I have always been a yoyo trainer. Yes a very unusual opening line to a blog about keeping your members training perhaps but it is the truth and I believe it gives me good insight into your customer base! Don’t get me wrong I love training and love the gym but sometimes I quite simply get bored. Partly I blame my job as often I find it hard to go for a good workout without mentally completing a facilities and service level audit, critiquing every last minute detail of my “member experience”. I also move from one type of training session to another as I try out different fads and trends to keep on the cutting edge of where our industry is going. These things combined make me an irregular and unpredictable member.
While I have read many papers and articles on retention and observed countless studies in this area (we’ll go into them in more detail in a later blog) I am absolutely sure of one thing. I used to say it to my personal training clients and now I say it to my gym owners – “motivation is what gets you started but routine is what keeps you going”. We are all fundamentally creatures of habit. Yes to actually get off your bum and sign up for a gym membership, a classes package or some PT sessions takes quite a bit of thinking and motivation. However, once we have signed up and after our first few sessions the feel good factor for that alone tends to subside. The motivation is waning. It is at this stage that the routine bit kicks in – if something habitually forms part of our lifestyle it is easier to achieve regularly as we can plan the time in our schedule and work around it. If it is ad-hoc and arbitrary it will eventually cease to have any space and fade away.
So put simply I’m telling you that if your members come more regularly to train with you they are more likely to keep training with you – hardly rocket science eh? However, the gym owners and PT’s I speak with often believe the members return visits are just because of the brilliant results they are getting but that is not always the case. Sometimes the great results are translated as an excuse to kick back and chill out even more! However if every Monday and Wednesday I go straight from my office to the gym and do the 6.30pm class that is a killer workout and get home for 8pm ready to have a light snack and hit the hay it just becomes part of what I do. It just happens. However once a Monday session is skipped suddenly Wednesday seem’s less inviting and this is where things can spiral out of control.
So.. how can you intervene when this does happen? Well, there are a number of ways. Firstly, talk to your users/members about rest days. Encourage them to select in advance their training days and their rest days and work their schedules around this. Another big thing you can do is keep your timetable reasonably consistent. I fully understand you cannot feasibly run classes with low numbers but if you are removing some from the timetable or re-jigging them perhaps a personal phone call or email to each member who attended the class regularly for the previous 6 weeks may give you greater feedback and a chance to intervene and prevent any disruption to their scheduled gym slot. Maybe they can come in for a gym session instead, or the other class which runs 30 minutes earlier? Whatever the options work through it with them. Finally engage with them, get on social media and instead of pushing out the all too familiar before and after shots and funny quotes instead just be frank – “So you missed a few days – So what? We’d love to see you back today and will go easy on you after the festivities of St Patricks weekend” I for one know this would grab my attention quicker than a healthy recipe which would seem futile after a weekend of over-indulegnce. It would also make the customer feel more understood and less scared of returning.
The reason I am blogging about this today is many gyms are probably suffering from this member apathy after the recent bank holiday weekend. If you have done nothing yet to identify non-returners make it your priority for today. Go through your paperwork or computer system and identify people who may have dropped out. Contact them via phone, email or social media (you will know which method is best based on their member profile) and tell them you missed them. Encourage them to get back in before the weekend and show how within one visit they can be back on track. Encouragement rather than scaremongering is the key here and positivity rather than negativity (or even worse that super dooper fitness is my life how could you possibly have missed a session attitude some trainers tend to adopt).
Go engage with them and let me know how you get on below…