The 5 step process to increasing member retention

It’s actually fairly easy to generate interest and build an audience. The challenge is converting an audience into a paying, engaged community – and keeping them there.

With the right strategy, you can increase your membership retention rates and member satisfaction, helping you get the most from your members.

In this blog, we’ll explore five ways in which you can appeal to your current (and potential) members and help improve your business’ member retention.

 

Interact with your members

Member retention starts in your facility. Whilst it’s important to try to engage new members, making sure your current ones are happy and likely to stay with you is arguably more important to your bottom line.

According to a recent whitepaper by TRP, 68% of all interactions with members led to a subsequent visit within 7 days of the recorded interaction. This shows that engagement with your members results in more visits and a longer membership life span.

Putting a robust communications strategy in place (including training staff on in-house communications) can help to increase membership retention and keep your members coming back to your gym or leisure centre.

 

Build an online community

Once you’ve put a good in-house communications strategy in place, it’s important to branch out and include online communications.

Any membership-based organisation relies on great member engagement to attract and retain customers. The problem is that engagement isn’t a one-way street, meaning that business must actively seek out potential members and make the effort of interacting with them.

Fortunately, social media is more popular and more accessible nowadays than it ever has been before. With ready-built digital platforms waiting for you to use to interact with your member base, you don’t even need to worry about building your own software.

A business that creates content that is valuable and informative, makes themselves available for questions and conversations, and offers advice to their followers is one that is definitely going to increase member rates.

You can also host events and other face-to-face opportunities to engage with members.

If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to engaging with members on social media, our blog about how to avoid common social media mistakes is a great starting point.

 

Keep your members motivated

If your members don’t feel that they are getting good results for the money, time, and effort they put in, they might cancel their membership. This is particularly true for gyms and leisure centres, as often members have specific goals in mind, such as losing weight, having more energy, and feeling happier.

You can combat possible attrition by making sure that your members feel motivated and enthused throughout their membership experience.

In fact, a recent survey by TRP shows that if a member makes any perceived progress using your facilities, they are 10% less likely to cancel their membership per area of improvement. If a member has goals to lose weight, have more energy, and feel happier, for example, they would be 30% less likely to cancel their membership if they felt they had achieved all three.

Crucially, this is true for members at all periods of membership, which suggests that it is always important for members to feel they are making progress, no matter how long they have been a member.

 

Encourage group workouts

TRP has also found that members who made a friend in the last 3 months were 40% less likely to cancel their membership compared to members who did not make a friend.

Group exercise classes can help to introduce members to new exercises, new motivation channels, and – perhaps most importantly – to each other.

Fostering a sense of community can help you retain your members for longer, which in turn can increase your profitability.

Other studies have also backed up the importance of group exercise classes. The risk of cancelling has been shown to be 56% higher in gym-only members compared to group exercisers, which means that more gyms and leisure facilities should be facilitating and encouraging group exercise classes and leisure communities.

 

Create a seamless membership experience

Making creating and managing a membership as easy and quick as possible is a sure-fire way to increase membership retention and conversion.

Booking classes, paying debts, viewing receipts, and managing membership options could be accessible from one central place without having to visit multiple websites.

Making memberships easy for customers shows that you are dedicated to the member experience, and also saves your members time, effort, and frustration.

This is likely to bring long-term benefits to your profits. Offering online bookings alone increase profits, since online bookings are more convenient and popular than face-to-face or over-the-phone bookings and will encourage more engagement and retention, with more members signing up for classes and staying with their leisure provider for longer.

Our Leisure Hub platform is the very first totally unified solution in the leisure market. This innovative piece of software drastically improves customer service and reduces administration costs and time. Find out more about the software that could drastically increase your membership base.

 

What’s more, Xn partners with TRP to provide integration to the TRP suite of products.

For a limited time Xn customers can benefit from 25% off TRP setup and training costs when signing up by 31 December 2020.

For more information on the TRP and Xn integrations, or details of the offer, please email sales@xnleisure.com