3 Gym Member Retention Mistakes to Avoid

Members are the lifeblood of any gym, which is why most gym owners will do anything to keep them around. While some ideas, like tailoring classes to what your members actually want, are on the right track, some retention plans can actually drive members away.

Here are three common member retention mistakes to avoid this year:

1. Running promotion after promotion

There’s no disguising the fact that promotions are great for bringing in new members. They can help your business reach a new audience, find life-long new members, and give the members you currently an added boost of morale. But running too many promotions, however, can actually be detrimental to your business model for a couple reasons.

Many times, people are intrigued by a promotion thanks to the exclusivity and immediate value it provides. Basically, if they know that they will be able to get the same deal at a later time, the promotion itself loses value. Running back to back to back promotions can actually hurt your chance of bringing in new members.

For current members, adjusting to the onslaught of new customers can take time and patience. If you are putting your current members through the ‘new member rush’ over and over again, it’s going to be hard to convince them to stay. This is especially true if there isn’t anything in it for them during these promotions.

If you’re running back-to-back member-focused promotions (such as a free class, for example) it might be time to think about making this ‘freebie’ part of your overall membership benefits. After all, if you’re just going to give it away for free every month then why even act like you’re going to make people pay for it? Members will appreciate not having to go through the tedious back-and-forth of a promotion all the time.

2. Making it difficult to understand automatic membership payments

We get it, automatic payments are a lifesaver for both the gym and the customer. They allow internal gym operations to run smoother while not causing members any unnecessary stress or confusion. What is confusing, however, is when a gym makes understanding and managing automatic payments convoluted and difficult for members. Unfortunately, many big-box gyms have a negative reputation of being shifty and opaque when it comes to automatic payments. This is one of the reasons many people turn to smaller, more community-oriented gyms in the first place. By making it hard for members to stop their automatic payments, cancel their membership, or not be able to switch their payment method, your gym is making a statement that you don’t care about how they interpret the process, which means you don’t care about their gym experience. Adopting an open, transparent process to manage automatic membership payments ensures that your members are never left wondering where they stand with your organization.

3. Creating a complicated gym experience

For many gyms, one of the first steps in creating a member retention plan is to increase the number of value-adding services available. This could mean adding more classes, machines, or even changing the open hours of the gym itself. While many of these plans are great in theory, they can also end up complicating your gym in the long run. Instead of having a straightforward class offering, members now have to juggle multiple rooms, schedules, and instructors just to find the original class they’ve been coming to for years. As you’re changing and updating your gym offerings to better fit your clientele, don’t lose sight of your actual members. Make sure that any new additions or changes are things that they actually want and that will be easy to see value in. You don’t want a predicted step in the right direction to end up setting you back.