Client retention has long been an issue for smaller gym owners trying to run a year-round business. While bigger clubs can often afford to take the hit owing to the fact many can spread the cost, those with less wiggle room often suffer if they don’t pay close attention to drop off rates. And with less and less exercisers willing to sign twelve-month contracts, it’s more important than ever.
If you want to improve your client churn and avoid losing clients to the bigger chains, you need to remember client retention isn’t about winning old clients back - it’s about stopping them leaving in the first place.
Here’s three easy ways to improve client retention and keep your hard-won customer base out of the clutches of your big chain rivals:
- Motivate - keep them coming back
- Educate - so they know why to come back
- Personalize - to maximize their exercise experience
1. Motivate
Motivation doesn't just mean scolding clients into attending regular gym sessions. After all, even you, a committed life-long exerciser, has at some point begrudged leaving a warm bed on a cold morning to workout. But you know that doesn’t mean you’re not dedicated, it just means you’re human. The same goes for your clients.
Exercise can be hard at the best of times, never mind in the cold depths of winter. Not only that but unpicking a lifetime of bad habits takes time and some clients need more encouragement than others to attend (both physically and mentally) their regular workout sessions. After all, how can you improve your client retention if you can’t get them through the door to train?
Ranging from ‘just simply encouraging a new client to squeeze out one more rep’, right through to ‘convincing a regular to sign up for their first triathlon’, it’s your role as a personal trainer and small club owner to boost your clients when they need you most. It’s to you they turn to spur them on when feeling fatigued, apathetic or downright demotivated. But how are you supposed to know which buttons to press and when?
Regular communication is key to reducing client retention. A good way of approaching this is to think about monitoring your clients’ motivation levels using a simple traffic light system:
- Green - regular attendance, seeing results and would likely train regardless of being pushed.
- Amber - semi-regular attendance but dropping results means they need pushing more often.
- Red - low/no attendance and need continued encouragement to return.
By the time a client has entered the ‘red-zone’ of motivation, it’s arguably already too late. In fact, the motivational process is all about keeping in touch with clients before they get anywhere near ‘amber’ in the first place, nevermind ‘red’.
There are several ways you can do this, ranging from consistently confirming workout appointments via text message, introducing mid-week ‘post-session’ follow-up calls to check how clients are feeling, and even sending clients regular links to informative online articles so they feel involved in planning their own fitness regime. Remember, if you stay connected to your members, you have a better chance of keeping them long-term and improving client retention
2. Educate
As a personal trainer and small club owner, you’ve no doubt seen even the most well-intentioned clients become disillusioned when those early wins in muscle increase, fat loss, or fitness gains begin to inevitably wain as they progress. As a fitness professional, you know this is all part of the process; clients always reach a natural plateau at the end of each training cycle where they need to increase either intensity or frequency if they want to reach the next level.
Educating all new clients why making fundamental lifestyle changes and not following fashionable trends are key to long-term health should always be an important part of your overall client retention strategy.
This can be achieved in several ways. For example, building short, mid and long term goals into fitness plans helps clients better understand there are no ‘quick’ fixes and that fitness needs to be consistently maintained if they want to stay healthy. Another way is to make sure both yourself and your client are up-to-date abreast with new industry research on exercise technique, diet and trends.
But educating clients isn’t just about ensuring they understand the technical aspects of their own training programmes, it’s also about helping them understand themselves.
The modern digital world has arguably complicated notions of body image. While on one hand, it’s deconstructing old-fashioned notions (especially for women) of being ‘beach-ready’, at the same time it’s also distorting what a ‘perfect’ body even looks like thanks to retouched images and the ubiquitous rise of the Instagram influencer.
With record numbers of people reporting a variety of issues surrounding body dysmorphia, it’s more important now than ever that as a personal trainer you’re educating clients on the damaging effects of celebrity-endorsed fitness fads and the societal pressure to conform to an unobtainable body image.
3. Personalize
Personalizing your service is one of the most efficient ways of improving client retention. After all, the more clients who are better-bought into your service means fewer straying from their fitness path and into the arms of the bigger clubs.
But personalizing doesn’t just mean making sure clients have a bespoke training plan. It also means engaging with them on a more human level: if you want to improve client retention as a smaller club owner, then you need to get to know your members as people.
Organizing informal client socials, sending out a regular client newsletters, or using customizable fitness tracking technology during your workout sessions, are all great ways of building a connection between yourself and your member base. If you create a community, by connecting with clients beyond the provider/user relationship, you will start to get more engagement from your client base in return and less people needing encouragement to keep up their membership
If you want to beat the system and improve client retention, then you need to deploy a strategy focused on prevention not cure.
You can do this by:
Motivating your client beyond ‘basic spotting’ and the occasional text message by taking an active interest in their engagement levels using a simple traffic light system. You can educate your clients on the importance of making long-term lifestyle changes and not letting doctored online images affect the perception of their own bodies. And you can personalize your service by making a human connection with your member base and offering them something the bigger chains often cannot: the sense of community.
Give all three a try and see if your client retention improves.
