While many gyms focus on attracting new clientele, what is your gym doing to ensure that you keep the members you already have?
Membership retention starts the first day an athlete joins your gym, not the month your first contract is about to expire. For many box owners, member retention conjures up thoughts of cold calls, awkward conversations, and going through a sales-y experience all over again. But with the right systems in place, member retention doesn’t have to be a hard sell.
Here are a few ways that you can start working on member retention TODAY.
1) Encourage Staff to Focus on Individuals
Do your clients feel like one of many, or like they truly belong and connect with the coaches and staff at your facility?
We suggest having regular coaches meetings, and even a coach’s Facebook group, where your personnel can talk about member’s accomplishments, injuries, and even goals. Make sure your trainers are all on the same page and work together as a team to help individuals improve- not just put classes through WODS. Make it a goal for your staff to know every one of their students’ names. Even better, encourage your staff to make conversation and talk to them about their status in the gym and outside. What’s their job like? Are they stressed? Knowing these things is part of a good trainer’s job. One idea we like is challenging your staff to hold a 3-5 minute conversation with someone new every day. Not just about their workout, or box related topics, but about their life, their family or even their dog. By understanding your members, and developing one-on-one relationships with them, you’ll help them not only improve their commitment, but feel like they are valued at your facility.
2) Create Community
After your one-on-one relationships have been established, the next step is to start integrating members into your community. Thankfully, this is one area in which most Affiliate gyms thrive. It’s a natural source of membership retention. A class setting provides ample opportunities to make friends and get to know people, but what more can we be doing help people get to know each other? Free skills seminars, cookouts, nights out at local bars, ladies only wine night, team nutrition challenges, partner workouts, the possibilities are endless; select ideas that suit your gym community and schedule them regularly.
3) Reinvest
As members become more acclimated into your community, they will begin to feel a sense of ownership in your box. This is great! It’s the kind of feeling that keeps them renewing for the 3rd or 4th year in a row. But if we are to keep our members feeling like they are part of something special, we have to treat our facility as if it is part of something special too. Your members visit your facility every day, and if they don’t ever see changes or improvement, they may start to wonder about this commitment. Reinvestment doesn’t have to always be in equipment either. Put some fresh paint on the walls, re-do the bathrooms, improve your kid’s area. Constantly improve their experience and they’ll keep coming back for more.
4) Stay in Touch
Undoubtedly, there will be members who fall off the wagon a little bit. Do your best to try and capture these members early on. If you track attendance, it’s easy to run a report of last visits and call the members you haven’t seen in a while. Monthly newsletters, e-mail campaigns, postcards, and regular Facebook or blog posts are other ways that you can keep your gym fresh on member’s minds and even recapture those you may have lost.
5) Have a system in place
Finally, once your contracts do expire, who is charge of handling follow up? Is it you, as the owner? An office manager? Maybe even a coach? Maybe you’re doing nothing to manage this process right now. Thankfully there is a solution, all you need to do is assign responsibility and set up a plan. Your first step will be to identify who has responsibility over this area and how they will be compensated for doing so. Bonuses based off of contract terms, or overall renewal rate work well. One approach could be pairing your head coach and office manager together. Your head coach conducts phone calls to talk about goals and bright spots, while your office manager handles any follow-up calls, and paperwork. You can also choose to allow a staff member to handle this alone. Either way, whoever is handling your renewals should be your best employee(s); the ones who are good at reaching out, being friendly, following up, and closing sales. At the end of the day, if you belong to a place where staff knows you personally, there is a community you love, and you see your membership dues being reinvested in improvement, as long as the results are there, why wouldn’t you continue? The national average for a mainstream fitness center or gym is only 30-40% retention, but as a Affiliate gym, your goal can and should be upwards of 60% member retention.
Guest Post by: Amy Duchene and her husband Marc own CrossFit 915 in El Paso, Texas. They also have their own kid’s fitness company, CuzImABeast, that offers informational articles, WODs, coaching videos, and cartoon learning aids for CrossFit Kids programs.