What is customer loyalty?
Customer loyalty is the process by which you get that customer to be loyal to your service or product. With the wide range of offers available today, obtaining a new client is becoming more and more complicated, so gaining the loyalty of your clients becomes a crucial strategy in every sports centre. A client who remains, becomes a recurrent source of income, ensuring the profitability of your sports center.
What do the researches say?
Numerous international sports associations and organisations have carried out studies on customer loyalty in sports centres that are more than interesting. We have selected some of these claims. Nevertheless, you have all the studies collected at the end of this post for consulting. Study results according to subject matter:
- Club selection: 60% of people value more than one option when selecting a club. In addition, 50% of users believe that their sports centre is no different from the others.
- New customers: New customers who use the club about 3 times a week during the first month are more likely to stay as members for the first year. Between 30 and 40% of new members are people who have no previous experience and this is the first time they have joined a club.
- Customer service: 12% of customers say that no one ever, or almost never, talks to them when they go to the sports centre. The contact of instructors with users increases the number of visits. Approximately 2 interactions per month, add at least one extra visit the following month.
- Ex-Members: About 20 percent of a club’s ex-members return to the same club and only 15 percent leave it to join another club.
- Community: social support is a relevant factor in client retention; training with family or friends increases retention. In addition, the relationship between memberships positively affects retention and is as important as the member-staff relationship.
How to get your users’ loyalty?
Although getting your customers’ loyalty is not easy, there are several points and actions you can take into account in your loyalty strategy:
- Closer communication: Perhaps, maintaining a close communication with your clients is one of the most relevant factors in retention. By doing so, you will not only make them feel valued and listened to, but you will also be able to anticipate their needs. In addition, this way you can get to know your users better, which will help you in the management of your sports centre.
- Improves the service and the attention to user that you offer in your centre: Keep your staff motivated and prioritize the user experience from the moment they arrive at your center until they leave. Check your facilities and the treatment of your staff with your users as starting points.
- Create exclusive offers and promotions for members: Depending on your business model, you will have to design strategies that are profitable and that will help you build customer loyalty. Offers, discounts, VIP cards and gifts, are some ideas that will help you in this process.
- Create events, competitions or challenges for your club’s users: This will encourage participation and a feeling of community.
- Turn your clients into ambassadors of your centre: Nothing works better than a satisfied customer who recommends your center to someone else. Word of mouth is still essential today. You can design discounts for bringing in new recommended members or gifts such as T-shirts or promotional backpacks.
- Don’t forget your lost customers: Perhaps they went through a time when they could not come to the centre for various reasons and left it. But they don’t necessarily have to be customers who never come back, so you can design strategies focused on them with very good results.
Control your centre’s loyalty from our sports centre management software.
- Track your client retention with our registration, cancellation and renewal reports: With this you will be able to see how the loyalty of your users evolves in the centre, as well as to have a report of the cancellations.
- Check the statistics of the most popular time slots to increase the activities and staff of your sports centre at that time.
- Check attendance to a specific activity: This way you will know which activities are most in demand, as well as being able to see if users are returning to that activity day by day, week by week or month by month. In addition, you can also see which coach is the most popular among your users. You will also be able to take action with those activities that present low retention levels or motivate coaches with low attendance or loyalty.
- Consult the socio-demographic data of your users from statistics or reports in order to establish age or gender ranges of your current retention.
Actions you can perform through our sports management software.
-
Maintain close communication with the user: For this, you have several tools at your disposition:
- News
- Newsletters
- Direct messages
- Create discounts or promotional codes: From our software you can create discounts to apply to your users. Also you can create promotional codes to use in their purchases, which you can send to all your users or to specific users.
- Create different payment profiles in memberships, so that you reward those who have been with the same membership for a long time, facilitating their loyalty.
We hope that these guidelines will help you to develop a customer loyalty strategy, increasing the profitability of your centre.
Resources: Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA). International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association (IHRSA). European Health & Fitness Association (EHFA). The Retention People (TRP). Les Mills International. Oxigen Consulting. WSC Consulting
