Two in. One out. This is the gruelling reality for gyms up and down the country. Even though one in seven people in the UK possess a gym membership, gyms and health clubs lose around 50 per cent of their members each year.

Mired by an explosion of competition, retention is a nut than people can’t seem to crack. It costs between 5 and 25 times more to acquire a new member than retain one.

Leading revenue management solutions company, DFC, which manages payment collections for gyms up and down the country, believes the answer lies in better payment tracking and Direct Debits.

“The retention challenge isn’t something new, but we’ve certainly found ourselves having more conversations on it now than ever before,” said Ivan Stevenson, director at DFC.

“Direct Debits give everyone control. Fitness is a seasonal business. Spreading payments allows for peaks and troughs in income.

“We’ve worked tirelessly to develop cutting-edge Direct Debit technology that reduces churn.”

One such solution is DFCs online joining portal and 24-hour sales aid, FastDD.

“FastDD is about more than improving member acquisition. It’s about making the member journey simple in order to cement loyalty. The joining process takes just three-minutes end-to-end.”

Even credit control doesn’t have to be a manual process anymore. Another of their fantastic, state-of-the-art solutions is MyPayments - DFCs simple and secure way for customers to rectify defaulted payments online and track ongoing payments through their client’s website or app.

“46 per cent of customers across DFC’s service choose to pay through MyPayments due to its convenience and simplicity and approximately 50% have had success in stage one of the default process,” Stevenson added.