Although it may not always feel that way, your members aren’t just coming to your gym to check themselves out in those corona-level-clean floor-length mirrors.
They’ve got fitness goals to meet, and they need your help to do it. The best and most effective way you can keep members engaged long-term and keep them coming back to your business is by motivating them and helping to monitor their progress.
In this blog, we’ll help you understand exactly how to engage members and the best ways to implement a gym member retention program. All it takes are the right ideas, and you can supercharge your gym member engagement.
Personalize Your Members’ Experiences
Members who feel as though you care about them are far more likely to stick around long-term. If you create a positive member experience that places your members at the center, they will remain loyal to you and your brand for years to come.
The best way to create this style of member engagement? Personalizing your member’s experiences. Creating bespoke and detailed plans, progress tracking, and challenges that cater to each of your members’ unique goals and needs is a sure-fire way to keep them engaged.
If you’re a big club with hundreds of members, you may be thinking that this is almost impossible for you to achieve. But with the right digital solution, you can make it feel as though you are with your members 24/7. By utilizing a digital coaching solution, encouraging members to check in with you via a food app and progress tracking app like those supplied by Virtuagym, you can give them the additional personalized support that will make your business stand out.
Set Realistic Goals
Clients and members that meet their fitness goals are guaranteed to believe in your business as much as you do. But this means making sure that you set realistic goals that are achievable is absolutely paramount. In the same way that setting achievable goals is helpful for keeping clients motivated and on track, it’s also helpful for keeping them engaged and satisfied with you and your business.
When it comes to helping your clients and members set their fitness goals, you could try breaking up their ambitions into smaller parts. Rather than start with a year-long weight loss goal, try encouraging members to work towards smaller, monthly goals. Check-in with them frequently - this is best done via a member’s custom fitness app. You should also encourage them to share their progress with others within your community.
Reward Your Members’ Accomplishments
Rewarding clients and members that perform well is one other effective way to ensure that they stay engaged with your business. You can do this in a number of ways, such as by offering real-life prizes for the completion of digital or in-facility fitness challenges. You could incentivize coming into your studio with a points system or provide rewards for challenge winners.
Offering praise and recognition may sound simple, but it’s a proven way to signify to your members that you care about them and their progress. Encourage them to share their progress with their peers and they will also receive recognition from within your community too.
Set Member Challenges
With an app like Virtuagym, members can participate in online challenges without any involvement from you. Challenges are all run on a community feature and members maintain motivation by competing against one another.
Allow members to score points on a leaderboard and keep track of their progress. Challenges could be anything from weight loss goals, muscle mass increases, or repetition competitions.
In particular, fitness challenges that focus on a specific compound movement or exercise can be an effective way to keep members motivated - because they are easy to track and progress in. Plus, you can encourage members to share video and photo evidence of their progress within your personalized app or on social media.
Social media can also be used to set challenges and keep members engaged - post an exercise a day and encourage members to check in with you if they complete it.
Talk to Your Members
It may sound simple but actually just talking with your members and unpacking the reasons they come to your gym can do wonders for your membership engagement strategy. When you talk to them and uncover exactly what it is they love about you and your business, you can take strides to offer more of what they like.
Keeping in touch with your members can be as straightforward as ensuring your staff approach members on the gym floor ( at a safe social distance of course ). It could mean sending out a survey or encouraging engagement on social media. It could mean posting frequently within the community feature of your company’s app. Figure out what approach feels right to you.
When you get the opportunity to talk with members, be sure to ask what they enjoy about working out with you, what do they wish you had more of, and what would they change if they could. It can be hard to take on criticisms, but members that feel listened to stick around long-term and continue to drive revenue for your business.
Ultimately, increased member engagement all comes down to fostering a sense of community and keeping motivation high. Doing this manually can be a full-time job, but with a digital app, membership management is easy.
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