Measuring Retention

We hope you’ve been reading Melvyn Hillsdon’s retention series in Health Club Management about outlining your retention strategy and measuring effectiveness. The articles help to demystify retention calculus, setting out four measurements:

• Member Retention
• Member Attrition
• Membership Length
• Dropout Risk

Using some or all of these metrics, and setting clear targets is the key to improvement. As long as you measure consistently, you can check on progress.
You will need a system to measure effectiveness, but it doesn’t have to be a high tech computer based tool; a system could be a spreadsheet or a list. The secret to a successful system is to get the buy-in from the people using it and feedback the results.

HCM July 09 p37 – member retention
HCM Sept 09 p45 – member retention part 2
HCM April 09 p69 – retention software

More next time on member contact and communications.