5 min
Spring is just around the corner, which means it’s time for some action! Slowly but surely, everyone is looking forward to getting fit for summer. But how can your gym contribute to this when your doors are closed? And how can gyms like yours prevent members from canceling their subscriptions?
Virtuagym knows that keeping members engaged can be challenging, especially now that most communication is done through social media. But don’t worry, we’ve got your back! Read on to find out how to keep your members and fitness community engaged.
Keep It Personal
Communicating with your members doesn’t mean just keeping them up-to-date; it is about truly understanding them and allowing them to connect and interact with each other. Our online Community feature lets you build and maintain relationships with your members. This feature will keep your members motivated, and in turn, you will increase your customer retention – two birds, one stone.
What Does the Online Community Feature Entail?
The online Community feature is the best tool for getting your members involved. It allows gym owners to create an online social sphere to communicate with their members. Keep all of your members informed about the latest promotions and activities via your personalized online portal and even your custom mobile app . It also allows your members to work together on a goal or challenge. These can even be customized for your gym – but more on that later!
How does Virtuagym’s Community feature work? First of all, all trainers and members must create a personal profile in the portal or via the app. This way they can track their progress, stay up-to-date on the challenges, check the progress of their fellow members, catch the latest news, and much more.
Once your members have activated their profiles, their names are displayed on the leaderboard. The leaderboard is where everyone can keep track and log activities. Your most active members appear at the top of the leaderboard.
We understand that during the corona crisis, you need to keep in constant communication with your members. Therefore it is possible to send messages to all your members, a specific group, or even just to one individual member.
When you combine the online Community feature with our fitness challenges and rewards, members can work towards a common goal. Community members can even encourage each other by leaving a comment or like in their profiles. Building this sense of community will cultivate engagement – and ultimately loyalty among your members. Thus they will be happy to stay with your gym.
Motivate Your Members
It is common knowledge that you need to keep challenging yourself in all aspects of life. This challenge could be fitness-related, personal, or professional. Doing so will keep your motivation and inspiration levels up, and focusing on your personal growth will ultimately lead to more self-confidence. As an active member of society, these are developments that you wish upon everyone (and especially your members)!
Becoming fit and challenging yourself are strongly linked. With our fitness challenge and reward system , these two come together seamlessly. How does it work? To get started, you can create a club challenge – or a private challenge – in your Virtuagym portal. This Challenge feature allows gyms to set up challenges such as steps and sit-ups. However, more specific goals are also possible such as losing a certain percentage of fat or gaining a certain muscle percentage.
With each activity or workout, members receive points that are added to the leaderboard in the online community. Sharing this information can also increase the competition between members as they work towards similar goals. Interested in tracking your members’ exercise in their free time? Offer challenges that leverage our integrations with wearables (e.g., Google Fit and Apple Health), such as a steps challenge.
Once the challenge is over, the winner will receive a virtual reward. But no worries! All participants will have the opportunity to share their finished workouts and activities with friends on social media via their mobile phones.
The Benefits of Our Fitness Challenge and Reward System
Are you looking for an effective way to motivate your members and boost your business; but are not quite sure how the challenge feature can contribute to this? Below we have listed all of the positive effects.
Fitness challenges and reward systems can boost engagement and retention, but knowing your gym’s strategic position is just as crucial. A Gym SWOT Analysis can help you use these aspects in your business plan.
In addition to providing access to helpful fitness content, this feature also allows you to:
- Increase engagement among your members
- Save time
- Attract new members
- Increase the overall satisfaction level
- Increase retention rates
How Virtuagym Clients Boost Their Member Engagement
The gym has long been a social gathering place. In recent months, this paradigm has been completely overthrown. Social gatherings now mainly take place online. Gyms that did not yet have an online community set up needed quickly adapt to digitization.
Until recently, one of our clients, the YMCA Central Massachusetts , was one of these gyms that needed to pivot to an online offering. Digitization was no simple feat for a massive fitness and lifestyle community with over 21,000 members in 41 towns in Massachusetts through six locations. Until then, they were managing all sports activities manually themselves. The current COVID-19 situation forced them to modernize – and Virtuagym was happy to help them do it!
They decided to use the custom Virtuagym app and the Community feature to build up their online offering. These app features give their members access to exercise guides, an online community, and a custom mobile app.
The community feature gives them the ability to share promotions and is also used as a platform to release stress healthily during these challenging times. The YMCA Central Massachusetts also makes convenient use of push notifications to offer real-time information directly to their members. They experienced this to be an extremely useful tool to establish a dialogue between the gym and individual members.
Are You Ready to Improve Your Member Retention?
Retaining and entertaining your members does not have to be a time-consuming and challenging process. Investing in your members is essential to running a successful gym, and we would love to help you!
Don’t postpone until tomorrow – start today and offer your valued members a service worth talking about!
