If you’ve ever dreaded opening your email inbox because you have a feeling there will be a few membership cancellation requests waiting for you, this post is for you. If your churn rate is slowly creeping up month after month, this post is also for you. And if your churn rate is escalating at an alarming rate, this post is especially for you.
Let’s face it: receiving a member’s request to cancel is undoubtedly one of the worst parts of owning a gym (besides chasing down declined credit cards, but that’s another post for another day). However, membership cancellations don’t have to feel like a sucker punch every time — instead, they can be a powerful tool used to improve your experience, facilities and staff. With a slight shift in perspective, you can actually use these cancellations as an opportunity to get unfiltered feedback about your business and identify common pain points for your members. But with an even bigger perspective adjustment, you can shift your strategy from being reactive to proactive and prevent cancellations before they hit your inbox.
The first step? Accept that turnover is inevitable: cancellations are going to happen. People cancel for a variety of reasons and often their motivation for doing so has little to do with you, no matter how personal it feels at the time (we say “don’t take it personally, but always handle it personally”). Let those “life change” cancellations come and go and respond with either excitement or empathy — whichever the situation calls for. But other cancellations are preventable if you’re paying attention. By recognizing early warning signs and intervening before they fully disengage, you can take back some control.
1. Attendance Dips or Drops Off
Members who miss multiple classes or days consecutively are much more likely to cancel.
2. Engagement Declines
Members who don’t participate in challenges, log on to the app, or attend events are less engaged with your community.
3. Account Changes
Sometimes members start the breakup process by asking to take a break first. If they request to freeze or downgrade their membership, they’ve likely already thought about canceling. Unreconciled credit card declines are another red flag. These red flags should come as no surprise to you, especially if you’ve been in the fitness industry for a while. The real challenge is having access to actionable data that’s easy to digest and identify trends. When you’re managing hundreds of trials and members, it’s easy to focus on the people who are showing up every day. “Out of sight, out of mind” can become a default mindset and that’s exactly how these early warning signs get overlooked or dismissed.
How to Go from Reactive to Proactive
The secret sauce to improving your customer retention? Pairing data with the art of personal connection.
We’ll start with a few key data points from SmartHealthClubs.com:
Wodify’s internal data indicates that members who check-in to your gym at least 11 times a month are 99% more likely to stay.
That means utilization matters, especially during the first few months. With that in mind, we recommend looking at member utilization reports on a weekly basis. We have a specific feature on our platform called Wodify Retain that’s designed to boost retention. Why? Because it’s significantly cheaper to retain a client than to acquire a new one. Wodify Retain leverages A.I. to create a unique algorithm to identify at-risk members. The algorithm takes into account data points such as attendance trends, performance records, membership duration and the date of their last check-in. From there, the personal connection piece kicks in. The feature generates a task list for owners, management or coaches to reach out and check in.
Our recommendation is that the owner personally reaches out or that a coach checks in. Either way, it should be someone the member is very familiar with. Coach check-ins can go a long way to make a person feel valued and missed. Depending on the response and situation, consider proactively offering options such as downgrading the membership or pressing pause on the membership. Providing flexible alternatives that fit a member’s current life circumstances can help prevent cancellations.
If the personal conversation attempt went unanswered, you can set up an auto-campaign that will deliver a series of emails designed to prompt a class booking. If you’re a Wodify customer, you have this capability within Workflows (we even have many of them built out for you!). If no action is taken, an email can be sent to the member laying out an option to freeze or downgrade their membership. This allows the member to feel seen and missed, but not pressured. It lets them know that we understand life happens and getting to the gym is hard, but we’re here to help.
With Wodify Retain, there is also the capability to run a daily report that highlights members who booked a class, but didn’t show up. This should prompt immediate outreach to check in on the member. When you know why they didn’t show for class, then you can choose whether or not to waive the no-show fee (if you have one).
Responding to a member’s situation with empathy rather than a penalty can be the difference between a client who feels supported and a client who wants to cancel.
With Wodify, the reporting, the communication and the automation can all be managed from one platform. For more ideas on how to use data to identify at-risk clients, book a free demo of Wodify Retain or visit our Insider’s Guide to Achieving Higher Retention.
