Gyms, studios and fitness
Anybody can sell a January membership. The business is decided in March, by how many of them are still turning up.
You run a gym, a boutique studio, a class business or a personal training operation. Members pay monthly, some of them come, and the ones who stop coming cancel about eight weeks later.
Sign ups look fine and the membership number is flat, which means you are buying people at roughly the rate you are losing them and nobody is measuring the second half of that sentence.
What we keep finding
Five things that decide whether a gym grows.
Retention is the whole business and almost every marketing conversation in this sector is about acquisition. These are the consequences.
Cost per join is known and cost per retained member is not
A channel that signs people cheaply and loses them in six weeks is more expensive than one that costs twice as much and keeps them a year. Without the second number the budget reliably goes to the wrong one.
The first two weeks decide the next two years and nobody watches them
Members who attend four times in their first fortnight stay far longer than those who attend once. That is a measurable, actionable thing and in most gyms nobody is reporting on it.
Churn is noticed at cancellation, which is eight weeks too late
People stop attending long before they stop paying. Attendance decay is the early warning and it is sitting unused in the access control system.
January is treated as a strategy
A quarter of the year's sign ups arrive in five weeks and a large share leave by April. Spending the entire budget on the easiest acquisition month and none on keeping those people is how a gym stays exactly the same size for three years.
Classes and gym floor are one product in the reporting
Class attenders and floor users have different retention curves, different values and respond to completely different advertising. Blending them produces an average member who does not exist.
Buy the member who is still here in March. It is a different person from the one who signs up fastest in January.
The only acquisition target worth having
What we measure here
The numbers a membership business runs on.
- Join, first attendance and fourth attendance as separate events
- Retention by cohort and by acquisition source, never as one blended curve
- Cost per member still active at ninety days, alongside cost per join
- Attendance decay used as a churn warning, weeks before a cancellation
- Class and floor membership separated, with their own values and campaigns
- Referral measured properly, because in this sector it is usually the best channel and the least funded
- Seasonal plan agreed in advance, with the January budget capped deliberately
The change
The same two channels, judged two ways.
These figures are illustrative rather than from a client, and the shape of them is what we find almost every time.
Judged on joins
- Channel A: 40 joins, cheapest per join
- Channel B: 18 joins, dearest per join
- Budget moves to A
- Membership total: unchanged by April
Judged on members at ninety days
- Channel A: 9 still active
- Channel B: 13 still active
- Budget moves to B
- Membership total: growing
Questions people ask
The ones that actually arrive.
Can you get attendance data out of our access system?
In most cases yes, and it is the single most valuable data source in the building. Door swipes, class bookings and check ins tell you who is leaving weeks before their bank does.
We are a small studio with sixty members.
Then the numbers are small enough to read by eye and you probably do not need us on a retainer. What is worth buying is a short piece of work to set up the measurement and show you what to look at monthly. We would rather sell you that.
Should we run a free trial?
Test it. Free trials raise sign ups and lower commitment, and a paid trial with a low price often produces fewer starts and better members. It is a clean experiment and worth running properly rather than deciding by opinion.
Our best channel is word of mouth and we cannot influence it.
You can, and it is usually the highest return work available. Referral is measurable if you give it a mechanism, and a gym that knows which members refer and when is in a much better position than one that hopes.
Proof
Zip VPN
Our own app, measured the way we would measure yours.
Our own app, and the closest real proof we have to a membership business: acquisition measured against whether anybody was still there a week later.
Read the case study- users a day
20,000
users a day
- events a day
300,000
events a day
- of users come back
20%
of users come back
Where this usually starts
Two pieces of work, in this order.
Businesses that sell the same way
Your turn
Bring the number you do not trust.
30 minutes. Most of these conversations start with somebody describing a report they have stopped believing.