In this age of heightened awareness surrounding health and wellness, the demand for personal trainers has surged exponentially. As individuals increasingly recognize the multifaceted benefits of maintaining a fit and active lifestyle, the role of personal trainers has become indispensable. Yet, amidst this burgeoning industry, one crucial aspect stands paramount: client retention. While embarking on a career as a personal trainer promises both personal fulfillment and financial prosperity, the ability to retain fitness clients is the cornerstone of sustained success in this field. As we delve into the intricacies of retaining personal training clients, we’ll explore not only the benefits of personal training as a profession but also the strategies necessary to cultivate lasting relationships with those we guide on their fitness journeys.
Now, if you’re a personal trainer and you’ve set up a fitness center from where you practice and share your expertise with fitness enthusiasts, it is not uncommon to have a few challenges. Even for some of the best marketers in this industry, client retention happens to be one of the biggest hurdles they have to deal with. This is mostly so because more often than not, most people find themselves focusing more on prospects, which makes it pretty easy to neglect existing customers. And needless to mention, a client who feels neglected is more likely to bounce and find another personal trainer. In other words, personal training is a highly sensitive career and how you engage with or treat your current clients will determine how long they’re going to stick around. So how exactly do you go about it when you want to achieve maximum client retention as an awesome personal trainer?
Well, here are five pointers that should help you in retaining personal training clients.
1. Up your game on engagement, conversation, and follow up
Without beating around the bush, the trainer-client relationship is one of the most important aspects of the personal training business. And one of the basic important aspects of cultivating a good relationship with anyone is to engage with them frequently through in-session and sometimes off-session conversations as well as appropriate follow-up. However, as much as you need to follow-up on their progress every now and then, it is important to remember to keep it vivid and professional. Every engagement or communication should have a valid purpose, especially if you’re contacting a client off their training hours. For instance, you could email or text a client on a weekday when they’re at work to check on their progress, but while at it, ensure that you bring a valid purpose such as setting up the date, time, or agenda of the next session. You could even share some tips or a new beneficial recipe in the same. To put it straight and forward, it’s mostly about the value you add to your client and not the other way round.
2. Use the right tools
We live in a world of technology these days, and it makes our work easier in more than a dozen ways. Doing some tasks manually can be highly draining, physically and mentally. It even gets more frustrating in the case of your career as most of the times, you will be training each client individually. This calls for investing in the right personal trainer software that will help you track your clients for inactivityy, automate your reach outs, and even alert you when there are sales opportunities. The main thing to note here is that keeping track of appointments is quite crucial to your practice for retaining personal training clients. It can be very frustrating for a client who is forced to wait minutes or hours for you, let alone you fail to show up at all, just because you forgot that you had set an appointment with them. Getting the right appointment reminder software can help get rid of such embarrassments, which could translate into a higher client retention rate in your practice.
3. Follow up on cancelled memberships
Well, you’re trying to keep the clients that you already have– but did you know that past clients whose subscriptions had expired or were canceled could help improve your client retention? Situations change and in most cases, clients cancel their subscriptions due to temporary reasons such as relocation, change of employment, new time schedules, and financial constraints, just to name a few. By following up on a number of your previous clients, you could end up recruiting them back, and you never know how many more new clients they could bring you.
4. Identify progress and reward your clients
Achieving physical fitness is not a joke. It takes a significant amount of effort, time, and dedication. As a personal trainer, you obviously know that it requires hard work. For this reason, another way you can influence your clients to stick around is by identifying their commitment and rewarding them for their hard work and little achievements. You can use simple rewards such as birthday cards, personalized T-shirts, or even free sessions. Such rewards can motivate them in a huge way, in addition to showing them that you truly care about them. After this, they can hardly be swayed by the competition as they see the worth of being there and using your services in the first place.
5. Ace it on customer service
As a matter of fact, this should have been the first one on the list. The fact that you’re a personal trainer means that you’re dealing with your clients directly, one-on-one. As a good personal trainer, you should never underestimate the importance of customer service in this industry. Be sure to provide the best service and support you possibly can if you want them to stick around. This will mostly involve a broad spectrum of things, including proper communication, superb instruction and feedback, building rapport genuinely, ensuring their safety, being available, and showing up on time. When customers feel valued, they are more likely to pay for additional services or products from the organization making it easier for retaining personal training clients.
Personal training may not be the easiest of careers, but you can surely achieve success if you manage to maximize your client retention rates. And to be honest, it takes great dedication even on your part, as your main goal is to see them achieve their fitness goals in the best way possible. In addition to the pointers mentioned above, you may also want to introduce other fitness-related products or services such as meal plans for weight loss, nutritional supplements, home workout programs, and nutritional counselling, just to name a few. Hopefully, though, the pointers that have been mentioned will shed some light and add some insights into your career as a personal trainer.
