Cancellations, pauses, cancellations disguised as pauses… When will it end?!?
If you’re a gym owner or manager, chances are at some point in your career you’ve experienced a “summer drought”. Stereotypically this can be a time of year where attendance, leads, sales, and revenue dops. If you find yourself in this situation, this article should help you bounce back as quickly as possible.
DISCLAIMER Whilst it may be impossible to completely eliminate a dip over the summer, both team GymOS and I believe that gyms can always do more to mitigate summer pauses/cancellations. Please read our previous article “The BulletProof Guide For Stopping Summer Membership Pauses” if you want to take the best approach, which is to negate summer pauses entirely!
If you’re experiencing a summer drought, here’s some tactics on how to bounce back.
1.Don’t Stop Advertising!
Here’s the situation: you predict a drop in sales, it comes, you want to save some money, so you turn off your adverts… WRONG MOVE. Turning off your adverts is a sure way to kill your future pipeline. Even when prospects are abroad, they still see adverts from their hometown. Ask yourself: when is a prospect ready to take action? Right when they feel the worst, which is typically the last days of their trip after binging all week. I do agree you can turn your adverts down temporarily, but keeping a constant reminder to your prospects is important.
2. Give Value
The pausers, your followers, and your database leads still read/watch your content. Just because you might be experiencing a summer dip, doesn’t mean your efforts towards marketing should dip. Use this time to double down on social and email marketing. Keep them thinking about you throughout the summer, so when they’re ready to train again, you’re already in their head.
3. September Promotion
This could be a blog on its own, but I’ll try to be concise. Take your most popular intro offer, plan a series of promotions across all platforms: adverts, Facebook, IG, stories, website, member groups, push notifications, email, SMS, WhatsApp, anywhere your prospects look. Plan out 3 weeks of promotions that you will drip feed to the audience. 2 weeks before the launch (or perceived launch) share some teasers and info about the September offer. 1 week before “launch”, offer some early bird places. The week of launch (usually 1st week of September) extend the early bird places and make a big thing about the offer ending soon. This drawn out, multi-platform approach is sure to get people in the door.
4. Reward Returning Members
I’m sure you agree, if a member pauses in June, no matter what they say, there’s a high chance they don’t come back. So for every member that comes back after a pause, or potentially comes back after an even longer break, give them a free pass for a friend! This is a referral for you, and the returning member (with their motivation peaked) will bring their closest friend who’s heard so much about your facility. It’s a win-win!
5. Mindset Shift
If you expect a “summer drought”, then a summer drought will come. Only prospects with kids up to roughly 14 years old have a valid excuse of not having time to start training. If you’re a large group performance gym, chances are your perfect members are young professionals (without kids). If you’re a premium SGPT gym, chances are your perfect members are in the later stages of their career and life, and their children (if they have any) would typically be older. There’s only a small demographic of people who might not be ready to start training in the summer, everyone else in the local area could be willing to start at any time! This summer I’ve had 3 gyms hit all time record months with trial and membership sales in July. If they believed in the summer drought and reduced their efforts, this wouldn’t have been possible.
Again, we believe the best bounce back from summer is to put effort into summer retention, so a bounce back isn’t needed. However if you’re already in a drought, hopefully this article helps!