While leisure operators can generate interest and build an audience fairly easily, the challenge is converting an audience into a paying, engaged community – and keeping them there.

With the right strategy, you can increase your membership retention rates and member satisfaction, helping you get the most from your members.

That’s why XN Leisure has put together a five-step process that helps operators appeal to their current (and potential) members and improve their business’ member retention.

1. Interact with your members

Member retention starts in your facility, so while it’s important to try to engage new members, making sure your current ones are happy and likely to stay with you is arguably more important to your bottom line.

According to a recent TRP whitepaper, 68 per cent of all interactions with members led to a subsequent visit within seven days of the recorded interaction, exemplifying that engagement with members results in more visits and a longer membership lifespan.

Putting a robust communications strategy in place – including training staff on in-house communications – can help to increase membership retention and keep members coming back to your gym or leisure centre.

2. Build an online community

Once you’ve put a good in-house communications strategy in place, it’s important to branch out and include online communications.

Any membership-based organisation relies on great member engagement to attract and retain customers.

The problem is that engagement isn’t a one-way street, meaning that businesses must actively seek out potential members and make the effort of interacting with them.

Fortunately, social media is more popular and more accessible nowadays than it ever has been before. With ready-built digital platforms waiting for you to use to interact with your member base, you don’t even need to worry about building your own software.

A business that creates content that is valuable and informative makes themselves available for questions and conversations, and offers advice to their followers is one that is definitely going to increase member rates.

You can also host events and other face-to-face opportunities to engage with members.

3. Keep your members motivated

If members don’t feel that they’re getting good results for the money, time, and effort they put in, they might cancel their membership.

This is particularly true for gyms and leisure centres, as often members have specific goals in mind, such as losing weight, having more energy and feeling happier.

To combat possible attrition, make sure your members feel motivated and enthused throughout their membership experience.

In fact, a recent TRP survey shows that if a member makes any perceived progress using your facilities, they are 10 per cent less likely to cancel their membership per area of improvement, such as losing weight, having more energy, and feeling happier.

4. Encourage group workouts

TRP has also found that members who made a friend in the last three months were 40 per cent less likely to cancel their membership compared to members who did not.

Group exercise classes can help to introduce members to new exercises, new motivation channels, and importantly, to each other.

Fostering a sense of community can help you retain your members for longer, which in turn can increase your profitability.

Other studies have also backed up the importance of group exercise classes. The risk of cancelling has been shown to be 56 per cent higher in gym-only members compared to group exercisers, which means that more gyms and leisure facilities should be facilitating and encouraging group exercise classes and leisure communities.

5. Create a seamless membership experience

Making, creating and managing a membership as easy and quick as possible is also a sure-fire way to increase membership retention and conversion.

Booking classes, paying debts, viewing receipts and managing membership options could be accessible from one central place without having to visit multiple websites.

Making memberships easy for customers shows that you're dedicated to the member experience, and also saves them time, effort and frustration. Xn Leisure believes this is likely to bring long-term benefits to your profits.

Offering online bookings alone increase profits, since online bookings are more convenient and popular than face-to-face or over-the-phone bookings and will encourage more engagement and retention, with more members signing up for classes and staying with their leisure provider for longer.

Xn Leisure’s Leisure Hub platform is the very first totally unified solution in the leisure market. This innovative piece of software is claimed to drastically improve customer service and reduce administration costs and time.

What’s more, Xn Leisure partners with TRP to provide integration to the TRP suite of products.

For a limited time, Xn customers can benefit from 25 per cent off TRP setup and training costs when signing up by 31 December 2020.

For more information on the TRP and Xn integrations, or details of the offer, please email [email protected].