If you’re looking to grow your personal training business, you may devote your time and resources to promoting new sales, workouts or training staff in an effort to convert personal training prospects into clients. But while you’re busy connecting with prospects, are you neglecting your existing clients?
If your client churn rate matches or, worse, exceeds the number of new clients you sign month-to-month, then you’re spinning your wheels at the detriment of your business. Strengthen client-trainer relationships through focused and effective reach outs to boost retention and break the churn cycle.
Keep the conversation going between sessions.
Your relationship with a client doesn’t begin and end on the gym floor. Find opportunities to connect between training sessions. That doesn’t mean you should email or text just to “check-in.” Give each and every communication you send a specific and valid purpose. This could be mapping out the agenda for your next session, sharing a recipe or an article of value, or assigning exercises for your client to focus on during solo workouts.
Track client inactivity.
Canceled sessions are an inevitable part of training and often beyond your control. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be proactive to prevent one missed session from spreading into a multi-week lapse in training. Each time you sell an agreement ask yourself, based on the expected frequency of training, what’s a reasonable number of days this client could go without scheduling a session?
Think of this number as an inactivity threshold. When a client exceeds this threshold, begin sending regular reach outs until you’ve successfully scheduled their next session. This shows your client you’re serious about their training and will hold them accountable for reaching their goals.
Don’t wait until a package has ended to discuss renewing it.
If you sell packages with finite term lengths, the last thing you want is to lose training momentum due to the abrupt end of an agreement. Similar to inactivity, designate a specific threshold for remaining sessions. If your club’s remaining sessions threshold is five, then any client who has five or fewer sessions is an opportunity for renewal. Hitting this threshold should trigger reach outs specifically designed to discuss renewal options.
Touch base with canceled members.
Before you say it, yes. This article is about customer retention, so why discuss clients who canceled their training agreements? Because circumstances change, and you never know when a former client might be primed to become a renewed client.
If possible, maintain a list of former clients whose cancellations were due to temporary factors like a change of employment, new time commitments or an unexpected financial burden. Market to this list directly when you introduce new training programs or promotional rates. These clients have invested in your services once before and likely will again if presented with the right opportunity.
Get the right tools.
Reaching out to the right clients at the right time can eat up valuable time and energy. Investing in sales software is a great way to reduce your manual workload. The right software will enable you to automate reach outs, track inactivity and alert you to sales opportunities.
By Club OS. For more tips on boosting personal training revenue, download our free Personal Training Sales Guide!
