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The Customer Retention Strategy Your Fitness Business Needs

Written by

Chayan Garg

Retention strategies for clients help maintain relationships with customers to keep them committed to the fitness services. These tips will help you to do that.

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As a fitness business owner, one of the most profitable things you should do is sustain your established client base.

Customer retention boosts revenue and increases the lifetime value of your clients. It also helps you build better relationships with your existing clients who are the most loyal customers and advocates of your brand.

What is client retention?

Client or customer retention is the process of maintaining and building relationships with your clients so that they remain loyal to your fitness business offerings so that they don't switch to any of your competitors. It is also an indicator that whether your fitness service satisfies your current clients.

Four Ways To Improve Customer Retention

Encourage customers and highlight their success

Highlighting their success story with encouraging words on their achievement empower customers. A few ways of celebrating customer success are creating a minimalistic graphic with their picture, displaying a snapshot of their miles run or calories burned that day, etc.

You can also send a monthly newsletter to keep your customer happy and informed. A newsletter is a simple and inexpensive approach and can serve as a constant reminder of your fitness business to existing or new customers.

This type of content takes little time and effort and can make a significant impact to motivate customers, thereby improving customer retention.

You can give a few shout-outs each week on various social media platforms to acknowledge your existing customers or new customers who are truly committed and working hard.

For example, “Shout out to Maggie for hitting up her 15th class in a row today! That is so amazing!”‍

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Track your client's progress

Routinely measuring and tracking customer results should be a part of your customer retention program or strategy. Make sure you have their progress images and track record, as they are an excellent method to improve your credibility because they are real-time evidence.

You may use this data to personalize your services to fit every client's unique requirements, resulting in customer satisfaction and retention.

FitBudd makes it much easier to track your clients' progress on a daily basis and offers you the power of your own fitness app, giving your fitness business new strength.

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Collect customer feedback

‍To boost customer retention, you must also ensure that customer experience meets customer expectations.

You can call a few members who participated in the virtual or in-person fitness session afterwards and ask for their thoughts. Find out if they enjoyed the workout and what you can do to make it even better. They'll respect your sincerity, and you'll almost certainly receive some great suggestions and reviews.

Asking for feedback will also make your customers feel that they are adding more value to your brand. It shows that you respect your customers opinions and will actively listen to their concerns. This, in the long run, will differentiate you from the other 90% in the industry.

Track client attendance

‍Attendance tracking is again one of the most important customer retention metrics. It demonstrates that you genuinely care about your clients and are aware that they are actively participating in your fitness sessions.

More importantly, you can contact a client who hasn't attended one of your training sessions and assure them you'll see them soon.

This communicates to your clients that their presence is valued and that whether or not they show up matters, laying a solid foundation for customer loyalty.

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BONUS FORMULA

Now that you're aware of the key metrics of your customer retention strategy, you can easily calculate your Customer Retention Rate with this formula.

[ (Number of customers at End of Period) — (Number of customers Acquired During the Period) / Number of Customers at Start of Period] x 100

According to the Association of Fitness Studios (AFS), the average fitness studio customer retention rate is 75.9% and for personal training studios, the customer retention rate is 80%. You can use this data as a metric for comparison when you calculate your Customer Retention Rate.

Got a better idea on how to increase customer retention?

‍These are just a few customer retention strategies you can incorporate to increase customer retention in your fitness business. It’s important to retain your existing clients as not only does it speak of how satisfied your current customers are with your services, but it also gives you new avenues to attract more customers through a referral or loyalty program.

Retaining customers in the fitness industry is crucial in the long run to build successful fitness businesses and also a cost-effective method to grow your fitness business as it takes a lot more marketing efforts and budget to convert a new customer than a loyal one.

With FitBudd, you can be assured of delivering an interactive workout experience, creating personalized nutrition plans, performance tracking, and more, which will help you improve customer satisfaction and increase customer retention.