2023 Gym Membership Retention Statistics
As a boutique fitness studio owner, it’s important to keep a finger on the pulse of the industry.
Your EFTs, or recurring memberships, can make or break your small business. How do the latest gym membership statistics inform the choices you’re making while marketing your gym?
The landscape of the fitness industry is constantly changing, but we want to help you stay ahead of the curve. We’ve gathered the most important gym membership retention statistics for 2023 to help you forge ahead.
Plus, we’ll share the fitness resource that can help you put this data to work as you grow your business.
Continue reading to pick up some actionable gym member retention ideas.
2023 Gym Membership Retention Statistics For Fitness Studio Owners
There is a clear spike in the country’s interest in improving overall health and wellness. That’s great news for gym owners, as membership is on the rise.
Though the pandemic has posed challenges for small businesses across industries, things have started picking up again. According to IHRSA, there are currently 184.6 million gym and fitness club members in the US.
But how many of those members stuck around? The same IHRSA survey tells us that the average gym retention rate is 60.6%.
That’s the average gym membership retention rate, however. Smaller, boutique fitness studios often have an advantage. Because of their small size, intimate nature, and level of personal attention, they retain more members. The average retention rate for boutique fitness studios is as high as 70%.
While that is an impressive figure, one more question remains. How long does the average EFT maintain their membership?
The average gym member remains with a facility for between 3.3 and 4.7 years. After that, they cancel their membership or try a newer, hipper gym. Again, smaller facilities tend to fall on the longer end of the spectrum because of the factors mentioned above.
But what about the other 30%?
Gym Retention Strategies: How to Keep Members
If you run a studio with great offerings, equipment, and facilities, you can expect members to stick around. The trick to a truly successful business, however, is keeping the 30-40% of members most likely to leave.
Here are three gym membership retention strategies that might help.
1. Add Value
What do members get by going to your fitness studio that they wouldn’t get elsewhere? Consider boosting your online offerings, including high-interest blog posts, downloadables, and freebies. A ‘healthy recipe of the week,’ downloadable hydration tracker, or tips from trainers are great options.
2. Communicate
Your members want to feel valuable and important. While it’s easiest to strike up a chat with your more social members, be sure to reach out.
In our digital world, face-to-face chatter isn’t the only way to make a connection. Communicate through email, text, or apps, but make sure messages are personal. Do what you can to segment who gets what.
It’s important to keep your gym at the front of members’ minds, but always in a positive light. If communication gets annoying, you’ve lost them.
3. Prioritize the Personal
Do you acknowledge your members’ birthdays? Do you build in time to connect with them on a more personal level? Do you reward them for reaching fitness-related goals?
Take as many opportunities as you can to celebrate, including “gamifying” the experience whenever possible. Who doesn’t love to trade in a reward coupon and reap the benefits?
Bring These Gym Membership Retention Statistics to Life
We’re living in a data-driven world. The secret to success is to understand that data and make it work for you. Now that you have these gym membership retention statistics at hand, what steps will you take to grow your business?
That’s where GymDash comes in. Most fitness studio software only offers POS and attendance tracking for small fitness businesses.
GymDash offers that and much more.
It’s an intuitive and elegant interface that tracks your fitness studio’s data. It analyzes that data in real-time and provides you with a gym health score, so you know exactly where your business stands.
You will see and understand trends in membership and immediately understand how to best apply that knowledge.
GymDash is a gym revenue intelligence software that provides tracking for the metrics that truly matter in a gym. No more confusion on what data to track or what the numbers mean.
GymDash makes growing your gym guess-free.
