Member retention has always been a top priority. While attracting new members is crucial, it should never compromise the experience of existing ones. Achieving record new member sign-ups is meaningless if a gym simultaneously experiences record cancellations, resulting in an unstable and unsustainable membership base. Long-term members offer significantly more value than an equivalent number of new members.
This blog focuses on the worst-case scenario: a lost member. Specifically, we’ll explore what can be done about membership cancellations. As anyone in the fitness industry knows, cancellations take many forms. We will examine these different types, the reasons behind them, and what independent gym and fitness club owners can do to address them.
What will we cover in this article?
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Understanding Why Your Members Cancel
To solve a problem, you must first understand it. To effectively address membership cancellations, we must first define what we mean by the term. “Cancellation” can encompass various reasons, from burnout and financial strain to illness and lifestyle changes.
Understanding the different types of cancellations is crucial for asking the right questions. As the Ashbourne system emphasizes, data and feedback are essential. The insights gained from departing members can be invaluable for improving retention. While high cancellation rates can signal systemic problems, it’s important not to overreact to normal turnover. There are enough challenges in the fitness industry without misinterpreting routine churn as a deeper issue.
While it’s obvious that new memberships should exceed cancellations, the reality is often more complex. Therefore, what questions should independent gym owners ask cancelling members? What feedback should we gather from this crucial stage of the membership lifecycle? And most importantly, how can we ensure this information is easily collected and utilised?
What Are The Reasons A Member Might Cancel?
1. Contract/Membership Plan Ending
Members may choose not to renew when their existing contract expires. This could be due to price changes, the expiration of introductory offers, or simply a change in their purchasing habits.
2. Change in Economic Circumstance
Increasingly, members cite financial constraints as the reason for cancelling. Gathering feedback can reveal whether this is due to broader economic conditions or if the gym’s pricing is misaligned with the local market.
3. Location/Routine Shifts
Changes in lifestyle, such as moving, returning to the office, or switching to remote work, can lead to cancellations. This is an important factor to track, as it’s often outside the gym’s control. Increased mobility and changing work environments contribute to this trend.
4. Medical/Lifestyle/Schedule Changes
Similar to relocation, these changes are important to document, as they typically don’t negatively affect the gym. However, injuries, illnesses, and other personal circumstances can necessitate cancellations.
5. Motivation/Enthusiasm
Cancellations due to lack of motivation are a key area of focus for gyms. Unlike medical or location-based reasons, this is something the gym can actively address.
6.Dissatisfied with the Gym/Poor Experience
This is perhaps the most critical category. Feedback from members citing issues with the gym itself requires careful attention. While hopefully infrequent, this data provides invaluable insights into potential gym operations problems. Asking the right questions can reveal specific areas for improvement.
Beware of The Silent Quitters!
Despite the many reasons for cancellations above, there is one type of cancellation that is puzzling for all independent gym owners… silent quitters!
Silent quitters, those members who simply stop attending without any formal cancellation or communication, present a unique challenge for gyms. Unlike members who provide feedback upon leaving, silent quitters offer no direct insight into their reasons for departure. This lack of information makes it difficult to identify potential problems within the gym’s services, facilities, or overall experience that may be contributing to attrition. While some level of silent quitting may be unavoidable due to personal circumstances unrelated to the gym, a high number of these “ghosting” members can indicate underlying issues that need to be addressed to improve retention.
What questions should independent gyms ask departing members to understand the reasons for cancellation?
While our typical focus is on member retention, we’ll now shift our attention to the most effective questions independent gyms and fitness clubs can ask departing members. As previously discussed, a member leaving doesn’t automatically signify a failure or mistake on the gym’s part. However, it’s crucial to determine if that’s the case. For example, if a gym’s monthly report shows 50 departures, it could be cause for concern. But if they know 40 of those departures were due to factors outside their control, they can then focus their attention on the remaining 10.
Based on feedback from independent gym and fitness club owners and managers nationwide, we’ve compiled some popular questions they use to gather valuable data.
Cancellation Reason: This crucial question allows for the categorisation of cancellations. As discussed, a cancellation due to health reasons requires less investigation than one stemming from a negative experience. Placing this question first maximises accurate responses and allows for efficient sorting of feedback, enabling gyms to quickly identify areas needing further attention versus those outside their control.
Summary of Membership Experience: Following categorisation, this question explores both positive and negative aspects of the member’s experience. While understanding reasons for leaving is essential, capturing positive feedback is equally valuable. This is a prime opportunity to learn what the gym did well, as member feedback can be difficult to obtain.
Staff Experience: Staff play a significant role in the member experience. This question determines whether staff interactions contributed to or mitigated the decision to leave.
Improvement Opportunities: This question invites feedback on potential improvements, such as new equipment, classes, or facilities. While it’s impossible to satisfy everyone, compiling frequently requested improvements can effectively gauge local demand and member sentiment.
Visits Per Week: This metric helps identify patterns among departing members. For example, if most cancelling members visited five times a week, it could indicate dissatisfaction among a specific segment, such as those affected by peak hours.
Possibility of Returning (and Criteria): While answers to previous questions often suggest the likelihood of return, directly asking this question can yield valuable insights. This feedback can be surprisingly useful for future strategies.
External Factors: Even well-managed gyms can lose members due to circumstances beyond their control. While often revealed in the initial categorisation, directly asking about external factors ensures these influences are captured. This can uncover additional economic or personal factors contributing to the cancellation.
Recommendation Test: Similar to the return question, this assesses whether a member would recommend the gym to others. This provides insight into overall satisfaction and the gym’s reputation, as word-of-mouth referrals are crucial in today’s digital landscape. A positive response, even from a departing member, signals the gym is on the right track.
Additional Comments: This open-ended question allows members to express any further thoughts. While these responses can be challenging to categorise, they often contain valuable insights and can inform future feedback surveys. Providing this opportunity ensures members feel heard and can uncover unforeseen issues.
Our Closing Thoughts...
By using this approach and asking these targeted questions, independent gym and fitness club owners gain a much clearer understanding of why members leave, distinguishing between normal attrition and potentially problematic trends. However, simply collecting feedback through surveys is insufficient if gyms and clubs don’t thoroughly analyse the data they receive.
Ensuring the gym management software you use within your facility collates the data that will help you to understand patterns in your members attendance and general gym habits is the first crucial step to being able to review your cancellations in depth and look to finding solutions to increase your membership retention.
Whether it is data, access control, payment collection or software, our demonstration team are on stand-by here, ready to understand how we can help any facility build on their success and reach new heights.
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the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.
the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.
Get your club in shape.
Want to discover how? Let us show you.
Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.
Get your club in shape.
Want to discover how? Let us show you.
Simply select your preferred timeslot and we’ll be in touch to have a chat about your health club, the goals you want to achieve, and how our system can help you.
