The last year has been quite a struggle for the fitness industry. Businesses were forced to close or significantly scale back their operations, which has meant a massive decrease in revenue for gyms, PTs, health clubs and studios across the country.
Now that gyms have reopened, it’s likely that your main goal as a club owner will be to get back to generating a stable income so that your business can thrive again. So, how can you earn more money?
The obvious answer is to get more members, but this can be time-consuming. It’s hard to find time to develop your marketing and sales strategy, especially given how busy you’ve been in the weeks following reopening day. Plus, for every new member, you acquire through paid marketing, there will be a cost (known as your Cost Per Acquisition: essentially how much it costs you to gain one new customer). Advertising, referral rewards, onboarding and admin costs etc. are all strategies for increasing your membership base that require an upfront cash investment – something that might not be possible for you right now.
There is a much easier way to generate more revenue that gym owners often forget about: Simply get your existing members to spend a little bit more money per month by adding value to your current offering.
In this blog post, we’re going to show you exactly how you can add value, make more money and delight your members all at the same time.
Your membership purchasing/renewals process should be quick and simple.
Before you think about getting your current members to spend more money, you need to make sure they’ve had a positive signup experience. A potential customer should be able to purchase a membership from you in less than five minutes. Any longer, and you risk losing the customer because their interest has been lost or they’ve grown frustrated with the complicated signup. The most popular way to make signing up easy is to allow people to join your club online.
You can read our full list of tips for the perfect online joining process here, but the main thing to consider is to make it straight forward. You can end up being drawn down the path of listing lots of questions for the customer to answer or making your ParQ pages upon pages long, but as mentioned above, if it’s too much effort then your potential customers will drop off before they’ve even started.
On the same note, renewing memberships should be equally as simple. Encourage your members to turn on auto-renew, so that they don’t have to do anything when their renewal date rolls around.
Increase the price of your memberships.
The most obvious way to get your members to spend more money is to slightly increase the price of your memberships. If you have a loyal membership base, it’s likely that the majority of them won’t mind paying a couple of extra pounds per month to support an independent business (particularly ones that have been the hardest hit over lockdown).
You can strengthen your position even further by making sure the member experience at your club is second to none. Always greet your members when they come through your door, promote a friendly atmosphere, encourage them on their path to meeting their fitness goals and let them know you’re always on hand to answer any questions they might have. You’ll be surprised at how these little interactions can make your members feel comfortable at your facility – especially after minimising human contact for the last year.
It might seem scary and you might be reluctant to increase your prices (which is understandable!), but it’s a whole lot less work than trying to gain another 50 customers.
Upsell using Bolt-ons.
Put simply, a bolt-on is an additional product that your members can buy when they’re in the final stages of their purchase. Think grabbing a snack or a pack of mints when you’re in the queue for the checkout at a supermarket – it’s the same concept. It encourages your members to spend a little extra each month to upgrade their workout experience, for example, a credit for a protein shake or two spin classes alongside their usual access to the gym floor.
It follows the same ideology – rather than getting a new member to spend more money on a £30 membership, persuade your existing members to spend a £5 on something extra. It soon adds up.
If you have 200 members paying £25 per month for their membership and half of them buy a class bolt-on for an extra £5 per month, that’s an extra £500 of income straight into your pocket. Over a twelve-month period that works out to be an extra £6,000 per year, taking your annual revenue from £60,000 to £66,000 with very little effort.
Start making more money today.
To summarise, there are a few different ways to get your members to spend more money. One thing’s for sure – it’s much easier to get your existing members to spend a little more money than it is to acquire lots of new customers in one go.
Start by having a specific revenue target in mind, then work backwards to figure out your pricing strategy and which of the above methods will best help you get there. We recommend working out your cost per acquisition too so that you have something to benchmark against.
Fancy learning more about Bolt-ons and Online Joining? Give us a call on 0203 884 9777 or book a chat with one of our experts today!
