Despite 23% of Brits having an active gym membership, figures suggest that only 12% of these members are frequent users.

UK gym memberships have leapt up by 15% over the last five years, from 5.3 million members in 2014 to a significant 6.1 million in 2019.

However, we’ll spend more than £4 billion a year on unused memberships, some of which are then ultimately cancelled.

There are numerous reasons why people may choose to cancel, from unavoidable situations such as illness or relocation, down to preventable reasons like a lack of motivation.

When it comes to why people avoid going to the gym, as many as 22% feel intimidated to work out in front of others, 18% thought people were watching everything they did, and a further 22% found their experience boring. 

These are all situations that you can avoid with the right marketing strategy.

Why do members quit?

How can you combat cancellations?

Over 6 million Brits are now members of a private health and fitness club.

The latest research by Mintel reveals that health and fitness clubs are now one of the fastest-growing leisure segments, with 18% of UK adults currently a member compared to 15% in 2018, and total revenue estimated to have reached nearly £3.4 billion in 2019.

With this in mind, what are you doing to engage new prospects?

And once they’ve signed up, are you doing enough to retain your members?

Benefits of email marketing 

Save money – in comparison to traditional marketing, email is a much more cost-effective way of keeping in touch with your members and prospects throughout their customer journey.

Save time – automation means that emails can be scheduled at the perfect time. Whether it’s an auto-response to a question about your timetable, or a booking confirmation right after a class registration, today’s customers appreciate instant responses and your team will be freed up to focus on other tasks.

Reach clients no matter where or when – as long as people are connected online, they can receive your marketing emails and engage with your brand on various devices, such as: mobile, tablet and desktop.

Target members using personalisation – email marketing allows for greater scope when sending personalised marketing to your members. Everyone wants to receive content that speaks directly to their needs and interests.

From prospects looking to join to existing members wanting to take advantage of your special offers and classes, email marketing enables you to customise your message for every individual on your customer list.

What should you be sending?

Welcome new members with introductory emails, informing them of your opening hours, class timetables and membership policies.

Ask for referrals from loyal customers. You could offer incentives to increase the return you see from your referral marketing. 

Provide regular updates about your facility, changing timetables and any events you may be holding, such as a charity spinathon. 

Follow up at the end of free trials to gather feedback and encourage trial customers to convert into paying members.

Keep in touch after cancellations as these members could be won back when they are ready to get back into fitness. If you aren’t in touch with them, your competitors definitely will be.

Seasonal diet and exercise tips to keep members engaged and showcase your knowledge.

Exclusive deals and discounts to incentivise members and prospects.

Have you started thinking about your March send plan?

Each month, we provide our leisure customers with an inspirational send plan that they can adapt to suit their business and send to their members. For more information, book a free, no-obligation consultation.

£283,659 marketing return in four weeks

Sport Sheffield and their exceptional Return on Investment – download the testimonial for more details.

As a university leisure centre, Sport Sheffield have a consistent pipeline of customers and leads, with approx. 30,000 students per year.

Whilst faced with challenges common to the industry, such as disruption from new models and market saturation, they’re also faced with lower attendance rates during non-term time.

For Sport Sheffield, implementing a strong digital marketing strategy with BriefYourMarket.com has been a business priority over the last five years.

With an average email open rate that’s twice the industry average, and £283,659 generated from one quarter, Sport Sheffield have succeeded to employ digital marketing to their advantage.

The health and fitness market has evolved considerably in the last decade. Following the emergence of low-cost and no contract gyms, leisure spending from consumers aged 18-34 shows increased fluctuation.

For businesses that use the traditional contract model, it’s crucial to appeal to an audience who are increasingly drawn to flexibility over long-term commitments.

Limited time offers are just one of the techniques that can achieve this purpose, particularly when delivered ahead of peak periods. Another tactic is targeted marketing to your most engaged contacts, as they’ll be the easiest to convert.

However, not every business will have such a clearly defined and niche target audience; with Sport Sheffield’s memberships largely made up of university students, staff and alumni.

Strategic marketing practices require an understanding of your target audience and competitors, with reporting suites like BriefYourMarket.com’s dashboard key to defining your unique ‘best time to send’ and locating your hottest prospects.

The millennial generation are willing to pay more for classes that are engaging, specialised with smaller class numbers, and tailored to their fitness goals.

Another key driver for millennials is brand alignment – does this product or service feed into their self-image and lifestyle?

For Sport Sheffield, they have a defined brand message to convey; that they are advocates for student well-being.

By tapping into the benefits of exercise beyond physical gain – e.g. boosts in productivity, self-esteem and mental health – they generated 581 sign-ups from this campaign.

Content marketing is not about being heavy-handed with your sales message. Instead, you should comment on key topics of interest for your members in a persuasive and memorable way.

Having a defined identity gives you a boundless supply of content and a strategic differentiator against your competitors. It’s what keeps new members signing up and your existing ones from quitting.

The features behind BriefYourMarket.com

“We use BriefYourMarket.com’s automated emails for reminders for people just coming out of their annual contracts, which seems to work really well. We get a good return rate on members receiving those emails.

Communications Managed has also been really good for us.

We used them last September due to staffing changes at the time, so it filled a gap for our marketing and gave us something different in terms of content – we’d definitely think about using it again in the future.

At the moment, we’re following up on the emails on a regular basis to identify leads. We have a routine, so we know where our peaks and troughs are during the week and target our emails around those where we can.

Whilst there’s certainly more that we could do with targeting specific people from our emails, we find the Return on Investment dashboard really useful.

We’ll quite often have a look at that and see how each campaign’s doing and which one’s performed better than others.”

Marketing and the GDPR

“Before the GDPR set in, we had our best year ever using BriefYourMarket.com.

The regulation then came into effect, which as we’re part of the University of Sheffield, meant that we obviously took quite a strong stance on the GDPR and didn’t send any marketing at all to our staff or students.

So, that year after its implementation, we saw an impact on our bottom line.

In 2019, with new system features like the Return on Investment dashboard and a different approach from the university, we have clawed back that deficit by a considerable margin.

We’re still not up to our 2017 levels, but we’re pretty up on last year so BriefYourMarket.com’s had a particularly big effect this year.

Having the system has helped us to take advantage of what we can now do with the GDPR.”

Lee Beckett | Sport Sheffield

The most successful leisure operators are the ones who optimise location, occasion and channel. So, how are you applying these elements to your own fitness facility and service?

For more information on applying a bespoke nurture-marketing journey for your members, click below to book your consultation.

Now that the ‘new year, new me’ mentality has faded, what’s your strategy to boost attendance?

Known in the leisure industry as Quitters’ Day, January the 12th is the fateful date when the majority of Brits will break their New Year’s resolution, and give up on their ‘new year, new me’ goals.

Gyms and fitness businesses are amongst those with the highest churn rate, with an estimated 50% of members leaving each year – either to go elsewhere or stop working out altogether.

What are you doing to combat high cancellations and low attendance this month?

February should be filled with incentives and tips to help new members feel more confident and motivated to reach their goals. To help our customers achieve their objectives, we’ve prepared four recommended campaigns that capitalise on key calendar moments and industry statistics.

“BriefYourMarket.com allowed us to smoothly move from paper-based communications to digital with little to no effort.

Over the last year, the support we have received from them has been excellent, and we are expanding our marketing options after each conversation we have with them.”

Each month, we prepare a content marketing plan just for leisure owners. These inspirational campaigns are designed to increase your brand awareness, generate you more membership sign-ups and influence higher retention in 2020.

Get in touch to find out how much additional revenue you could capitalise on from a pre-prepared monthly send plan.

National and global sporting events go hand-in-hand with spikes to the UK leisure industry. For example, Britain’s Olympic success in 2012 led to a record increase in sports participation with an additional 750,000 new members and a £19 billion boost to the economy.

In 2019, we’re seeing Brits taking on more active lifestyles, with an overall spend of £129 billion on leisure activities just last year.

International Olympic Committee (IOC) President, Thomas Bach, recently revelled at the promise of diversity that the Tokyo 2020 Olympics will bring, claiming that it will be “more youthful, more urban and will include more women”.

As a leisure provider, you have the ability to increase your members’ activity and help them to achieve their fitness goals, and all that’s needed is a marketing strategy that taps into some of the year’s key sporting events.

Tap into game day marketing opportunities

Whilst opinions are divided on the long-term effect that events like the Olympics may have on overall sports participation, with many countries showing a dramatic decline post-event, it’s up to the individual facility to increase its own membership engagement.

During major sporting events, offer unique membership promotions, discounts or classes, with topical campaigns that encourage positive brand affiliations or a new take on the importance of exercise.

There’s also a diverse range of activities that you could introduce to your class schedule, encouraging participants to try something new.

For example, if you have the space to hold football coaching, promoting this around the World Cup or Premier League is likely to gain your business more attention.

Or, given that indoor cycling is believed to be the most popular form of group exercise, why not encourage your members to attempt bicycle-led fitness sessions?

Whatever you decide to do to tap into the potential of the latest competitions and matches, make sure it’s well publicised across your online and offline marketing channels to really give your business the leading edge.

As the days start to grow shorter and the nights darker, six in ten Brits would rather curl up in front of the TV than hit the gym, with one in five cutting down on exercise altogether.

Autumn may bring to mind connotations of warm, cosy evenings spent at home, but for gym and fitness operators, this ‘hibernation’ attitude can lead to a significant drop in attendance and membership rates.

Connect with your members all year round

To reduce your membership churn rate, you need to adopt a consistent stay-in-touch policy with your customers.

With automated marketing, this would mean sending emails and print campaigns based on their recent activity or behaviour, such as: last log in, attendance and overall brand engagement.

As we get closer to the new season, you’ll find that more and more of your members will start doing the following: