How to keep new Members Engaged beyond the New Year

It’s January, which means a fresh influx of new members to your gym. Whilst this is a bumper time for most gyms, it’s important to minimise the churn that usually follows such a high volume of recruits (let’s call it ‘New Year's Resolution Syndrome’). Let’s take a look at some ways you can keep your new members engaged with your gym in 2020.

When all is said and done, it’s the way you treat your members that will most influence the likelihood that they will stick with your gym. Many gyms take a long time to work out the best way to treat their members, and many don’t have the strategy and resources to do this. Fortunately, thanks to automated member retention software like KeepMe it’s never been easier to treat your members well. Here’s our no-nonsense guide to treating your members right from the start…

Start as you mean to go on

It’s time to cut to the chase; the secret to improving member retention is mastering gym membership data.

You can’t improve gym retention by playing a guessing game, you have to be mining your member data for insights into building a retention strategy that works for your gym. Too many gyms focus on member data after the fact. Trying to make sense of a member’s journey when they’ve been with your gym for a while is going to cause you problems, as months and even weeks can make a difference as to whether you turn a member’s retention prospects around.

So, as with all things in life, you need to start as you mean to go on, collecting, analysing and acting on member data from the beginning.

One way you can do this is by having a single member retention software with which you monitor retention data.

This needs to be connected to your member outreach processes so you can directly act on the intelligence you get from your retention data. 

The new signup journey

Gyms need to understand and monitor the customer journey that their gym members go through. This starts when people first sign up as new members.

You must have a solid member onboarding process to maximize the possibility of making your members feel at home in your gym and be empowered to make the most out of their gym experience.

When onboarding new members keep track of demographic details such as age, gender, location and so on. The more detailed the data the greater the retention snapshot you’ll get of each member. You can then use this data to track retention levels and engage with at-risk members before they are beyond saving (KeepMe designates ‘high risk’ members as those who are likely to cancel if you interact with them, whereas ‘moderate risk’ members are open to positive interactions to turn their retention prospects around).

The first few months of a new gym membership are normally a kind of ‘honeymoon’ period in which your member is motivated to attend the gym. But after this grace period, it’s possible that their attendance will start to slip and they could become a retention risk.

Use member retention software to treat your members right

There are two essential components to treating new signups in the right way: understanding the importance of building customer relationships and having a laser focus on improving member retention. 

You need to do both if you want to do either!

Building effective member retention strategies is a complex matter, so you must simplify things by using AI software to make sense of all this complexity.

For example, KeepMe has an ‘On-Site’ mobile app that means you can find out when an at-risk member is at one of your gyms. The app helps you direct your floor staff to interact with them. One-on-one staff-member interactions are a strong way to improve member retention, and they increase the chances that your members will come back for more. 

Keepme can also be used to automate member communications. For example, you can schedule a NPS survey to be sent out every 90 days (frequent enough to track progress, but not too frequent to annoy people). This will help you track how positively (or negatively) your members view your gym. This gives you a chance to win back people who have issues with your gym and enrol promoters into your referral schemes. 

We hope January is a fantastic time for new gym sign-ups at your gym, and that some of the tips we’ve talked about in this post can be put to use to keep new members sticking with your gym for the long run. You can see KeepMe’s AI retention software in action by booking a free demo today to see how it can improve your gym’s retention levels.