Can Personal Trainers Help to Improve Member Retention?

1 in 5 people says that personal trainers (PTs) are the most important factor when it comes to sticking with their exercise routines.

Personal training studios have an 80% average retention rate, compared to 71% for traditional health clubs.

A study from Stanford University showed that by receiving just one motivational phone call per week, gym members increased their activity levels by a sweat-inducing 78%.

The pros of personal trainers for your club

PTs help with motivation and incentives

Gym members often face a mental battle between the desire to work out and that little inner voice that tells them to binge box sets after a hard day’s work. But if they have a personal trainer they have another person to help keep them motivated and committed.

Often the mere fact that a person has made an appointment with someone else is enough to encourage them to keep their commitment to working out at the gym. And after the session, their trainer can ask them if they want to set up another appointment, ensuring that they attend regularly. This regular attendance makes it more likely that members will stick and not churn.

PTs get results faster

Often gym attendees can get demotivated because they’re putting in lots of effort but they’re not seeing the results they wanted. Having a personal trainer they can train with at your gym, will help them draw up realistic and attainable goals and will help ensure that their workouts are the most productive. This will give members a greater sense of personal achievement which will help them form positive associations to working out at your gym. This can be a very powerful factor when it comes to retaining your gym members for longer.

PTs increase member engagement

Research has shown that the more interactions gym goers have with staff the more likely they are to stay. It can be hard to coordinate this kind of engagement for individual members because it means tracking their attendance closely and allocating staff to interact with specific members (although you can use KeepMe to automate this process). So having personal trainers working at your gym means you will be giving members quality engagements with highly trained staff. This will have a positive impact on gym retention.

The cons of personal trainers for your gym

Cost

Let’s be honest, a lot of gym members are not willing to pay for additional personal training on top of their membership fees. Only the most dedicated gym members are going to fork out for personal training so you won’t necessarily be able to deliver retention on scale this way, although this is of course a great way to develop a small but loyal segment of customers.

Resources

There are lots of reasons why your gym might lack the resources to offer personal training. It might not be viable for your gym, and that’s ok. When it comes to increasing gym member retention there are lots of ways you can do this and using personal trainers is just one of them. Although if you can find the resources to offer this service it can really work wonders in terms of keeping members coming back for more.

Quality

A high-quality personal trainer can be an incredible asset for your gym and is a great way to retain customers and generate positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

But it can be hard to properly assess the quality of trainers and it takes a lot of time and know-how to pick the right candidate for the role. Some qualities to look for:

• They are an officially certified trainer

• They have great interpersonal skills

• They are genuinely interested in helping their clients

• They are confident and know exactly how to tailor fitness programs to suit your members

• They are self-dependent and reliable and won’t need to be heavily managed by your gym to ensure they deliver their services

This should give you an idea of the kind of qualities that are needed for your personal trainers to help improve gym retention. If you can’t ensure that you go through a thorough vetting process then using personal trainers in your gym may not be for you.

Do personal trainers help boost gym retention?

Despite the cons of personal trainers, there is no doubt that if you work with the right professionals they can do absolute wonders for membership retention.

If you’re considering this approach, why not try out a few PTs on short-term contracts and monitor how effective they are? If you do start using personal trainers, make sure you tell all your members about them and how working with PTs can transform the quality of their workouts and make them more motivated. It will do wonders for your fitness retention rates.

Want to see how improving gym retention can supercharge your revenue and improve your marketing ROI, book a Keepme demo today – it will be worth your while.