code which gives them a £7.50 discount if they then sign up. Alas, you only get a free pass if you sign up!
The system is checking if these members have signed up on our behalf. If they don’t sign up after x number of days the member then gets passed onto the guys at reception to call. Each of these ‘hot leads’ gets two phone calls.
If they are interested we sign up, if they aren’t we add them to our ‘prospect’ to try and tempt back at a later date.
METRIC 3: Assess retained membership
This is one of the most important numbers to track and yet so many club owners struggle to answer these 2 questions when asked:
How do you measure churn?
Are you growing month to month?
A good metric for this is simply gains and losses. How many have we signed up vs. how many have we lost. Super simple, but absolutely crucial.
Are more members leaving then signing up? Seeing a lot of members who joined in January losing their motivation just about now!
Tracking your Direct Debit members…
Look at your recent cancellation list, people have cancelled their Direct Debit instruction and start making some calls. Your management company will deal with defaulters I’m sure. But what about those who have seen out their membership term or are on flexible contracts, They have every right to cancel, and so often they will be left to do so without a fight!
Obviously churn is a part of the business. There are always going to be people coming and going. Injuries, people moving away are common reasons. But just as regularly members are telling us ‘I’m not using it enough’, ‘I don’t know what i’m doing’, ‘i’ve seen no results’. These aren’t valid excuses for me. One thing that has helped us turn round more of these objections, has been having a solid offer to reengage such members.
We explain to the members how important the gym is and how important their health is. A simple reinduction to something they already knew. Once they accept that, it’s easy to book them into the diary for a reinduction there and then. At this point we’ll also agree to reinstate the members DD, we won’t allow them to take up the reinduction without it.
A personal trainer or gym instructor taking the member through our induction checklist, reassessing goals, weighing in and going through a simple session plan. They are back in the gym, using it. Their initial reason for cancelling has been turned around.
Tracking your Paid In Full members…
Also worth looking at your paid in full members. Are any coming up for renewal soon? Contact these members and get a renewal set up before they expire. No good leaving it down to them!
Is retention even your issue? If you are retaining members then fair play to you.
That is the number one most difficult thing to do. Now how can you grow?
Especially keep tabs on your advertising, things like Facebook ads. Whether you do this yourself or have a specialist company. Track track track. Use a thank you page as an end point to see how many successful conversions you actually have.
METRIC 4: Tracking marketing spend
It can be very easy to simply do what you think you should be doing when it comes to your marketing.
Do social, spend hundreds on a mailout to the local area, get an advert in the local paper – all tried and tested ideas that gyms rely on.
But you have to rethink your marketing so you can track your spend and what it brings in. Don’t just shout loudly, spend money everywhere and hope for the best.
So how do you do this?
Well if you use Facebook ads or social media ads, then make sure your ads are tracking conversions, not just link clicks. Knowing how many people visited your website is useful because the more eyes on your service, the more likely someone is to buy, but it gives you no information about your marketing spend to membership gain.
Make sure you set up actual conversion targets, like knowing your members have to hit a thank you page to confirm a sale from an ad, so you measure on how much member you’re getting for your buck. There’s no reason not to track this information.
Offline media can use a similar trick. Make sure you’re using promo codes, or asking people to enquire at reception – something that you can note down to ensure that you know where your members are coming from. Do things in proper campaigns with unique codes and tracking for each one, so you can keep track of where your money is going and where you’re investment is.
We recently used a voucher code as part of a campaign with a local newspaper. 0 people used the code. When we took over from a previous club, they always had an ad in the paper, but we were able to cut this instantly and move all our ad spend over to online.
And how can you tell what a member is worth?
This is why knowing retention is so useful. By knowing what a member pays per month and how many months they stay on average, you can now work out how much to spend on your members. If your gym costs £29 a month and it takes you £50 to get a member, but they stay for 10 months, then you can start looking at your budgeting long term, that you’re spending £50 to make £290, rather than halting every campaign because it didn’t make money on the first month.
METRIC 5: Capacity utilisation (gym, classes, secondary spend)
Classes are such a huge missed opportunities for so many clubs!
Are you tracking your class usage? – A busy class is a good class.
Are you being efficient with your time and space? – Think about alternative classes that would fit your member demographics better.
Are you making sure your classes are busy? – it improves the atmosphere and brings people back!
You can track class attendance and proactively fill classes by reaching out via email or push notification. Quick, and will only cost you the 5 minutes it takes to send the message. With the Ashbourne system you can target this message to members that actually attend classes. This being said, I think you should hit as many people as possible. Even those that don’t currently attend classes.
Put on a total gym cap across your facility!
You can take a similar view with gym capacity / usage. Your gym might be rammed at 7pm on a Monday. But what about the day time traffic? If it’s a lot quieter then perhaps it’s time to look at an off peak membership option.
Don’t stop there though, get the word out to the relevant people. Who are available during the day, retirees, certain industries – factory workers, nurses etc, the unemployed. Your local council can be a great place for reaching out to groups like these.
Dissect your secondary spend figures:
- What % of your income is currently coming from secondary spend activities? – This is all down to your till software and the reports it can produce.
- Are all categories pulling their weight?
- Are there options that you can add?
- Are there lines / products / services that are only costing you money? – Spend on stock greater than revenue on product group.
A quick example of how to use downtime to improve secondary spend…
Are you being efficient with how you are ordering stock for example. I visit so many clubs that have empty vending machines, shelves that lay bare. We’ve had a problem in The Fit Club with downtime on sunbeds for example.
You want to be a place that members can rely on for secondary purchases whether that’s a bottle of water or minutes on a bed.
METRIC 6: Are you tracking usage?
Two sides of the coin here. I’m a big believer that you can grow your gym business with or without sleeping members. On one side you can refrain from contacting sleeping members, sitting on the fact that they will continue paying for a period and then eventually notice and possibly cancel memberships.
On the other hand you can look to contact sleeping members and actually get some more investment from them.
When looking at our sign up information at The Fit Club, I can see that ‘Referred by a friend’ is by far the most common reason for joining. So yes, you may see a few cancellations by waking sleeping members. However, there is also potential for growth!
There’s a big fear around ‘waking’ sleeping members sometimes. But when you take into account secondary spend and referral it makes you think whether it’s actually a good approach to take. Open and honest marketing may be a better approach. But that’s up to you!
Get In Touch With The Team At Ashbourne
Ashbourne is focused on making it easier for health clubs to grow their business and keep delivering their members a better service.
Ashbourne can manage every single aspect of your fitness business, handling everything from your payments to your website, entry and booking systems.
This gives you more time and freedom to focus on your members, revitalise your marketing and have time to actually manage your club properly.
And of course, Ashbourne are here every step of the way with free resources and advice to help your club be the best it can be.
If you want to discuss the future of your club, then don’t hesitate to set up a chat with our team and we can pay a visit to your facility to chat about your business and how we can help you maximise your profit.
