It’s one of the most persistent challenges in the fitness industry: retention. The member turnover in the fitness sector fluctuates between 20% and 50%. To make that more concrete: an average club with 1500 members, memberships of €40 per month and 30% outflow misses more than two tons in turnover every year!
Let’s face it, if that would happen in another industry, a crisis meeting would be scheduled immediately. But in the fitness industry, we seem to find these kinds of numbers normal.
Nonsense, of course. While 100% retention is impossible – members will always stop – it shouldn’t be normal to let hundreds of thousands of euros slip away without a fight.
It starts with the right focus
Retention is often analyzed in comparison to the inflow of new members. If you can compensate outflow with new members, you company will remain successful, right?
You can’t solve the problem with that mindset. Suppose you are gardening. You want to water your garden, but you have a garden hose full of holes which means that your plants don’t get enough water. You can open the tap all the way, but this way the holes in your garden hose will eventually get bigger.
That’s also how it works if you compensate outflow with sales. If you focus very hard on sales, you put your organization under pressure. Your staff cannot offer everyone the same introduction, and your facilities can’t handle the capacity. The result: at many clubs you’ll see that months with a lot of inflow are followed by months with high outflow.
So, you don’t improve your retention by opening the tap. The question is: where are the holes?
Visits and touchpoints
Let’s start with the most important factor: the amount of touch points. There is a correlation between visitor behavior in the first months and the prospects for renewals: 61% of members who actively come to the club in the first 4 months, renew their subscription after 12 months. But when someone does not come, the seed is quickly planted: “should I keep doing this?”. If you are not on top of it, you are guaranteed to lose him or her.
However, physical visits are not essential. For example, online coaches have no physical contact at all, but can nevertheless build up a good retention. In your online service you can easily control digital ‘visits’, such as their activity in their calendar and your community, if they log their training and nutrition, and so on.
Mind over matter
Fitness professionals are incredibly good at creating training and nutrition plans, but they don’t always take the mental aspect into account. And that is also necessary.
When you ask members why they are quitting, you will often hear that they don’t have time. But that’s nonsense. Everyone can make time for things they see the added value of. What happened is that they’ve had some experiences that led to their decision to cancel. When an ex-member tells you they don’t have time anymore, they are basically saying that your gym is no longer worth their time.
In short: don’t just aim your arrows at a member’s body, but also their mindset. Not the physical results, but the mentality and behavioral change are crucial to increase retention.
In order to influence that mentality, the social aspect is essential for a gym. Why do you keep going back to your favorite bar? That is not only due to the beer they serve. It depends on the people you meet there. Boutiques, for example, respond very well to this: they create a real fitness community around their club that their members want to keep coming back to.
The panacea to increase your retention
… unfortunately does not exist. It’s not like you can turn that one button and everything will be fine. After all, something different is important for each member.
How clean your clubs are, what music you play, how loud the sound is, the friendliness of your staff, whether your training schedules are organized, your online services … Everything influences. The same goes for your members: don’t just focus on one aspect (such as physical results), but also on the mental and social aspect. In other words, the entire customer journey!
That’s why you should keep experimenting with improvements. Each procedure is followed by an analysis: will my members stay longer thanks to this change? If so, on to the next improvement. If not, try something else. With this method you gradually achieve a higher retention.
Do you want more insights?
Peter Wolfhagen from Blackbox Research shared these insights during our weekly FitNation Lunch & Learn webinar. But he had a lot more to say. Don’t want to miss tips anymore? Sign up for one or more sessions!