If you want to bring in more money to your gym, one obvious way to increase revenue is to get more members. The more memberships you sell, the more money you can make and the stronger your business becomes.
However, getting more members isn’t the only way to increase gym revenue. In fact, there are two easier ways that are often overlooked. You don’t have to focus on selling memberships month after month. Instead, you can increase gym revenue by:
- Earning more per member
- Increasing retention
These two methods will help you make the most of existing members and make a higher profit. But how do you do these things you might ask?
Don’t worry – we’re going to break it down.
Inside this blog:
- Chapter 1: How To Increase Gym Revenue Per Member
- Chapter 2: How To Increase Retention
- Chapter 3: Why You Need Online Personal Training Software For Your Gym
How To Increase Gym Revenue Per Member
While selling more memberships will obviously increase your revenue, it’s also important to think about making more money per client. This is how a fitness business can truly scale.
Let’s talk about how to take advantage of your existing client base to increase your fitness business profits.
The Profitable Market You Might Be Missing
More than likely, your gym offers a standard membership option that gives clients access to the space and equipment in your facility. You might also offer personal training at your gym that select clients adds on to supplement their membership.
However, if this is your only gym business model, you are missing out on an extremely profitable slice of the fitness market.
Here’s what we mean:
On average, a gym membership costs around $60 per month. Let’s say that one personal training session costs the same. Since most personal training clients will probably want to do 2-3 sessions per week, it could cost as much as $500 to $780+ a month, which is pretty expensive for most people. There are plenty of people out there that want something better than a gym membership, but simply can’t afford to spend that much a month.
Let’s imagine for a minute someone that can spend around $299 a month on fitness and wants something more personalized. He can afford the gym easily, but he’s not really getting the experience that he wants. And though he has a little more to spend, he still falls short on being able to afford a personal trainer 2-3 times per week.
Here, we have our gap in the market.
And this market is big.
Think about this: What percentage of people can afford to spend $700 per month on fitness? The affluent few.
How about people that can spend a little more and are willing to do so for better results? Now, that’s a little more accessible right? That’s not all though. There are also people that travel and live remotely and don’t want to commit to a traditional gym membership or people that would rather workout from home because of COVID concerns or general preference.
These are all the market segments that are not well served by the traditional gym or personal training model on their own.
If you own a gym and you are not reaching this segment of the market, you are missing out on a huge profit for you and a huge win for your existing clients. Now let’s talk about exactly what to offer to serve this segment and maximize your revenue per client.
More Profitable Gym Services To Offer
To reach the clients that aren’t fully satisfied by a gym membership alone but don’t want to shell out the dough for traditional personal training several times a week, you have to expand your gym’s offerings. Let’s cover some of the most profitable services you can offer to make more money per gym member.
Online Personal Training
The fitness industry has changed a lot over the years, and one major shift has been towards more online options. From group classes to health coaching to personal training – people want to be able to do more from home (or on the road or anywhere!).
If you want your gym to keep up and make more money per each of your members, it’s time to get join the trend and get online.
Online personal training is like traditional one-on-one training. You offer clients support, help them reach their goals, provide accountability, and more. But with online personal training, (as the name implies) all of the training is delivered remotely.
Now before you begin imagining sitting through hours of Zoom meetings and streaming workouts to gym members, online personal training mostly involves delivering workout materials like videos, meal plans, and supplemental content for clients to complete on their own time.
This is what makes this training option easy for you to offer and more flexible and affordable for personal training clients. This is a great fit for clients that attend the gym a few times a week, but are looking for a little extra (yet still reasonably priced) support on their fitness journey.
Hybrid Training
Another great option for increasing revenue from existing members is offering hybrid training. Like online training, most of your personal training components will be delivered remotely for clients to complete on their own time.
With hybrid training, you will still meet at the gym occasionally anywhere from once a week to once a month. Instead of using in-person meetings for workout sessions, you can use the time with clients to answer any questions they might have, go over proper form, and/or check in with their progress.
For many of your gym members, having the option of in-person support along with the flexibility of online training is the perfect option. Hybrid training can help you provide the personalized experience each of your clients need and is more sustainable for you than squeezing in tons of in-person sessions each week. With hybrid training flexibility and customization is the name of the game – giving you and your clients plenty of options that lead to increased revenue!
Online Group Coaching
Many gyms include group classes as part of or as an add-on for the monthly membership. A lot of members like group classes because of the community atmosphere and chance to workout among others with similar goals.
However, to make more money per gym member, you might consider taking the online approach to group training as well with an online group coaching program.
An online group training program or group fitness challenge is a great way to serve more clients efficiently and effectively. This is a less customized form of training, which takes less of your time, but is still a great option for clients.
This truly interactive and engaging way for clients to train works best when members that join have similiar starting points and end goals. For example, you might group some experienced gym goers that all want to build muscle mass in one training group.
Here are some things you might include in a group training program:
- Private social network
- Weekly Skype check-in calls
- Prizes for top achievers
- Recipe of the day, meal guide or weekly meal plan
- In-app courses on nutrition, mindfulness, cooking, etc.
- Habit coaching
- Nutrition coaching
- Support through chat
- Daily fitness videos
Incorporating group training into your fitness business can be really lucrative and allows you to scale quickly. Plus, once you’ve created an online group training program or challenge, you can reuse the content over and over.
How To Increase Retention
Of course, finding new clients is important, but it’s keeping them around that really matters.
High retention means:
- Less time searching for new clients or trying to sell memberships
- Better results for your gym members
- Better results for members means more referrals and even more business
If you can focus on retention, you will increase gym revenue. And we have the numbers to prove it. It costs an estimated five times as much to get a new client as it does to retain an existing one. Plus, one study’s results suggested that gyms could increase their revenue by $45,000 in one year simply by increasing average retention by two months!
Before we talk about ways to provide more value to gym members so that you can retain them, it can be helpful to understand the most common reason gym attrition occurs.
Why Gym Attrition Happens
Most health clubs have an average attrition rate of 27%. In the gym industry, attendance and retention are directly connected. The members who are the most likely to quit your gym are the ones that aren’t attending regularly.
Sometimes these members start out strong with regular attendance, but their commitment begins to waiver over time. Of course there are many reasons why people fall out of their gym routines. Life happens. A new baby, a new job, an unexpected sickness, etc. – all of these things might inhibit your once all-start member from making it to the gym everyday.
You may also be losing members because your gym’s offerings weren’t right for them. Members may decide that they want more customization of their packages or more flexbility and how and when they can train.
Fortunately, you can tackle the most common reasons members leave head on. You can improve your retention and deliver more value to each client. This, of course, will lead to increased gym profit!
Let’s talk about how.
Deliver More Value With The Right Offerings
We’ve already discussed how online personal training can help you make more money per existing client. The same offerings that can help you increase revenue per member, can also help you deliver much more value to clients and improve retention.
In addition to adding online, hybrid, and online group training to your gym packages, you can also maximize member value with things like nutrition coaching, template programs, habit coaching and more.
As a busy gym owner, you’re probably thinking of expanding your services and offering add-ons like these may sound nice, but there’s no way you’ll have time to actually do it, right?
Let’s wrap up by explaining exactly how you can 1, increase revenue per member and 2, increase retention with the right offerings.
Why You Need Online Personal Training Software For Your Gym
If you don’t want to rely on new membership sales to increase your gym revenue, it’s clear that you’ll need to shift your focus to existing clients. We’ve covered what services gyms can add on to do just that, but it sure seems like a lot of work.
Fortunately, with the right online personal training software like TrainerFu, you can easily step outside the traditional gym business model and expand your offerings. This is how you make more money per client and deliver more value.
With TrainerFu, you can create and share all of your online training components like workout videos, PDF guides, and more. You can also build templated workout programs and online group fitness challenges. You can easily communicate with clients right inside the app and offer support both one-on-one and through the community newsfeed feature.
TrainerFu also knows that gym owners have enough on their plate as it is. The app automates the tedious parts of online training like onboarding training clients and payment collection.
If you’re really ready to increase your gym revenue, it’s time to think outside the box of selling memberships. The right personal training software can help you make a higher profit with more ease.