Now you have re-opened your doors, you’re no doubt busy looking at ways to rebuild your membership base and fill the revenue hole that multiple lockdowns have left in your business. Although it may be tempting to implement an aggressive membership sales strategy right now, a better and more cost-effective option is to review the current member experience across all touchpoints and perform a ‘gap analysis’ to identify where and how you could not only improve but also increase current membership yield to boost your bottom line and plug the revenue gap.
This may seem like a long-term strategy rather than a short-term fix, but it can actually be both. Let me explain; according to The Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one, so it makes sense to focus your energy on cultivating a loyal membership base in the first instance. By doing so, you are far more likely to generate additional yield from your membership base, resulting in a welcome boost to your revenue. But don’t just take our word for it, according to Dimension Data, 84% of organizations working to improve customer service report an increase in revenue in as little as a few weeks.
In this blog, we will be sharing some quick and ‘easy to deploy’ tactics that will help you drive member loyalty and subsequently increase current member yield. Let’s take a look:
1. Provide Personalised Health Assessments
Despite all the negatives associated with the global pandemic, it has unveiled some fantastic opportunities for gym owners to tap into and capitalise from, the most notable being that the public is more health focussed than at any other time in most of our living memories, making it a great time to implement new ‘chargeable’ health and wellness services.
A great place to start is offering body composition analysis for a small fee. Aside from boosting membership yield, the impact on member loyalty and overall retention is huge. Many leading advisers on retention for the fitness industry talk about the importance of communication with members, you don’t have to read too much of the work done by Guy Griffiths or Richard Earney to realise ‘creating a culture of feedback’ has a seriously positive impact on member retention.
Providing health assessments through body composition analysis starts this process for you all by itself. You have the initial ‘consultation’, followed by the development (if required) of a personalised training plan (which you can either package up and charge for separately or tie in with the cost of the health assessment) based on these health metrics, naturally, regular check-ins follow this. Before you know it, you are communicating and feeding relevant information back to members on a regular basis, you can then choose to tie any other amount of messages/information or offers into this feedback and really develop that relationship with each and every member, so it really is a ‘two birds, one stone’ initiative!
For a no-fuss way of implementing body composition analysis into your service offering, check out the fully integrated My Body product from ClubWise, which allows your members and trainers to measure, record and track body composition through both the ClubWise staff and member-facing apps, using the highly accurate Tanita scale. You can find out more here: www.fitsense.co/mybody
2. Retail Items
Selling a range of relevant retail items in your club is an effective way to increase revenue from your current members and with ClubWise, you have the tools to do so with minimal effort. On many products, industry markups can be very high, providing plenty of opportunities to boost your bottom line. Whether it’s protein shakes and bars, electrolyte drinks or even branded merch, your members will appreciate the convenience of being able to purchase these items at your club.
The key here is to make it as easy as possible for members to purchase retail items and perhaps most crucially, develop a system that doesn’t require cash. A great way of doing this is to set up a digital store directly in your Member App with an integrated credit and debit card payment solution. This makes purchasing far more accessible to members and delivers a quick, contactless and hygienic way to purchase the items they need.
3. Mini Free Personal Training Trial
Personalisation is the industry’s buzzword at the moment, and for good reason. You will notice that personalisation is a common theme throughout this blog, with body composition analysis, tailored workout programmes, and communications. However, for a truly personalised experience, you don’t get better than Personal Training. Personal Training has the ability to create more positive member experiences. We also know, that a good and well thought out PT model in your club has the ability to significantly increase your revenue, but how do you encourage your current members to buy Personal Training? Give them a free taster.
Unsurprisingly, members who have never used PT before are most likely deterred by the unknown. They are unsure how it works, what it costs (isn’t Personal Training something rich celebrities have?), they could be nervous about putting their money and trust into someone they don’t really know and who doesn’t know them or understand their goals, their ability level etc. They may see Personal Trainers as someone that creates tough exercises like a drill sergeant. However, by offering a free mini PT session, you are providing members with the opportunity to learn about how the Personal Training sessions work, the benefits and ultimately, provide them with a better understanding of all the areas that a Personal Trainer can help with. Be sure to follow up with members that have taken advantage of the free session to maximise conversions.
4. Boot Camps and Workshops
The idea behind boot camps and workshops is to maximise seasonal opportunities that inspire renewed motivation and keenness among members to reach specific goals more quickly. These chargeable packages provide immediate revenue that has a positive impact on cash flow. A great example is a ‘summer body boot camp’, targeting those members that want to get in shape for the holiday season. To make it even more appealing to current members, ask them what types of programmes they would be interested in participating in and deliver what they want. By doing so, you are showing your members that you care about their needs and goals and are proactively looking at ways to help them get the results they want, quickly.
The beauty of this initiative is you can get creative and target seasonal downturns to bump up revenue all year round.
With ClubWise, you can easily add packages to the digital store in the Member App, which members can book and purchase using the secure in-app payment portal. As the Member App is fully integrated with ClubWise, you get full visibility of sales, directly in your ClubWise Dashboard.
5. Raise Your Prices
This may seem controversial at this point in time and your initial reaction is probably going to be along the lines of ‘I need to keep my members, not drive them away with price increases!’ However, a subtle and carefully calculated price increase will do wonders for your gym’s financial health with little impact on member retention, If you’ve been working hard on delivering an exceptional member experience. Still not sure? A recent study by Esteban Kolsky showed that 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for an upgraded experience. Say no more, right?
The key here is to ensure you communicate your new pricing with plenty of advanced notice, keep it minimal and explain why the increase is necessary to continue delivering the high-quality services they love and expect from you.
Implementing a price increase could present administrative challenges depending on how you’re set up and what software you use. Ideally, you’ll want an easy and streamlined process that lets you implement price increases for specific member segments, in bulk.
ClubWise is working towards providing a more streamlined solution to enable us to work with club owners to administer bulk price increases for current members. The solution includes the ability to apply bulk increases quickly and easily to a number of different membership segments, for example, all members currently paying £20 p/m, OR all members on a silver membership.
Communicating a price increase to members also becomes an easy task using the ClubWise Campaign Manager tool. ClubWise displays clever prompts within the price increase workflow, to remind you to send a campaign to the appropriate member list – which will already be set up for you.
For more information on how ClubWise can help you deliver an exceptional member experience, increase loyalty and drive revenue, book a ClubWise discovery call today!