When you run or own a gym, you’re constantly looking for ways to maintain and increase your member retention. Members can decide to leave a gym for lots of reasons, including, most commonly, moving to another gym or choosing to work out at home.
So, what can you do about it?
Beckwith Health Club has extensive experience with rising and falling member numbers, especially throughout and in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Here are 3 top tips to increase your gym member retention, taken from our trials and successes over the last decade.
It’s All About the Metrics
Tracking progress is a key motivator for exercise. Everyone comes to the gym with different goals, abilities, and plans, but ultimately, what they have in common is their desire to measure their progress.
This is typically thought to be an area owned by fitness accessories and individuals, but actually gyms themselves can have a huge impact in this space.
For example, do members need to swipe in and out to access and leave the gym?
If they do, this allows you to measure the number of times they’ve come to workout in a set amount of time, i.e. the last month, 6 months, year. When you share this data with them, it’ll be a useful resource for reinforcing their progress and encouraging them to keep going.
You can also track and share class booking histories with individual members. For example, how many classes they’ve attended in the last week, or how many times they’ve taken a specific class.
(EGym equipment is the best for progress tracking – learn more about it here!)
Are You Part of the App Game?
Gym apps are a fantastic tool for metrics and tracking progress amongst other things. At Beckwith, we use Clubright to run our gym app and it’s had some great feedback from our members.
Apps are also a good tool for gyms to reward their members for that progress.
Beckwith’s Clubright app measures members’ gym attendance (through entry swipes) and rewards members when they reach certain swipe milestones. We’ve recently had a few members hit 500 visits, which is an incredible effort!
A gym app should also be an easily accessible, all-in-one response to gym members’ regular needs. If they need to speak to staff directly for every other issue, then an app is desperately needed.
Although we don’t vouch for a fully digital experience, since we know that our fully trained team is one of the highlights of a Beckwith Health Club visit, we have learnt that a multi-purpose app is key for retention. We’ve also recently launched instructional videos on our app, which has proven really popular with our members.
Beckwith members can access the Beckwith Clubright app here.
How About Some Perks & Rewards?
Lastly, gyms have a huge role to play in motivating and encouraging their members. There’s two sides to this:
Firstly, gyms can reward members for specific efforts and for reaching milestones. For example, the 500 visits milestone we discussed earlier in this blog. Create automation in your app to send a ‘Congratulations!’ message or gift voucher when these milestones are hit, for example.
Also, include members on the gym’s social media, if they’re happy to be involved in this way. Or, offer some small perks such as free or discounted sports drinks, protein bars, and sport clothing and equipment. These are all important steps for retention, as it gets the gym involved in directly supporting members’ fitness goals.
Lastly, gyms can also be directly motivating forces in their members’ health and goals. For example, this can be by creating regular fitness challenges for members (with rewards, of course!), perhaps on a monthly or weekly cadence.
Another way to do this is creating a strong social media presence for members to engage with. This is both a resource, i.e. by publishing fitness content on blogs or exercise guidelines. It’s also a source of motivation i.e. encouraging them to get another session in.
