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3 Amazingly Simple Methods for Member Retention at Your Health Club
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3 Amazingly Simple Methods for Member Retention at Your Health Club
By Curtis Mock
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1. Offer more than just a simple Personal Training Orientation for your new members.
Give them a real workout and let them experience what it is supposed to feel like. Not only do they walk away feeling confident regarding how to do exercises properly, they also get to feel the exhilarating feeling of having blood flow to the muscles!
This also allows them to get to know your trainers. After a session or two or three with a personal trainer, they will notice that when they workout on their own, it's never quite the same. This will help increase your personal training revenues also!
And you don't have to give away an hour long session. You can do a 12 minute workout of superset after superset. It doesn't need to be heavy weights. Just light weights, high reps, one set after another, moving from one body part to the next between sets. You really won't need more than 12 minutes.
Let's say you give them two 20 minute PT sessions. That is 5 minutes of warm up on a piece of cardio equipment, 12 minutes of workout, and 3 minutes of stretching. Make sure the stretching is hands-on (not handsy!). Providing assistance and physical touch increases trust and loyalty, but you have to be careful. No touching between the knee and the waist or on the front portion of the torso. That goes for both men and women.
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To really keep your facility clean and in tip-top shape, establish a daily, weekly, and monthly cleaning list.
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Members don't necessarily notice a clean club, but they will definitely notice an unclean club. There are already a dozen reasons for members to cancel at the end of their term: non usage, new competitors, nice weather, etc. Don't give them another reason!
This type of workout will sell far more PT services than a simple Orientation, but more importantly it increases the loyalty and retention among your members. It is well documented that if you can get your new members involved and active regularly within their first 30 days, you are far more likely to keep them as members for the long run.
2. You Must Keep Your Facility Clean.
And that doesn't just mean taking weights off of machines or picking paper towels off of the bathroom floor. That means wiping down all of the machines, finding every dust bunny in every corner, keeping the office tidy, keeping the bathrooms and locker rooms sparkling, keeping the equipment wiped down and serviced, removing stains from the carpet, and (gasp!) vacuuming underneath the cardio equipment. It's funny how it works though.
Members don't necessarily notice a clean club, but they will definitely notice an unclean club. There are already a dozen reasons for members to cancel at the end of their term: non usage, new competitors, nice weather, etc. Don't give them another reason!
As impressive as it is to occasionally see the owner or manager mingling among the commoners, cleaning the equipment and making small talk, their skills are often better utilized in other areas. Learn to delegate cleaning tasks to the staff. As an active owner or manager, perhaps you should take on your share of cleaning tasks, especially those tasks that put you on the floor and around the members.
You need to have a daily, a weekly, and a monthly cleaning list and you need to hold those assigned to those tasks accountable for making sure their list is complete. Just start making a list of every single thing that needs cleaned at your facility. Then go through the list and determine if it is a daily, a weekly, or a monthly task. Then assign the tasks to your staff.
Remember, a clean club is not a value-added service for your members; it is a necessity for running a successful fitness business.
3. Focus On Your Existing Members, Not Just New Members.
Stop spending all of your time trying to attract new members, and focus a sizeable percentage of your time making sure your existing members are happy and well taken care of. It's easy to become transfixed on getting as many new members as possible, but in today's competitive health club market, you need to make sure you hang on to the members you already have.
It's likely you have heard that it is 7 times more expensive to attract a new member than it is to keep an existing member happy enough to renew or continue on their roll-over membership. Let's put that into perspective. Would you rather spend $10,000 on marketing or $70,000 on marketing, if both would generate the same amount of member revenue? Of course you would rather spend seven times less to get the same results!
That's not to say that generating new memberships is not important, because it most certainly is. But attracting new members should never mean neglecting the members you currently have. It's funny how salespeople are sticky sweet to guests, but once that guest becomes a member, your staff don't give them a second's notice.
Okay, maybe not funny…it is actually quite sad, considering your members are intelligent enough to recognize this change in demeanor. Overpromising and underdelivering are commonplace in the health club industry these days. It is your job to make sure this doesn't happen at your club!
About Curtis Mock
Go to About Curtis Mock.
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