Customer Retention Strategies to Level Up Your Personal Training Business
I don’t know about you, but have you ever felt like it’s really confusing to navigate the world of marketing? Like finding clients? Where do you find them online social media through friends, what’s the best way to get and keep clients. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the landscape of marketing, then you’re in the right place. Because today we’re going to talk about the two ways to get and keep clients, client acquisition, and client retention. And whether you know it or not, when you don’t have an endless amount of time and money, picking between those two might be the most important decision you make in your business.
Hi, I’m Peyton Hughes. I’m one of the owners of DiNozzo, I seven figure your fitness business that I helped to grow with my husband, that has a churn rate of under 3%. And through the 2020 crazy times, we have been able to survive and keep our entire team intact. And today, I want to tell you why the decision between client acquisition and client retention has played a strategic role in that, and why I think you’re gonna want to learn about how we did it. So first of all, marketing, if you’ve gone to any industry specific conference, if you’ve ever been targeted by Facebook ads, as a fitness professional, I’m willing to bet nine out of 10 of the speakers at the event are talking about marketing, lead generation, how to attract your ideal client etc. Or your Facebook ads are littering you full of messages that make you stressed out and overwhelmed just thinking about all the things they’re promising that you will get if you just sign up for this one thing, or just download this one thing, and it can be so much information. What if I told you that people are obsessing about the wrong data? What if instead of obsessing about the number of new clients, you landed every month, you obsessed about the number of clients you had to replace each month? See, the biggest problem I have in the fitness industry is that from an educational standpoint, or from any kind of service out there, it’s gonna teach you how to grow your business. Most of them skew heavily towards messaging, marketing, and sales. Super important as a business consultant for years before helping Michael build gym Nazo. And I always advocated for a strong sales system who wouldn’t that’s obviously intelligent, but not at the risk of assuming you already have a high quality service. And that’s the mistake I see a lot in the fitness industry making outside of the basic certifications. What else is out there? What else is really helping you hone in on your craft, create the intelligence, the training, the style, the programming, all the things that create a really winning strategy. And I ultimately think it comes down to how we prioritize client retention over client acquisition. You see, client acquisition is the sexy side. That’s the cool marketing. That’s the slick trick. That’s the magical pill side that goes hey, if you just have me two grand a month, I’ll hand you 30 Warm Bodies that you can train and transform. What they don’t tell you is that it’s gonna require you to use a super sleazy sales script, arm wrestle them to get on the phone, going back and forth 30 times until you guilt trip them enough to pick up your call. All they really want is free stuff. And then you feel really weird selling them into a package, you know, isn’t quite right for them, because they weren’t right for you to begin with. I’m not saying every lead acquisition system out there is like this, I’m just saying quite a few are and quite a lot of trainers feel like that’s going to be their secret sauce to hitting six figures, multiple six figures, seven figures. Well, I’m here to tell you as someone who is not a marketer, like I’m not, I did not grow a business by being a really slick marketer. I could write a good email or two, maybe you can too. You want to know how we built our business. It’s not very sexy, but it works. And if you’re interested in what works, you’re gonna be interested to hear this. It was through word of mouth marketing. It was by obsessing so hard on making the clients that we had have the best experience with us create raving fans out of them, that they almost become many ambassadors around the community, in their family, with their friends and their Circles, that we didn’t need to spend very much money on marketing. And that’s what I advocate for. So between client acquisition, or retention, I want to sum it up with one glorious analogy using a red bucket. So this red bucket, let’s just pretend this red bucket represents your business, the clients the money, all the things that you’re working really hard to get in your business. client acquisition is all about how many streams or how big of waterflow, can you get into this bucket. So that new bodies in will be the game like just we don’t care how good they are necessarily, I
mean, any good salesperson will go, we do care. But a lot of what I’m seeing out in the market is less discerning than that. So just filling the bucket full of water. That’s the goal. So in theory, you fill it up faster than you lose water, and that gets you money or client. Whereas the client, and that’s client acquisition, client retention is all about, oh, how many holes do I have at the bottom of my bucket? How big are those holes? And how do I strategically close the gap so that no matter how strong the flow of new clients is into the bucket, I’m losing a lot less. That’s client retention. This is client acquisition, I believe you need both. But I think if you have to pick where to spend the most time and energy, it should absolutely be client retention. So that when you do that, right, you can go after client acquisition and nail it. Fill up that bucket and more buckets like it. So let’s talk about how you can do that. Before I begin, why should you listen to me? Outside of the fact I’ve already said I’m not a marketer, and that might make you go wah, wah, okay. But listen to this. Most of the people marketing to you telling you you just need warm bodies in your business are not in the trenches with you building a business. I am building a business. Yes, it hit seven figures last year, and it’s still holding strong in 2020. But I am just beginning on that side of our business. What I’m obsessed with now is helping you learn the secrets that we’ve come up with to do that. And some of them are awesome, super cool, sexy secrets, like pain modification on the fly. And other things seem boring, and just consistent because guess what boring and consistent works overtime. So here’s what I want to share with you today. Something why you should listen to me is while most of the industry is really excited and measure success around having 10% of their our of their membership be a churn rate, our churn rate is 10%, meaning that at the beginning of the month, they have X number of clients and compared to the end of the month, most gyms, personal trainers, etc, have less over time, the question is how much less and that’s the number you want to think about. As much as you want to obsess about how many new clients you have. We all know you can have 20 new clients. But if you lose 18 Every month, that sucks, I don’t even care what’s going something’s going on between those two numbers. That’s, that’s not sustainable, because you’re paying for all those new leads to come into your business. That’s not sustainable, you know what is sustainable, adding five new clients and keeping four, that’s actually a better long term strategy than only hanging on to two clients every month, even though you get 20 people in the door. So when we compare churn rates, the good industry or gym in our industry would be 10% Roughly turn rate they’re replacing 10% of their members every month, and growing from there, at Janaza, we’re less than 3%. Every month, obviously, that data is pre COVID. But since COVID, we still have 85% of our active members paying full price. And we are now seven months into 2020. And so this is what I’m talking about retention really wins the long game, if you can put your effort into the least talked about side of your business and shore that up really focusing on the quality of what you offer. You won’t need as many warm bodies through the door to burn through enough clients to land in a healthy place in your business. And most of us in fitness got in because we love fitness and we love helping others. And we love adding value to people’s lives so it doesn’t feel good. No matter how much how many new clients we get. We don’t feel good. If we lose a bunch of them. Period. We can sit there and and that’s the thing about data. You can focus on any data you want. It all tells a story. But if you only obsess about leads, you’re missing out on the quality that you’re providing. those leads. So one of the ways you can do that is by obsessing about retention. And we do that in four ways. And so if you want to take notes, now’s the time to take notes. The first way is to build sustainable training. From a programming standpoint. The second way is to build a system of services that set up to keep the client through the cycles and ebbs and flows of their active life satisfied paying you and getting something from your expertise. The third way is obsessing about service. Oh, yes, customer service, and really thinking through every minute of their experience with you, how are they being prioritized, valued and cared for? And the fourth set is the force point is, how are you educating yourself or your trainers, if you have more than one of you to be able to provide real time clients specific custom modifications that work? If you can do those four things, you will set yourself apart of most of trainers, unfortunately, and fortunately, our industry is fairly unrelated, regulated, meaning that you can be as good as you want to be. But you might be the only one. That’s good. That’s not totally true. There’s plenty that are, but they are holding themselves to a high standard versus everyone collectively agreeing on some standards. And so let’s dive into these. First of all, when it comes to sustainable training, our secret sauce has been how do we reduce the number of workout related injuries because we’re not ignorant and neither are you doesn’t matter how good of a trainer you are, somebody at some point is going to do something that they’re going to kind of limp out of the session with. And as much as we can minimize those experiences, the better the way we found, start baking it into the actual workouts themselves. Things like warm ups, things like cooldowns. And best of all, blending recovery with performance into the actual workout. So that you’re giving your clients what they want, which is really good sweat and what they need, which is some restoration, which they will not do at home on their own. We know therapists know, everybody knows people don’t do their homework, they if you can’t give it to them in that session, they are unlikely to do what is prescribed. Alright, the second way that you can obsess about retention is to look at the services that you offer. Do you have something for if somebody feels like they’ve been pushing themselves too hard, and they just want to kind of taper in their exercises, you might say, Gosh, that’s ridiculous and so unmotivated, I can’t imagine somebody would do that I would just motivate them to dive in. There is a time and a place for that. But there are cycles to people’s abilities to do things, there’s things going on in their personal life, they may have lost a loved one. And now they want to like channel something else in their workout, they might have a nagging shoulder pain that they do not want to go get surgery for or go and get checked out. But they still are coming to you with cash in hand expecting you to find something that works for them. Are you going to do that or not? I believe and what we’ve done sustainably has been to tailor one on one training to be solving problems or reaching specific micro goals. And then when we’ve done that, moving them into what we call a semi private model, which is for custom workouts for for custom people, obviously, and one trainer, facilitating those workouts in real time at a fraction of the one on one cost to the client, and definitely an increase in the total value to the business. And the next one would be group training. And we’ve tiered it in three different group training levels on introductory level, not because it’s so basic, but because it’s about little to no impact, for example. So if you are, have more weight to sustain, and you don’t want to over overstressed your joints, that’s a great place for people in general fitness concept. Then you go to more of the intermediate, then you go to the more advanced, more competitive, who has the leaderboard types, those that really want to crush their workout and can physically do so by building out all those services. We’ve created an ecosystem of services. And that has served us very, very well. The third thing we’ve done is obsess about creating a five star service. This is something that I believe our industry has, of course very varying standards on but we spent time with Ritz Carlton and we spent time going to five star resorts, restaurants, anything we could get our hands on not because we just love luxury, although it was a kind of a nice perk of the business but it was reconnaissance because we want it to go, what actually makes us feel special? And how can we replicate that into fitness, because people will pay and come back for experiences that make them feel valued and important, and have that sense of belonging. If you can create that intentionally, in every single service that you offer, people are going to go, they’re just better. They’ve just make me feel better. I don’t even know what they’re doing differently. I just know, that’s the best workout I’ve had. Because they matter, they matter to you. And you’ve intentionally infused quality customer service wins in your entire experience. And the fourth thing you want to do, you need to invest in an accelerated and advanced skill set, the kind that allows you to intelligently modify strategically in real time in a group. So not just one on one, knowing what to do to navigate a tweak pain, how to work through pain, not just around pain, but we’re talking like in a group situation where there are multiple factors to pay attention to multiple histories to know and multiple strategies to implement, to figure out how to not bench your athlete in the workout and make them feel like they had to sit it out because they had a nagging ache and pain, they experienced that versus being able to move through their pain in a way that doesn’t impair them, put them into more risk of injury, but allows them to still get a sweat. They’re, they’re loyal to you and to those trainers. So it does take time. It’s not a simple magical, these 10 fixes will change everything for your client. But it’s the kind of skill set that I see trainers, mouths watering over. They’re like, I don’t know what you just did that was magical. How do I learn what you just did. So I can do that with my clients. And that’s the skill set that you want to invest time and money into. Because we know people hire coaches, not workout programs, your coaches really matter. So those are the four ways we’ve obsessed about client retention and why we believe when in a toss up, if we had to pick between client acquisition and client retention with the assumption that we already have clients to begin with, we would heavily biased towards retention, because there’s nothing better than having a bucket with very few holes, and then getting to focus on filling that bucket the most efficiently and quickly as possible. So that’s my talk around acquisition and retention. I hope you got something great out of this and encourage you to like and subscribe to this video channel because we love putting out videos like this and your support allows us to continue to do so. And we are continuing to add more value and give you a peek behind the scenes of what actually works in our business.
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