Are you struggling with member retention at your gym? Don’t know why you’re losing members each month? You’re not alone! Member retention is the number one issue gym owners are trying to solve. But no need to worry! With RhinoFit, we give you all the strategies you need to increase your member retention! RhinoFit can help you stay in touch with your members, keep them motivated and coming to the gym, and improve your revenue!
How does my Gym rank with Member Retention?
Calculating your Churn Rate
Members will come and go… it’s inevitable. The percentage rate at which customers cancel their gym membership during a specific time period is defined as the churn rate. Your goal as the owner is to decrease this number to the best of your ability. You want as many members as possible to stay loyal to your gym!
To calculate your gym’s churn rate, begin by selecting a particular time period you want to analyze. This is usually the month, quarter, or year. Once you’ve chosen your time frame, find the total number of members you had at the beginning of the period. Next, find the number of members who canceled their memberships during that time. Then, you will divide the number of lost members by the beginning total members. Finally, multiply that number by 100 and you will get your churn rate!
Example: 950 members after the period ÷ 1,000 members before the period x 100 = 95%
Therefore, the churn rate is 5%. This means that you retained 95% of your customers and lost 5%.
It is crucial to be consistent with calculating your churn rate. If you want to calculate quarterly, you should check your churn rate every quarter so that you can continuously improve where needed and look for any interesting patterns.
Why do Gym Members Cancel?
The number one goal as a gym owner is to keep members coming to your gym. You must remember: attendance = retention! This is why it is vital to understand the reasons why customers cancel their gym memberships in the first place.
“New Year, New Me”
For most people, a new year means new healthy habits! January is always the busiest month for gyms. For the people who sign up solely because of a New Years resolution, about 80% of them quit after 5 months. They begin their year on a high of ‘New Year New Me’ motivation and once it starts to get more challenging, they give up and cancel their membership. You want to do your best to avoid this by keeping these members interested in what your gym has to offer!
Lack of Motivation
There are three main reasons why people lose motivation. First, they are not keeping track of their progress. Progress tracking leads to a desire to keep getting better. Without this, there is a lack of motivation.
Second, they may be setting unrealistic goals. Everyone’s fitness journey is different, and each member should have attainable goals. When a member has unrealistic goals, they will get frustrated with themselves and just want to give up altogether.
Last, they might believe they aren’t making progress. They’re working hard and, in their mind, they don’t see the results that they are expecting to see. This has a major impact on motivation loss because they feel as though it’s not worth the effort.
How do I stop all the churning and burning?
Your objective as a gym owner should be keeping your clients motivated until solid habits are formed. Thankfully with a few simple implementations, you can help your members set healthy goals, track their progress, and send constant reminders!
5 Member Retention Strategies for your Gym
Member Retention Strategy 1: Stay in Touch with your Members
Members need accountability. “Success with member retention and member monetization are highly dependent upon the frequency of interaction between the business and the member; the more frequent the interactions, the greater the likelihood of success in monetizing and retaining members.” (IHRSA)
RhinoFit’s Email Automations and Communication tools are a perfect way to send reminders to members. Besides the billing and payment reminders, you can reach out with a motivational message! With just a few simple clicks, send personalized emails or text reminders to your clients. Even just a simple “We Miss You!” could catch their attention and spark a desire to come work out again.
RhinoFit helps to bridge that communication gap so you can stay engaged with your members. Whether it’s to one person or a group of members, you can create messages to be sent out automatically. Your members will definitely appreciate it!
Member Retention Strategy 2: Create Fun Challenges for your Members
According to Forbes, social experiences is by far the highest motivating factor for joining and going to the gym. Whether it is a 30 minute or 30-day challenge, fitness challenges and contests are a substantial way to keep your members motivated. You can even give out a prize, like a membership discount, to the winner. This keeps them interested, accountable, and hopefully a bit competitive!
You are providing your clients with realistic goals and a way to track their progress. Ongoing and consistent challenges lead to members more likely to follow-through and attend your gym!
Below is a list of 10 challenge ideas that can be implemented at your gym:
- AMRAP Challenge
- Personal Best Challenge
- Running Challenge
- Most Visits Challenge
- Share Your Transformation Challenge
- Healthy Eating Challenge
- Weight-loss Challenge
- Charity Challenge
- Burpee Challenge
- Plank Challenge
Member Retention Strategy 3: Use Leaderboards and Fitness Tracking as Motivational Tools
One way to keep your members engaged and focused on their goals is to create a competitive environment that rewards accountability and results! With RhinoFit’s Workout of the Day (WOD) and leaderboard feature, you are provided with built-in fitness assessments, workout tracking, and programming tools. Therefore, your members can easily track their progress and personal achievements, while holding themselves accountable. The WOD feature includes all the tools members will need to effectively stay motivated:
- Workout Tracking and Leaderboards
- Fitness Assessment and Benchmarks
- Progress Tracking and Ranks
Member Retention Strategy 4: Use RhinoFit’s Attendance and Churn Rate for Forecasting Client Satisfaction & Future Cancellations
Tracking your members’ attendance is crucial for determining how satisfied your clients are with your fitness program. If your members are consistently missing classes or have not attended any recent sessions, it could be a sign they have lost motivation or may want to cancel.
Stay ahead of the game with RhinoFit! We make it easy to pull all of your daily and monthly attendance reports for items such as class attendance, absent members, and members who reserved, but didn’t attend.
You can easily access your churn rate without having to calculate it yourself! Simply find “Churn Rate” under the Reports section, and you will see a list of your members, their membership type, and the exact churn rate! How convenient is that?
Member Retention Strategy 5: Set up Recurring Payments
Did you know about 80% of health club revenue is from gym memberships? Your recurring membership revenue is the backbone of your fitness business. So what do you do if you’re losing more gym membership revenue than you’re bringing in? To put it nicely, your future as a gym owner is looking bleak!
Set up monthly billing for your members with RhinoFit’s integrated payment options. This will not only help to increase your overall member retention rate but help save you some valuable time. This way your members don’t forget to renew their membership and you don’t have to chase them down for payments each month! With RhinoFit’s membership feature, you can build your own custom membership with billing options for weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or annual payments.
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