Growth doesn’t come easy for many brands, particularly in competitive industries like sports, health and wellness. Whether it’s a gym struggling to attract members or a boutique fitness studio suffering from member churn, at some point in their journey, owners are hitting a plateau. After the fanfare and success of the initial launch, how do you go from stagnation to breakthrough? In this article, we’ll explore practical, evidence-based strategies that mid-market wellness businesses can use to reignite growth.
You’ve attracted members, built a steady business, but suddenly the momentum slows. Before rushing out and wasting your hard-earned profits on tactics that may or may not work, it’s best to take a step back.
DIAGNOSIS
Like a good doctor, it’s time for diagnosing the underlying issues.
Understand member churn
Member churn is the percentage of members that don’t renew their membership upon expiry. According to the Health & Fitness Association, churn rates for gyms can range from 30-50%, meaning that up to half of members leave every single year, often offsetting new member acquisition. It’s like trying to fill the bath tub while leaving the sink open.
It’s vital to analyze your membership data and identify patterns. Are most members leaving after six months? Are they least likely to renew in the summer period? And how does that compare to the number of members that you’re gaining throughout the year?
Use tools like retention dashboards to pinpoint exactly where and why members disengage.
Evaluate your brand positioning
Part of your initial success is likely because you are ‘the new shiny thing’ in the neighborhood or because you became the most convenient choice for people living nearby. However, tastes and preferences evolve and new workouts are gaining popularity.
Conduct surveys with current and past members to understand your position. Start with interviewing five members and five former members who haven’t renewed. What is that they like about your business? What are the improvement areas? Why have they (not) renewed? What other businesses in your space do they frequent? Why?
Based on their answers, draft a quantitative research and send them to all current and previous members to validate. You will be surprised by the insight you’ll gain by simply listening carefully.
Assess your competitive edge
When you started your business and gained initial success, there was clearly a need for your services. However, the market may have evolved and you may have exhausted your current market. Consider whether your gym’s location or services are limiting growth. For example, gyms in densely populated urban areas often face high competition,
making differentiation critical.
Are you offering the same services as competitors? A lack of unique offerings
can lead to stagnation. Boutique studios with signature classes or wellness programs tend to outperform generic gyms. Being open 24/7 is hardly a differentiator, particularly as this can be easily copied by anyone.
Take a hard, honest look at your immediate environment and consider serious adjustments to your business model.
GROWTH STRATEGIES
Once you have analyzed the root cause of your challenges, it’s time to draft a winning strategy. Keep in mind that strategy is the art of saying no; doing everything a little bit is not a strategy. It’s time to make choices.
Strengthen retention to stabilize growth
Take a deep look at member churn rate and refuse to accept that this is simply a given. It’s not normal for half of your customers to leave every year, period. Take action to reduce the churn rate.
Stop the bleeding by focusing on member engagement, loyalty programs, and personalized experiences for your members. This makes financial sense: according to Harvard Business Review, retention strategies are five more cost-effective than acquisition. In other words, you need to work five times as hard to acquire new customers – and make money from then – than to keeping current customers.
Introduce milestone rewards, exclusive events, or loyalty perks to increase lifetime value. Rather than giving discounts that eat into your profits, offer items with a high perceived value and low cost for you. This could be personal training sessions for anyone extending their membership 6+ months, a free smoothie for every 10 events attended, or early sign-up rights for events that tend to sell out quickly.
Start simple and be flexible. Don’t spend weeks crafting an intricate loyalty program with complicated point systems and a s system that stresses your operations, without having tested it.
Differentiate with unique offerings
Based on your understanding of your customers and the market, develop signature programs or expand into niches.
If your gym is next to a hotel, build a strong relationship with hotel management and the concierge, offering attractive rates for traveling fitness enthusiasts. Provide a special incentive for hotel staff so they can enjoy your facilities and are more likely to recommend you to their guests.
If your gym is in an area with with a large aging population, offer low-impact Mobility & Longevity classes for seniors on quiet Tuesday mornings.
And if your gym is in a business district, offer special programs for lunchtime or after-work fitness, and reach out to management to provide corporate wellness programs.
Often, this is a matter of repackaging your current services and putting a strong brand on it. Then go out and hit the neighborhood door-to-door.
Optimize pricing and revenue streams
Right pricing may be the hardest task of any gym owner. Consider implementing tiered pricing with clearly differentiated membership levels. Offering basic, mid-tier, and premium plans allows gyms to appeal to a wider range of customers, from budget-conscious individuals to those seeking exclusive perks.
Higher tiers can include added benefits such as personal training sessions, access to group classes, or premium facilities. Or base your tiers on access times, for example, an off-peak hours package versus all access.
This encourages upselling and creating a sense of value. Keeping the options simple yet comprehensive ensures customers can easily choose a plan that fits their needs without feeling overwhelmed.
Pick a strategy that matches your positioning and void too many options that are not only confusing for customers, but also overwhelm your staff.
Moreover, publish pricing transparently. Nothing frustrates a gym-goer more than having to negotiate a good rate for their regular workouts.
Gyms can further enhance revenue by incorporating add-on services and using psychological pricing strategies. Add-ons such as personal training, nutrition coaching, or pay-as-you-go class options give members the flexibility to customize their experience while generating additional income.
Psychological pricing, like charm pricing (e.g., $29.99 instead of $30) or bundling multi-class passes and family memberships, increases perceived value. Additionally, anchor pricing positions premium options strategically to make mid-tier plans feel like the best deal, improving overall membership conversions.
Market across multiple channels
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. While it’s tempting to spend all your marketing budget on social media (because it’s so easy to measure), divest your budget across channels. Marketing research shows that by simple adding one channel, the effectiveness of each channel increases by 30%. So if you can avoid it, by all means, go hard on social media, but reserve some budget for other channels such as flyers, a radio spot, a newspaper ad, and so on.
Mix promotional content with brand building
Marketing effectiveness studies show that the most successful brands use a combination of targeted sales activations and emotional brand building.
A sales activation is an ad with a direct call to action or promotion, for example: “Grab your off-peak membership at 30% discount – valid only this month”. Whereas a brand building ad does not aim for a direct sell, but loads the brand emotionally. For example, a well-produced video showing members high-fiving with their coach at your gym, or member transformation stories.
If you only advertise sales activations, the moment you stop advertising, your sales will drop. However, if you throw in emotional brand building into the mix, your business will over time become less dependent on these promotions. Les Binet and Peter Field recommend spending 60% of your marketing budget on brand building and 40% on short-term activation for sustainable growth.
The rule of thumb: spend as much money as needed on sales activations (to keep the lights on), while spending as much as you can on brand building.
Experiment and optimize
Use A/B testing for marketing campaigns to determine what drives sign-ups and
re-engagement. For example, test offers like “First Month Free” versus “No Joining Fee” to see what converts better in your market. Maintain a flexible mindset, but stay recognizable. Don’t shoot out 100 offers that don’t fit with your brand. Be yourself.
Get obsessed with data
To measure is to know. The most successful gyms are obsessed by data. They don’t simply focus on individual member encounters or hear-say stories to judge how well the gym going; they keep track of the gym’s performance constantly to spot growth opportunities.
This goes beyond financial figures like revenue and profit, which are merely the outcome of action.
A member retention tracker is an online dashboard that monitors member churn, attendance, engagement rate, and other key indicators that help gym owners identify at-risk members and target them with personalized retention campaigns.
Couple this with marketing effectiveness tracking – a central dashboard that gives an overview of how many leads and interactions each campaign – and you got your own in-depth gym’s health tracker.
Conclusion
Diagnosing stagnation, strengthening retention, differentiating offerings, exploring new markets, and leveraging data are proven strategies to regain growth for wellness and fitness owners.
Growth may slow, but it doesn’t have to stop. By understanding the root cause of stagnation and implementing the right strategies, your fitness or wellness brand can reignite its momentum and achieve sustainable success.
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