Incentivize to Revitalize Your Profits

Have you ever walked into a club, and seen an advertisement for a free cruise on the wall, gift certificates at the front desk or a free New Year’s dinner? Incentive programs are a great tool for motivating members and boosting your club’s bottom line. Whether

it’s the competition or the prize itself, by rewarding people for actions, you are positively reinforcing behaviors that will be profitable to your club.
Natalie Spencer, the general manager of The Renaissance European Day Spa in Fayetteville, N.C., explained how their referral program works and how it helps all the profit centers at their spa grow. “Our Ambassador Referral Program has been a great success in getting new members into the spa,” she said. “For each new member that our current members sponsor they receive $100 spa dollars to use toward our day-spa services, tanning and Carrot’s Restaurant. This program not only helps to generate new members but also helps to cross promote the different areas of business that we have.”

Jeremy Harden, the director of fitness at Towne and Country Fitness in Wilder, Ky., has implemented an incentive program to help members reach their fitness goals. “All members received online nutrition for the months of October, November and December,” Harden said. “Those who used the healthy eating program for 60 of the 90 days received a 10 percent discount on our Biggest Loser program.”
With their Biggest Loser program starting at the beginning of the year, this incentive allows individuals to lead a healthy lifestyle. “This incentive makes the participants better conditioned to succeed,” Harden continued. “The Towne and Country Biggest Loser program had 275 participants last year and are looking to add to that number this year.
Healthtrax of Glastonbury, Conn. also uses powerful incentive programs to increase their membership. One such program is known as “Project 0.” The program ran from October to January and awarded a prize to any of the 89 participants who didn’t gain weight during the timeframe. Joyce Hyde, the executive director of Healthtrax said, “It is important to have incentive programs for members to keep them happy, which will turn into them referring friends.” Ultimately, it increased membership and member retention.

An incentive program is also a great way to motivate staff. According to Hyde, “You have to empower and incentivize the people that are around you to drive and achieve the outcome you want.” At Healthtrax Glastonbury that’s exactly what management has done with the training staff. When selling personal training packages, trainers receive a bonus for selling personal training packages at their full price. This gives them an incentive to not cut price, which negatively affects the clubs bottom line.

Also, personal trainers can use incentive programs as a marketing tool. Scott Herman of scotthermanfitness.com recently harnessed the power of incentives to encourage individuals to help market himself. Herman recently launched a competition challenging participants to make a montage of him. The contestant with the greatest video received various prizes. Herman received a montage video of himself to send to a reality show, along with a lot of other videos of him being uploaded on the Internet.

Incentives give people a tangible reward for their efforts, which creates drive and motivation. Attaching rewards to a goal allows you to motivate individuals. Hyde left us with these words of wisdom: “The bottom line is, we need to increase our bottom line!” Utilizing incentives leads to an increase in your bottom line.