Every gym owner knows that memberships soar their highest in the start of the year, as new-year resolutioners hoard the gyms in an attempt to make their bodies and lives healthy. But, the vigor soon fades out with the passing months, as members fail to retain their membership throughout the year. For most the gym facilities, increasing membership consistently in a year is a quite challenging. However, with some carefully chalked strategies and the right tactics to improve member engagements, the inconsistency in the revenue can be wiped away.
Following are few ideas that can help you overcome this plateau and letting you achieve memberships throughout the year.
Gather Member Reviews And Analyze Them Critically
According to a study conducted by Vendasta.com, 92% of gym-goers read reviews about the gym before joining them. A gym with negative testimonials or no web presence is not going to be favorite amongst your potential clients. Therefore, it is imperative that you look whether your gym has positive reviews and feedback. A positive online presence can make a stark difference in your gym sales. Your prospective clients will be able to view your gym services, staff, facility and its unique culture when looking for best gym to join.
Positive reviews will build trust in users and it will help your website rank higher on Google. You can beat competition as reviews on Google will result in higher rankings. You can also promote your reviews on social media platforms such as Facebook or other important sites such as in directories and Yelp.
If you don’t have convincing reviews, overcome the problem by offering an incentive to whomever posts a review about your gym. Offer a free personal training class or free membership for 3 days. This can lead to positive outlook for your gym among both existing and new members.
Incorporate Healthy Challenges
Fitness enthusiasts thrive on the sound of healthy challenges. You can boost up your membership sales by occasionally offering individual or group challenges that can help them reach their health goals. This would not allow retain your existing members but would also serve as an advertising venture to reach new potential clients.
Fit Body Challenge
Fit Body Challenging is a very motivating challenge for gym members that will steer their attention towards attaining a fit body individually or collectively. Decide the duration for which the challenge is going to run, e.g. 10 weeks. Conduct a weigh-in of members on day 1, and then keep track of it on weekly basis. You can put up the information of each member on soft board such as weight at the start of the challenge, and the subsequent weight every week. The information can be used to motivate members as they view encouraging progress on their chart.
Miles Challenge
This challenge can also garner your members’ interest, as it will track the number of miles covered by them during a particular time-frame. Choose the duration of the challenge, let’s say a month in this case and then ask each member to note down the amount he spends on treadmill or the elliptical. When the challenge is up, the member with most miles covered will be entitled to a free month of training, gym branded gear etc.
Train Your Sales Team
Is your sales team in-line with your objective of increasing gym memberships? If no, then you are possibly missing out on ways to improve your gym sales. You can considerably attain higher membership rates if you first devise a plan and then break it down into attainable goals for your sales team.
You can make use of following ideas to increase membership sales.
- Host In-House Events: Host in-house events such as Gym Members Day and allow your members to bring along a guest. Your sales team can communicate with them and convince them into getting the membership.
- Partner: In order to reach your sales goals, it is very important for you to, think of alliances and partnerships. You should hand over your brochures to local businesses asking them to pass them to every customer.
- Consider Offering Referral Program: You can offer perks to your present members such as a free training day for offering referrals.
- Mark Your Presence In Public Events: By putting up a stall in different public events you can not only distribute brochures amongst visitors but your sales team can also convince them in acquiring membership.
Integrating a gym software can be very effective in letting your sales team track your potential clients with the help of a database. A simple way to reach out to all potential clients is to set up email templates that can be sent over to them occasionally. Once an entry has been made about a prospective client in the software, your sales team should conduct a thorough follow up by email him after 2-3 days. You can offer them special discounts for signing up within a specified time-frame.
Engage In Communication And Plan Vigorous Follow Up
In order to plan a vigorous follow up on your clients, you should always be open to communication. In order to ensure a smooth communication process, you must ensure that you have complete information regarding your potential clients. This can be done asking your front desk staff to obtain name, phone number and email address of all the people who visit the gym. You can also obtain additional information by asking them how they got to know about your gym. When you call a potential client, make sure that you have some convincing proposal to offer to them. Usually when getting in touch with a prospective client, you can offer services such as free personal assessment, or free one-week membership. You can enter this information in your gym management software so that the data can be used for metric tracking.
Use Gym Membership Software
Gym membership software not only stores all information relevant to your members but also allows you to efficiently track, engage and convert prospects. You can easily track the gym’s date through charts and reports on a single dashboard. Active browser format also allows you to create your own filters and charts. This can help save a lot of time that your employees have to put in while gathering all the relevant information in putting up automated reporting and dashboards.
