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4 Ways to Guarantee Your Fitness Leads Visit Your Gym a Second Time

4 Ways to Guarantee Your Fitness Leads Visit Your Gym a Second Time

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One of the biggest challenges for fitness studio owners is getting your fitness leads to convert into full, paying members. If you own a gym, your main goal is to figure out a proven way to get new visitors back into your location again.

We’ve worked with over 130 fitness studios in the past 11 months, and we’ve learned some awesome strategies. These strategies will guarantee that your fitness leads come back to work out a second time. Read on:

Call Fitness Leads Back

The reason fitness leads usually don’t purchase a membership to your gym the very first time they visit is trust… or rather, a lack thereof. Just like with any other relationship, it takes a while to build rapport between the two of you. So help this potential new member feel comfortable making that decision to purchase.

If you want fitness leads to come back, show them that you want them there. Call them the day after their first visit to ask how they liked it. Email them to let them know what classes are coming up that they might be interested in.

And be prepared to have a few of these conversations! 80% of sales happen somewhere between the 5th and 12th contact. So, it’s really important that you stay in front of them after their first workout. This can also include text messaging.

If you call and get sent to voicemail, hang up and call them back right away. I talked about this strategy, and all things fitness studio sales and marketing at Opex:

Hold Their Spot

Some group fitness classes come with size limits, especially for workouts that use equipment (like spin, pilates, or TRX). Popular time slots for these classes tend to fill up quickly and accumulate waiting lists. So someone who reserves a spot in class but doesn’t show up can sometimes prevent another person — who might be even more interested in your studio — from participating.

The best way to prevent this is to keep a credit card on file for each of your fitness leads who schedules, similar to how hotels do reservations. The card holds their spot in class, but if they don’t show up or if they cancel within a specified number of hours before the class start time, you can charge them a small fee. This encourages them to show up and avoid being charged.

Schedule Future Visits

Another way to get a new visitor back for their second workout s to schedule out the remainder of their trial on their first visit. Liberty Harper, one of the fitness studio owners we work with, does this at her location, and she’s seen seriously great results from it. She tells us how to manage that conversation with fitness leads in The GSD Show:

As Liberty explains in this clip, people are more likely to show up for future visits when you plan them out ahead of time because the expectation is already set. You’ve taken the work out of planning, and they don’t want to disappoint you after you’ve put in the effort. All they have to do is show up.

Then, once your fitness leads show up for a second session, you’ve already overcome one of the biggest obstacles they see when deciding whether or not to sign up with you — you’ve shown them they DO have room in their schedule to work out multiple times a week.

Give Fitness Leads Variety… and Value

A huge part of working out and getting the motivation to go to a studio is finding a routine that actually keeps people interested. So when you schedule a new visitor’s upcoming workouts at your location, mix it up. If the first day’s workout is pretty arms-centric, focus on legs the next day. You can also include warm-ups and cool-downs, do different activities each time to keep their muscles guessing. It also helps to play music during class, you can even take song requests. Adding variety to the workout experience keeps them interested enough to come back again.

On top of that, be sure  to highlight whatever makes your studio unique during someone’s first workout. This might include complimentary equipment, like bike shoes, towels, or water bottles. It could even be a free body fat assessment, or an analysis that sends them their workout results — like calories burned, heart rate, and so on — after their session. Find something that works for your studio, because 74% of buyers purchase from the company that was first to add value.

These are the strategies that have worked best for getting fitness leads to show up a 2nd time by the fitness studios we work with. If you choose to implement them at your gym, we’d love to hear your results!

By the way, if you really want more help in this area, checkout out this definitive sales guide I created for you:

sales strategy definitive guide click image

Loud Rumor
Loud Rumor

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