Top 4 mistakes to avoid with your gym loyalty program

For a profitable fitness center, members are key.  

That’s the fact.

With that in mind, fitness studios use different methods to get more members.

We can group those methods into 2 groups:

  • Getting new members. 
  • Building relationships with existing members to turn them into loyal members.

Here we are going to focus on the second method, but if you want to know more about strategies you can use to get new members to check out our blog.

Most often, if you want your fitness business to make more profit, you don’t need to get more members but to increase retention of existing and turn them from regular into loyal.

In fact, a Harvard Business School study found that only a 5% improvement in customer retention rates yields between a 25% to 95% increase in profits.

Loyalty programs represent one of the simplest methods fitness businesses can implement to increase members’ retention.

But even if it is simple to implement, mistakes are still made.

Mistakes that can turn a source of loyal members into the main reason for a bad experience. In fact, according to a 2017 survey, in the U.S., even when people love a company or product, 59% will walk away after several bad experiences, 17% after just one bad experience.

To prevent this from happening and to help you create a loyalty program for your fitness studio that will keep members engaged, we have singled out 4 common mistakes to watch out for.

1. Rewards that fail to motivate members

The title says it all. You want your loyalty program to look compelling to your members. There’s nothing exciting about getting $1 back for every $100 spent.

Your objective is to motivate occasional visitors to become regular members and to make regular members into loyal members. 

To do so, you must provide a generous reward – but also maintain a stable return on investment. 

Put yourself into your members’ shoes. What rewards would get them excited? 

Free membership? Guides for meal plans? Fitness advice and coaching? Discount for a personal trainer? Use the knowledge you have about your members to come up with tempting rewards. 

2. Overreaching

Now, looking back at number 1 on our list, it’s just as important not to swing too far the other way. 

In all the excitement of launching a new loyalty program to boost revenue and increase customer retention, businesses tend to promise the world.  

This is a very dangerous situation! If you cut down on your rewards – it will lead to customer dissatisfaction, and if you don’t – it might put you out of business! How do you avoid this? 

Put sustainability first. Only start loyalty programs that you know you can keep up with. You can always add more to the program later.

Need ideas for promoting your fitness business? Check out our blog post: How to get more paying members – 4 powerful methods for fitness businesses.

3. Copying your competition's loyalty program

Another recurring mistake, mostly because competitors like to “one-up” each other. If you offer one-month free membership, the competition will try to copy that offer or maybe even increase it.

How can you make your loyalty program different from the competition?

Coming up with unique rewards would be a good idea… But don’t be surprised if you notice that competition copied even that.

To stand out, you need something that others can’t copy. Here, members’ experience plays a huge role.

If your loyalty program system is smooth and easy to use, your members will enjoy it.

What makes a member’s experience great? The first place is easy to use. You need to make sure that your members are able to:

  • Collect points easily.
  • Quickly redeem rewards.
  • Keep track of their points

Speaking of making your loyalty program easy-to-use for members, that brings us to our next big mistake.

4. Making a complex loyalty program

Probably the biggest mistake on our list. The more conditions and variations you implement in your loyalty program, the easier it is for the whole program to spiral out of control. Members will be left confused as to how the rewards program even works.

This happened to Chipotle in 2016.

The program nicknamed Chiptopia failed for many reasons, the biggest of which being the complicated reward scheme. As a result, it was a big target for criticism, and customers couldn’t relate to the rewards program as much as

Chipotle intended to. This was probably best described by Food&Wine magazine in 2016 – “You’ve probably played board games with fewer rules.

For busy fitness owners who want to get the most out of their loyalty program, Referrizer provides a digital solution that is easy to use on both ends — for you and your members!

As a finesses owner you will be able to:

  • Keep track of loyalty points automatically.
  • Provide unique experiences for your members.
  • Encourage members to post reviews and refer friends using rewards.

Watch a live demo to learn more. 

Communication with clients just got a whole lot easier!

We’ve come up with a true game-changer that will help you communicate with clients easier, increase sales, reduce missed opportunities, and prevent losing clients.

If you run a business, you know how important it is to respond to clients’ messages as fast as possible. However, the more engagement you get, the harder it is to follow up with everyone. It’s a bittersweet feeling. You are excited that you have a new booking, but with that excitement, the sense of being overwhelmed kicks in too. Unanswered texts are piling up, and there is no time to keep up with it all. It’s a total mess, right?

To help you with this challenge, we’ve created a solution that allows you to keep communication organized even during the busiest days!

Meet the new Referrizer Inbox, an elegant and (we have to admit)
good-looking fellow who will make your business life more comfortable

The new Inbox is a handy tool that transforms messy text communication into an easy-to-use interface with a familiar look. Here is what you can do with your new Inbox:

Better organization

When you start to use the new Inbox, the first thing you will experience is incredible transparency and meticulous organization. You will be able to jump from one conversation to another while having the person’s contact info in the same tab. 

But that isn’t the only thing that is organized. To make it easier to keep track of communication with clients, notifications inform you how many unread messages you have. And for those who are big fans of emojis, searching for a particular one and including them in text messages is now possible in a few clicks. 

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Everyday experience

The new look makes communication with clients easy and fun, like chatting with your friends. From now on, getting bookings, following up to check appointments, and winning back old clients doesn’t have to be any different than sending a message to a good friend to check out if they are free for a coffee. 

On the left side, you will find a list of all contacts you have been communicating with, and in the center, you get the full history of exchanged messages. On the right side is your personal assistant that tells you the most important information about the contact you are talking to.

Increase engagement with personalized messages

The more personal it gets, the better relationship you create with customers. The new Inbox allows you to craft personalized messages with variables that pull data from your CRM system. What does this mean for you? Even if you are super busy, variables allow you to send personalized messages that don’t sound like generic replies.

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Search option

When you start using the new Inbox, you will be able to find a specific contact, without the need to leave it, thanks to the Search bar. You can now jump from conversation to conversation faster than ever without slowing down your productivity by switching between a bunch of different tabs.

Less unresponded messages

From now on, you can have a powerful communication tool on your work computer and your mobile phone. And thanks to a transparent interface and push notifications, you will be able to quickly notice and reply to messages without leaving clients to wait on you. 

Discover how you can communicate with clients easier, increase sales, reduce missed opportunities, and prevent losing clients with
the new Inbox.

Try it NOW!

6 referral marketing tips to get Yogis to your studio

When it comes to bringing new yogis to your business, you have different methods to try out. 

From social media posts and paid ads to flyers and organic traffic on your website. 

But when we look at performance and invested effort, referral marketing is one of the simplest and cost-effective ways for yoga businesses to get new clients. 

It comes as no surprise that successful yoga practitioners and studios rely heavily on word-of-mouth marketing. 

Here is the simple reason why. Before anyone joins your class, they need to decide if you are the right place for them. 

People research, look for reviews, read about other people’s experiences, look at your program and offers. 

In other words, they are putting in work to help them make the best decision, which is expected since it is not a one-time purchase. 

Yogis are looking for a place where they will feel comfortable, surrounded by friendly people and skillful teachers.

When we consider all the variables in the decision-making process, it is obvious why it can be hard to cut through the noise – even if your business is the perfect match.

Referral marketing works great in this case because it usually comes from a person we know, and based on research, 92% of people trust recommendations when it comes from a friend. 

So, by focusing on referrals, you are reducing the friction people usually experience before deciding to join you – and the less friction there is, the easier it is to bring in new clients.

Here are 6 tips to help you obtain more clients with referral marketing.

Provide a remarkable experience worth mentioning.

First things first – people talk about businesses in 2 cases: when they have had an unbelievably unpleasant experience or when they have had an amazing time. 

And yes, you want to be the latter since 55% of people will refer you if they are satisfied with your business. 

So when you are focusing on providing the best possible experience to your clients, there is a great chance that people will start to talk about your business even if you are not offering any rewards.

Thinking about how you can provide a better experience? 

Start asking your clients for feedback to hear what is wrong. 

Go through negative reviews (if you have any) and solve the issues that cause them. 

And most importantly, build a strong relationship with your clients by sharing valuable and useful knowledge.

Offer attractive rewards.

Since clients are doing you a favor by referring, it is a good idea to give them something that will make them feel special. 

Rewards can drastically impact the number of referrals you are getting – research shows that 88% of Americans are looking for some kind of incentive. 

However, you need to choose incentives for your referral program carefully. Offering extremely generous rewards can turn into a costly experiment, but also, if incentives aren’t tempting enough, you will see low engagement. 

The best way to choose rewards is to decide how much you are willing to spend on obtaining new clients through referrals.

Use a loyalty program to boost referrals.

If you are already using a loyalty program to get people to come more often, make it possible to earn points whenever they refer a friend to your yoga studio. 

This is a great way to engage clients since they will be able to earn points easier and also collect rewards faster. 

Keep in mind to highlight that clients will receive points only if a referral signs up. You want to make sure you are rewarding actual conversions.

Keep clients notified.

People forget, or even worse, they don’t know you have a referral program. 

Make sure that from the beginning, you notify people that recommendations are always welcomed and highly appreciated. 

If you are collecting new clients’ emails, use the welcome email to introduce them to the referral program. 

On the other hand, if you are not using any kind of email marketing, make a nice-looking flyer you can give to your clients. 

Set a clear goal.

It is always easier to move forward when you have a clear goal – the same goes for referrals. 

For example: We at Referrizer know that some small businesses don’t have a budget big enough to invest in marketing automation. 

To help business owners overcome that challenge, we made it possible to get Referrizer marketing automation for free through our referral program. 

For each new referral, our users get a discount on the monthly subscription. With 6 referrals, they get Referrizer for free for a lifetime.

You can use the same system for your referral program. 

One referral can be 15% off on the next class. 

For five referrals, you can give them 25% off on 10 classes.

Five referrals = 30% off in one month. 

Make referring simple.

Reviews are very similar to referrals. 

Both are valuable for you and happy clients are willing to provide them.

As it often happens, people forget to give you a review, or perhaps the review process is too complicated.

The same thing can happen for clients who want to refer a friend to your business.

Making it simple for people is the key to getting more word-of-mouth referrals. 

Here is how we make it easy for everyone to refer with Referrizer. 

Instead of hoping your clients will remember to mention you, we use text and email campaigns to reach out to your loyal clients and boost referrals. 

When your clients receive text messages or emails from you, they are able to refer a friend in 3 clicks without downloading the app or creating a profile. Your client’s phone number becomes their ID. 

The best thing about it, while it is super simple for them to refer, it is even easier for you to monitor referrals with our unique link id, so you don’t need to keep track of them manually by yourself. 

Want to learn more? Schedule your 1-on-1 demo here.

10 best performing emails for Fitness studios

Discover what kind of email marketing works for fitness businesses. 

Everyone is talking about how great email marketing is. 

How you can grow your business… 

Or earn extra revenue… 

Based on everything we hear, email marketing truly sounds fantastic!

But does it actually work for fitness businesses? 

Well, yes! It works!

It can work for modern fitness studios and small family gyms. 

But, you need to know what to send.

If you are already collecting emails from your members and looking for ideas, this guide is for you. Here you will find new ideas that can improve your email marketing and increase engagement. 

On the other hand, if you don’t have an email database, this will help you see why it is important to have one and how it can help you grow your business. 

Why should you send emails to existing members if they are already paying? 

As you have probably experienced, people come and go. It is totally natural. But even if it is natural that people stop coming to your place after a certain time, you want to make that relationship last as long as possible. There is a simple reason for this – it takes much less money, effort, and time to keep existing members at your place than to attract new ones.

Forbes’s conclusion based on research and surveys is that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profit by 25% to 95%.

With this in mind, let this guide help you to retain your customers!

Welcome email 

If you are obtaining email addresses from people when they become members, you should wish them a warm welcome.

This is a great chance to catch the momentum and start building relationships. 

Here are few things you can do with your Welcome email:

  • Introduce new members to the loyalty program.

  • Tell members what they can expect to receive in the following emails (warming up is important with email communication also).

  • Ask your members to whitelist you.

  • Provide information about any special offer they may have purchased while joining. 

 

Pro tip: Even if welcome emails have the highest open rates, you don’t want to put too many calls to action. Focus on ONE crucial goal. Why? The less option you give to your members, the easier it will be for them to choose one. Multiple calls to action can confuse people. And in that case, high open rates don’t mean much if no one is clicking to grab a special offer, learn more of like you on Facebook. 

fitness welcome email

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Milestones

Fitness and a healthy lifestyle require a lot of passion and motivation. And it is always nice when someone acknowledges it. 

Use achievement and milestone emails to remind members of their progress. If you are keeping track of members’ visits, turn that data into strong motivation. 

New members made their first 5 training sessions? Mention it! 3 months of training? Make it special! One year of hard dedication! Celebrate! 

 

Special deals

Take advantage of holidays and special occasions and start running special deals. 

But here is a catch with special deals for existing members. 

It is not about lowering your prices, it is more about getting them to stay longer with you. 

Use holidays to offer your members 20% off on a 6-month membership. They can save long-term while you are making sure that they will stay with you.

 
Fitness special deals email

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Challenges

If you like to create challenges to engage your members, you should definitely use emails to make a big announcement. 

You are not only going to break a boring cycle, but you will also create friendly competition among your members. 

But why stop there? 

Invite your members to share the announcement with friends — and with a simple email, you’ve created an opportunity to sign more members. 

Best fitness emails

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Educational

Even with the internet, people still don’t have time to research the best exercise and diet plans. 

If you already have a blog or educational material, make sure that your members get it. 

Giving something of value without asking for anything in return will help you make your relationship with members even stronger. 

Fitness email newsletter

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Review requests

The more positive reviews you have, the easier it is for you to get new members. 

If you are not getting enough reviews, try to ask for them. 

And by ask, I don’t mean to mention it casually. People forget. 

Use emails to ask for a friendly favor. 

But remember, if you are already asking for a favor, make sure it is super easy for people to do it. 

This means, give clear instructions and make it possible for them to do it in 2-3 steps only. 

review email for fitness

Need cool ideas for fitness marketing? Check out How to get more paying members – 4 powerful methods for fitness businesses.

Happy Birthday emails

Depending on the content management tool you are using, or how you collect members’ data, you may have information about their special days. 

Whether you are planning to give them a small gift or you are going to wish them the best, people will appreciate that you have remembered.

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Ask for referrals

Encourage people to talk about you and boost word of mouth marketing. 

You can target one group of loyal members and send personal emails or target all of your existing members. 

Statistics show that more than 50% of people are looking for some kind of reward for referrals. 

So yes, rewards and referrals go great together.

But it doesn’t mean people won’t talk about your business for free if they really like it. 

 
gym referrals email

Win back campaigns.

Your members won’t stick around forever. That’s the fact.

But even when someone stops visiting your studio, that doesn’t have to be the final goodbye. 

Instead of putting money into attracting new members, it is much easier and cost-effective to bring back old ones. 

Win-back campaigns work great with special offers. 

But sometimes you won’t have to offer anything. A simple reminder will be enough to re-engage people. 

win back email for fitness

Announcements

New products are coming? 

Have a new loyalty or referral program? 

Changing operating hours? 

Starting a new training program?

Announcement emails are a great way to get people caught up with new things that are happening. 

And when done correctly, you can generate sales or attract new members using emails only.

Announcement email for gym