Analysis: Understanding why people let go of their gym memberships is key to figuring out how to get them back
By teresa hurley, Dublin Technical University
Are you a lapsed health club member or have you been a member of several different health clubs before? Did you know that less than 52% of gym providers actually bother to find out why you left? The author of this study examined factors influencing re-engagement intentions and re-engagement behavior of health club members who have discontinued participation.
A mail survey of 100 Irish health and fitness providers was completed along with a mail survey of one hundred recently retired members of a medium-sized suburban health club in Ireland. An experimental field study was then used to measure true re-engagement behavior to re-engage 300 retired members of the same gym.
Attrition rates at gyms are generally high, making for a large, lucrative market of untapped lapsed members readily available for re-engagement. However, if health clubs don’t really know why members are leaving, how can they fix the problem and how can they get inactive members back on track and re-join?
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From Jennifer Zamparelli of RTÉ 2fm, a recent survey found that young people value going to the gym over saving for their future
It’s critical for gym providers to find out why members are leaving by completing an exit analysis of all members who drop out, as it can cost seven to ten times less to reactivate a previous member than to sign up a new member in terms of marketing, recruitment, training of new members on machines and operational issues of the club, etc.
The results of this study indicate that 45% of respondents would join again if invited, and 95% said they would be more incentivized by price. Some operators ignore this market for lapsed members and focus instead on targeting new members. This excessive concentration by gym providers on the new member versus lapsed member market has been highlighted in a number of previous studies over the years (Thomas et al., 2000, Reinartz et al., 2004; Homburg et al. al., 2007; Mandina & Karisambudzi, 2016).
So while it’s not a new phenomenon, it still doesn’t seem to have been tackled by the Irish health and fitness industry. Health clubs should consider shifting strategic focus from being overly focused on acquiring new customers to actively re-engaging the lapsed member market by finding out why they left and offering an incentive such as price to re-engage. In fact, offering an incentive of any kind to reactivate retired members seemed to be better than no incentive at all in this study.
Interestingly, 85% of the inactive member market surveyed had not rejoined a club since leaving, and 54% indicated they would consider rejoining the same club, reinforcing the need for gym providers to offer the inactive member a good incentive to rejoin.
21% of inactive members in this study cited “club relations” as the main reason for discontinuing membership, including cleanliness, opening hours, access and operational issues. These are issues that the club can monitor and act on as part of a broader customer service policy by regularly seeking customer feedback throughout the customer/membership experience, providing and rewarding good customer service suggestions, and Inform partners that action has been taken accordingly.
As part of this study, highly satisfied customers were found to be more likely to have stronger intentions to re-engage, so striving to increase customer satisfaction should be an important part of any customer service policy. More frequent attendees also had higher intentions to re-engage, and those who dropped out more recently demonstrated stronger re-engagement behavior. This supports the idea that the sooner the reactivation program begins, the better the chances of rehiring the lapsed member. Ideally, members should be offered a promotional incentive or customer loyalty reward before the membership expires.
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From RTÉ Brainstorm, UL’s Leanne Quinn on 10 Reasons More Women Should Lift Weights for Life
The use of membership fees was found to be effective in improving customer retention, but only up to the six-month period, with 29% of lapsed members saying it was instrumental in prolonging their club membership. Membership add-ons should be viewed as a strategy to extend membership duration while improving club results during the often low-revenue summer season. Inactive members in the €21,000 – €40,000 income range were found to have stronger re-engagement intentions than other income levels, so knowing their market segmentation could be helpful in knowing which customer segments are likely to react. better to an incentivized customer reactivation policy. .
Clearly, there are a number of strategic ways in which health club providers can reduce member attrition rates and improve customer retention, customer service, and frequency of use, strategies that could prove useful in improving more than just club results.
Note: This study was based on a medium-sized suburban health club in Ireland, therefore no comparisons can be made between the results of this study and those of larger health clubs, chains, urban clubs or outside of Ireland .
Dr Teresa Hurley is a lecturer at TU Dublin currently on secondment to Campus Planning from the Head of School of Management position in the Faculty of Business.
The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
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