You’ve sent a welcome message – what next?

So you've sent the welcome message, said thank you and congratulations to your new member for making such an excellent decision to join your club. Now it's time to get them engaged. 

Different clubs use different approaches… some do nothing! Here are some examples of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to tell if your members are engaged during month one of their membership. Each engagement measure can trigger different messages to be sent.

How successful is your induction process?

And could it be improved??

Here’s a simple measure: - how many members joined last month, and how many of them attended a gym induction? Say 100 joined, and 60 of them had an induction… well done, you have a 60% or 6:10 induction rate.

Making your new members regular

We want to ensure as many new members as possible make the minimum visits in their first month. What is the minimum you ask? Good question: - here’s three ways of setting the minimum…

A Class Act in Month One

How many of your members visit a fitness class in month one? This is much easier to measure than first month visits. While it's not as effective a KPI as visits, and you're unlikely to hit 100%, you should be aiming for 100%.

Thank Yous & Congratulations! Why are new member communications so important

We've been focusing a lot lately on absentees and how you can get recently absent members back into the club. But as we approach the New Year, we want to ensure all of your new members are engaged and stick around as long as possible.

The face-to-face interaction such as a good welcome session and setting goals with a new member are really key (for a full service club) to engage with new members. It's also critical to get the new member communication journey right, whether you're running a traditional or budget club. There are loads of reasons why, here are our top three. Please add yours in the comments below, and we'll include them next month:

Say Thanks and Congratulations

The new member has just bought something from you. So say thank you.

Is our attrition good?

Part of the GGFaqs series: We’ve had a few questions asking if a club’s member attrition (rate of dropout) is good, and this is always an interesting topic for discussion. What most operators want to know is whether they are better than average…

Attrition rate is defined as:
The average number of members per thousand who cancel every month.

Firstly, there’s always some debate as to whether attrition is relevant. Attrition is a good measure because you can look at it regularly (say monthly) and get a gauge on performance. However, it can also be affected or skewed by a good sales month, as this increases the total members used to calculate the attrition percentage.

BeatBoxing in Wokingham - Getting more people active

Wokingham is regularly voted as one of the best/healthiest/happiest places to live, but over the last month, we've been a lot more active. This is thanks to MyJourney, a great initiative that has its roots back in pilot schemes that ran in South London a few years ago. The inspirational and brilliant Dr William Bird and team at Intelligent Health are behind the project.

Social Media for retention?

We've been really surprised by discussions and questions* at LIW and other events over the last couple of weeks about social media about how clubs should use social media for retention. 

Social Media is a useful marketing tool for clubs looking to engage and interact more with members, and while it is possible to run targeted social media marketing campaigns, sending targeted retention messages is practically impossible, and certainly not as cost effective as sms, email or direct mail.

LIW 2014 - highlights

This year’s Leisure Industry Week is smaller again, having moved to hall 1 at the NEC, with a few companies noticeably absent from the exhibition, and other industry players not attending even for meetings.

For GGFit, it is still one of the key events in the Leisure Industry calendar, bringing key partners, customers and prospects together for a ‘week’ to network, connect, share ideas, and do business. One thing is clear,

When is an absent member too absent?

How many absent members should we contact, or how dormant is too dormant?

A good question asked when we were speaking at the FitLinxx client seminar at the Lotus F1 facility recently… and a classic frequently asked question. To clarify, when we start contacting absent members, we begin sending messages from around 21 days’ absence (depending on the policy or journey we define with the club). We call these members recoverable. But what about members who are already absent for longer than this; the dormant members? How many of those should we contact?