MyWellness Challenge - October - Classy!

A Class based challenge is ideal for October. The weather is starting to turn, you've got a bunch of new members who joined in September, as well as a few returners. So get them, as well as all your regular members involved in your fitness classes!

If your class timetable is full, now's the time to add a couple more classes. If not, the Class Challenge will fill it up for you.

What does LIW stand for?

Having worked in the banking industry where exhibitions and conferences were very professional but also very overindulgent (all inclusive party on an aircraft carrier in San Fransisco bay anyone?), Leisure Industry Week has always felt more understated.

Technogym Client Workshop - 14th Sept 2015

It was great to present to Technogym’s customers (and a couple of prospects) this week on the subject of Keeping Your Active Members Active. We often focus so much on engaging new members as they join, and on re-motivating ex-members, that it’s important to remember that if you keep all your active members active, then you’ll not have any absentees!

The GGFit presentation focused on three key areas: programme reviews, other member interactions, and challenges. You can review the full Prezi here, or check out the programme review advice in this blog post.

Other presenters on the day included John Stuart from Bounts, who talked about inspiring, rewarding and tracking members and then Martin Perry from Technogym who tied together how the MyWellness Cloud apps can help to keep your members active and motivated.

Forget Exercise Plateau, make Programming Achievable

How often should you be trying to review your member’s programmes? The “industry standard” of every 6-8 weeks is often unachievable, unless you are running a small, bespoke service gym where everyone gets a PT session once a month (in which case, you almost certainly have great member retention!)

MyWellness Challenge - September - Calorie Burn

In September, everyone's getting back into their routines, keen to work off those summer indulgences, or may even be joining your club for the first time, so you need a simple motivating challenge accessible to all. It's time for a Calorie Challenge!

The calorie burner is a great way of setting an inclusive challenge that will appeal to many of your members. It helps them to focus on what they're putting into their workouts, and will hopefully help them to get better results too...

Profile App for Ex-member engagement

A couple of years ago, we ran a series of posts looking at how clubs are using Technogym's Profile App (aka Aspiration Finder) to improve their members' experiences.  You can read the full Profile series here, but we want to offer another post on how Profile can be used to engage with ex-members...

Send out a link to your club's MyWellness Profile page to your ex-member database. This could be linked into a survey or other mailshot, or just an offer to use this great tool to find out what motivates them.

Ex-member Rewards & Incentives. Get them back in...

Following our previous post about contacting ex-members, we want to know how you reward your ex-members, or get them back into the club. "No re-join fee" won’t cut it here (unless you’re doing something very innovative).

We’re interested in how you coax a previous member to make another visit, or what you use to encourage them to complete a quick survey. You probably don’t want to give away an iPad, and giving one ‘lucky’ re-joiner a year’s free membership means they have to rejoin to be able to win… which might be a little pushy, or too ‘strings attached’. Here are some ideas to get you started.

How to re-engage your Ex-members

August is a great time to try to re-engage with your ex-members. We know that September is the second peak joining month (after January), so now’s the time to put your club in the front of people’s minds with a compelling ex-member campaign.

The ex-member database is a vastly under-utilized resource at many clubs. We find that most ex-members (over 50%) are not currently exercising, and they all know your club, so asking them to re-join will yield results, and ROI is clear compared to trying to recruit new members.

What works for you? The (Programme) Review

Results are a key factor in retaining members, which is why the review (or programme review) is a key interaction in keeping members active.

But the review is often feared, both by members and instructors, in the same way as the performance appraisal in the workplace. Instructors are worried that a member won’t have achieved the results they wanted, and the member (who is also worried they've let the instructor down), and/or that the instructor’s goal is going to increase the intensity of their workout.

Here are three things you can do to make the (programme/exercise) review work better for everyone, and make this critical member interaction happen more often and more effectively in your club:

MyWellness Challenge - August - Team Workout

This August, get your members working as a team to push themselves a little more while the gym is quieter, and help them achieve their individual goals by competing for their favourite instructor.

A Team, yesterday

Team workouts are great ways of getting your instructors talking to members to persuade them to join their team, and then make sure they're visiting regularly and logging their workouts. A simple prize like a day off for the winning instructor is a good motivator, you could also give some of the top performers spot prizes or select a winner at random from the top 10 in the winning team.