Are you looking for new ways to retain your personal training clients? Clients are like gold for fitness professionals. It takes a lot of time and effort to secure new clients and keep them coming back for your sessions.
With a personalized customer experience, you could potentially retain up to 80% of your clients. But, it’s not always easy. Between planning your sessions, driving between appointments and juggling all of your appointments, it can be hard to respond to every client inquiry and manage your outreach.
That’s why we’ve gathered a few personal training client retention tips below to help you grow your business and keep more clients engaged.
The truth is, your role is so much more than just a “personal trainer.” You’re sometimes a therapist, a life coach, a CEO, an accountant, and sometimes your clients’ worst enemy!
Regardless, you may lack enough time in the day to balance your business with client-facing appointments. As much as you want to retain current clients, you also want to market your business in the best way possible and interact with potential new clients.
Sure, you could hire an assistant to answer phone calls from clients and manage appointments. But they don't provide 24/7 support, and it takes a lot of time to train them.
That’s why you should consider investing in a chatbot solution to offer a great client experience from beginning to end. Your chatbot should empower you to run your business and focus on what matters most, while you have peace of mind knowing your website visitors are in safe hands.
This means fewer late nights for you, combing through your inbox and responding to clients, and giving clients the 24/7 availability they expect. You can also integrate your chatbot with Calendly to schedule sessions, consultations, and group classes with your clients.
Plus, you can tailor your chatbot exactly to your personal training business with a pre-built template. You can add your own personal touches to the template to customize it as much as you want, or you can leave it as simple as you want to cover the basics.
A chatbot can ultimately help your clients at every stage of their journey, from their first interaction with your business to signing up for a session. This will give you the competitive edge you need to stand out from other personal trainers in your area and bring in a loyal clientele.
As a personal trainer, you pay close attention to your client's fitness and health goals. To gain trust with your clients, you can actively track their progress throughout their journey to show them you care and help them stay on track in a way that’s healthy for them.
Whether you take monthly progress photos, check in on their food tracking to give them healthy suggestions, or have monthly check-ins, staying close to your clients’ goals will keep them motivated. It will remind them what a great asset you are to their overall health and help you form meaningful relationships.
As a result, you’ll start getting more referrals from your friends and rack up stellar reviews on websites like Yelp and Google Reviews.
To stand out from the crowd, you’ll want to keep a pulse on your competitor’s services and pricing models. While you won’t want to change your business model and prices regularly, staying informed about how your competitors maintain their client base will give you more inspiration and help you continue to improve.
This means that you might level up your fitness experience and invest in a new program to improve your knowledge.
Clients gravitate towards variety and if you mix up your workouts outside of just weight training, they’ll never get bored! From boxing to pilates, you can add variety into your workouts to help your clients gain new skills for a well-rounded fitness routine.
Every client will have a different area of interest and skill. Meeting them halfway and catering to their needs will show them just how much you care.
Another way to improve client retention is to establish a loyalty reward program. A loyalty reward program will show your clients how much you appreciate their business and will also keep them engaged.
Statistics show that retaining one gym member costs five times less than finding a new one. Loyal members are the biggest asset for your business. Gym or loyalty rewards programs can take some time to prepare, but it's worth the effort.
Here are a few ideas we’ve gathered:
Offering different options and personalized programs will help you develop meaningful relationships with your clients and allow you to organically grow.
Running a personal training business isn’t easy, especially with all of the different hats you wear on a daily basis. Regardless, keeping a pulse on your client retention rate and looking for different ways to improve can help you stand out from your competitors and help each client become the best version of themselves.
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