How Retention Can Boost Your Fitness Studio’s Profit

What's the single most overlooked metric that could transform your studio's profitability? Retention. While many studio owners chase endless promotional challenges and acquisition strategies, the true path to sustainable growth lies in building genuine community connections and personalized experiences.

The numbers don't lie - a mere 5% increase in retention rates can boost profits by an astonishing 25-95%. This episode takes you deep into the psychology behind lasting membership loyalty, exploring why community-driven efforts consistently outperform traditional marketing tactics. I share the story of a studio owner who built a million-dollar business with exceptional profit margins by focusing primarily on community engagement and member advocacy rather than constant promotion.

You'll discover practical techniques for enhancing client satisfaction without breaking your marketing budget. Learn how to leverage your existing members as powerful advocates, create personalized experiences that reflect your brand values, and build sustainable community bonds that keep members coming back. We explore why reviews remain one of the most underutilized yet potent tools for studio growth and how community gatherings can strengthen your studio ecosystem.

Whether you're struggling with high turnover rates or looking to take your successful studio to new heights, this episode provides a fresh perspective on growth that prioritizes quality relationships over quantity of leads. Stop exhausting yourself with marketing fatigue and start building a sustainable community that grows organically through shared values and exceptional experiences. Your members are your most valuable marketing asset - it's time to treat them that way.

Chapters

• 0:00 Success Through Community Building
• 2:42 Understanding Retention Drivers
• 5:10 Techniques for Personalized Experiences
• 8:57 Building Sustainable Community Bonds
• 15:27 Closing and Future Announcements

Transcript

Speaker 0: 0:00

He was so successful. He had over a million dollar studio, had high profit margins. Why? Because he understood the benefit of community-driven efforts. He put a lot of effort into the experiences he was providing, and that's really what it comes down to.

Speaker 0: 0:14

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the 50 Great Cast. I'm your host, Zach Coleman, and today we're gonna talk about something that most individuals that own a business leadership roles, whatever you're at don't really think about Retention Probably the biggest metric that you should be watching while you continue to grow your brand Retention. So we're going to go into the secrets of building a lasting membership loyalty and how that's really going to affect your studio. Going through some of the topics today, let's talk about understanding the real drivers behind lasting membership loyalty. We're going to talk about techniques for creating much more personalized experiences that you can take and, you know, building a sustainable, genuine community bond with your studio. I like to call this, within what we do with one of our brands, the sustainable lead flow offer. But today we're going to go in there and we're going to kind of discuss building a sustaining genuine community. I think these are all very important topics, especially in today's day and age where the internet is kind of becoming our thing. A lot of people are working from home, but in realistic, everyone wants to get out, everyone wants to find their community right, so let's just get right into it. According to a study done by Bain Company, they found that customer retention rates that move up to just about 5% more boost their profits by up to 25 to 95%. In the studio realm. That would be lowering your churn rate from, let's say, 8% down to 4%. Mastering your retention strategies that create deeper, lasting engagement with your audience and transforming some of those casual members into brand champions for you, your advocates, the people at your studio that are gonna continue to bring more people.

Speaker 0: 2:13

Here's the aha moment. Here's what I want you guys to understand. If you can understand that membership retention is driven less by promotional gimmicks, like challenges, and more by genuine, consistent community building efforts and personalized experiences, then you could grow I mean, I don't even know how large, depending on your location or if you have multiple locations right. So let's dive in A story I'd like to talk about. About a year ago now I think it was a year ago I was talking to this studio owner. This studio owner was not part of a franchise, he was part of a licensing agreement and he was actually buying out the license agreement and growing his own studio.

Speaker 0: 2:54

Because you know, you're going to see a lot of marketing studios, especially the individuals that I call tire, the basement dweller ones that are just people that think that marketing is. It's really just the marketing people that you think that you keep utilizing because you wanna go cheap but actually don't provide results. Focus strictly on online. They're gonna tell you straight off the bat oh, they'll say something along the lines of oh, it's inconsistent to focus on referrals, to focus on membership engagement. That's inconsistent. You need digital marketing. I'm going to be the first to tell you, as someone that does digital marketing with a big emphasis on branding and audience, that you are in a space that thrives on community, so that's what you need to focus on. So you're probably frustrated. You're probably still seeing, if you're listening to this cast or watching. You're probably going through situations right now where you do a challenge. This is what I hear all the time. You have a free offer. You're bringing in people that aren't really reliable on your offers. Those people tend to stay maybe a month and then they leave your attention rate's horrible.

Speaker 0: 4:05

Well, this studio that I was talking to you. To get back to the story when we are going through and talking about he was so successful. He had over a million dollar studio had high profit margins. Why? Because he understood the benefit of community driven efforts and advocacy amongst his studio members. He put a lot of effort into the experiences he was providing. He was leading by example, showing the people that I put this much effort into the studio to provide this experience and so they are going to take out of it what he puts in it, and that's really what it comes down to. He did a lot of community activities. He did a lot of community involvement in their local area and he mixed that with some of his digital marketing efforts to use them in kind of an omni-channel community digital approach. Right? So that's kind of the way to go for studios. That's the way you should be looking at the way you're going to grow your studio Now if you want to bring people in long term.

Speaker 0: 5:05

Let's understand the real drivers behind lasting membership loyalty. Why do members want to stick with you? I think it usually comes down to one thing they know you, you know them, you communicate like you know them and that you understand and customize around them. So how do you really pre-understand your audience, pre-bring them in, if you don't go in getting an idea of that right? We call it a business plan, but I like to say business plan is only going to outline the very basics of growth and the kinds of things you're going to be doing. It's not a strategy. People, you want to start with the drivers, right. What is going to drive members to you? One is just going to be customer service in general. So to start with this, I think that you need to go back and look at your vision for the studio. Go back to the business plan and kind of say what is the vision of our studio studio? Go back to the business plan and kind of say what is the vision of our studio, what is going to be our goals for the next one year, three years, five years, from everything that we're doing, if it come to marketing, if it come to operations, and focus on that.

Speaker 0: 6:11

I see so many studios being successful when they really focus on the experience more so than everything customizing, understanding that it all works together with pricing, visuals, messaging, employee hiring, employee retention, client retention and how that all works together and that's really a normal business practice, but I'll tell you firsthand. People can feel when they judge a book by everyone judges a book by cover. They can feel when they come to your website, they come through other touch points, they see the studio, they understand the customization of it, they deal with the employees. They can feel that brand pretty much off the bat, maybe subconscious for them it's not for me because I do it for a living but maybe it's most likely going to be subconscious to them but they're going gonna feel that you are leading by example and that you are providing an experience that they want because you are showing quality. It doesn't matter if you're doing volume, doesn't matter if you're doing value, doesn't matter if you're in the middle and you're pricing blah, blah, blah. What matters is that you attract people and that is gonna be a driver that's going to be a continued driver and that's going to start to build sustainability.

Speaker 0: 7:24

Another driving factor going down some techniques here is stop focusing on these continuing challenges, giving yourself marketing fatigue. You know a driver is really going to be more customer service and continued marketing efforts that you can track slowly and organically and then understanding how you're bringing these people in, not to get into another study, but 90% of people that look for a studio, the first thing that they do is they go to Google. I'm sorry they go to Google. Your social media may be a trust factor, but you don't need to promote the online billboard here to try to attract a million members. You have a local community here, so you're going to get more efforts out of finding local community events that are a little bit cheaper, that you can go to with your team and they can get an experience of the people that work at your studio and you can get their email that way or you can talk to them that way. You know people like to know that they have somewhere down the street that they can go to. It's one of the biggest deciding factors is that first impression of moving forward. Then it comes to their customer service. Those are the two things, and so let's talk about.

Speaker 0: 8:38

Now that we're talking about understanding some real drivers, let's dive into techniques techniques for creating personalized experiences that enhance client satisfaction. Some great techniques is utilizing your branding system and what you create through the branding side and leveraging that to understand the unique differentiation of personalization that you can do. Let me give you an example here, if you've gone in and you've created your values, you live by those values and one of your greatest values is customer service or, like me, communication. Are you going to be calling a million people and trying to get them to your studio? Does that match your value? No, you can guide the goals of what you're doing based off of the values and the mission that you develop for your studio, and that could work with your marketing direction as well. So utilize that to customize, personalize a efforts in all of your communications depending on what you're doing.

Speaker 0: 9:41

You know, a great example of a technique that we like to use with a lot of our studios is understanding the point of advocacy and kind of focusing on hey, why are you doing a spending we'll just say three to $4,000 on Facebook ads, doing a challenge to bring these free people in, for them to leave. Better retention is going to come from people you already have in studio. So leverage the techniques of a good technique of that would be okay. You have members. So go in and look at all the people in your studio and say, all right, we have, we'll just say, 500 members. Let's just say one third of them have been here for over a year. Let's just give them. Third of them have been here for over a year. Let's just give them a month free. And so how would you do that strategically without just giving them a month free, right? Well, ask for a review. That review is going to boost you higher in your advocacy. They themselves are now going to have you at top of mind.

Speaker 0: 10:39

And then, right after that, then you do the promotion of hey, if you have any friends, if you have any, anybody associated with you and you can do this in certain platforms set up an email campaign to hit people at certain times. For that, you know, we do have partnerships with some of the some of the larger companies that focus on post sale type retention and retainer models. So always reach out to me. We have a call, you're working with us, we have promotions that you can utilize and strategies you can utilize with those platforms, yada, yada, yada. Just reach out to us and we can talk about that.

Speaker 0: 11:15

But really want you to focus on understanding there the difference between using already existing members that have high retention and allowing them to bring in like-minded individuals that match the same values that you match with the organization, and that's an easy way, without having marketing spend, that you can do that. That's a technique that you can do to enhance client satisfaction and bring in more members. For retention model, giving them a free month after the review and if they bring on another member, so utilize the review first and then, after they give you a review, then utilize that situation. Another technique, of course, is you can do email campaign, but I would focus the email campaigns a little bit more towards your existing members and challenges. That way, allow your existing members. Instead of going into a challenge to bring in more members through Facebook ads, utilize your existing member and say, hey, we have a free offer here. Or doing a challenge day for all existing members, bring a guest. That way, you're using your existing members as your advocates and you can even set those challenges based off of different pricing structures or retention within the studio to help attract better members. Those are just some thoughts, but that's a way that you can start leveraging and building better retention is by starting to use existing members instead of utilizing pre-purchase.

Speaker 0: 12:45

Now, how do you build a sustainable, genuine community bond with your members, your team and all that? And I think it really comes down to just following your brand's vision, following the values, making sure you're living by those values. You're personalizing all your inner workings around that right. You're going to have your business model over here, but you're also going to have your brand and then your marketing over here. They all kind of work together, but your brand is going to be that centric thing that's going to make you different than everyone else. So I would say, building sustainability is all about doing things like I was saying earlier focusing on your existing members and allowing them to be your advocates for bringing on new members.

Speaker 0: 13:30

And a way you could do this and also target people online that match your values is by utilizing probably the biggest KPI that I see that most studios don't utilize anymore, which is TickTick Reviews. Reviews still play a huge part from a digital perspective, especially when it comes to studios. You're right in that middle ground there and people wanna go work for a studio. So, like I said, if you utilize getting reviews as a KPI for you on a larger basis, then you will outrank other studios in your area organically. There's strategies that continue that, but that's how you can utilize that strategy from a much deeper perspective, and that's something that we do with some of our clients to kind of get the best of both worlds. Get higher in rankings to bring in new members that match the values that are going to come through reviews. See of both worlds. Get higher in rankings to bring in new members that match the values that are gonna come through reviews, see your GBP, see the experience and then they're going to come in.

Speaker 0: 14:29

Another way you can build and sustain a genuine community bond. Add some sort of monthly gathering. You can utilize this as part of your events or your what I was saying earlier community outreach Nothing wrong. Host a small event at your studio with members, allow them to build relationships with each other. It's about a community, right? So building an effort like that, give it to members for free and or provide a discount for if they bring a guest. This is another way that you can start utilizing existing members to understand that you're building a community. You can do it with what I would call challenges, but certain types of classes you can even do hey, we're doing a special class, we're thinking about bringing this type of class on. You can utilize that as a hybrid model. You can utilize your existing audience to build that experience, and that's what it really comes down to Now, that's it for today's cast.

Speaker 0: 15:27

I'll let you all get back to it for your day. I'm Zach Coleman. This is another episode of the Fitch Great Cast. I hope to see you guys all next time and again. If you're listening to this, go down, leave a review. If you're listening to this, listening to this, go down, leave a review. If you're listening to this, we'd love for the podcast to grow. We're really trying to grow our review count and if you're watching this on our YouTube channel, just be sure to go down and subscribe Subscribe. We're trying to build this audience up, bring more advocacy, bring more knowledge to the industry. We do have some special partnership announcements coming soon with some other brands in the industry. Once we get those finalized, I'll reach out and let everyone know what we're up to and how we're looking to expand and grow our offerings and everything that we're doing. But other than that, again, zach Coleman, stay gritty.