Re-engage dormant gym members with a win-back campaign

How many people on your database aren’t coming to your gym anymore? Given the industry’s high churn rates, then chances are, it’s a lot. 

Instead of seeing all these dormant members as a loss, you should look at them as an opportunity. That is, an opportunity to convince them to lace up their shoes, dust off their gym gear, and sign back up again. 

A win-back campaign — also known as a re-engagement or reactivation campaign — is where you specifically target dormant members with a marketing campaign geared towards getting them back in the gym.

Win-back campaigns are a real winner

Every successful fitness studio should have a rock-solid win-back campaign strategy in place. Why? There’s less effort (and less cost) involved in winning back a dormant customer compared to finding new customers. 

For starters, these are people who already chose your gym once. They know the location, they’re familiar with your classes and equipment. They hopefully love the vibe. Sure, their membership may have lapsed, but their likelihood of returning is often much higher than converting a completely new lead.

What’s more, you already know a bit about these members, so you can more easily personalise your campaigns. Plus, these dormant members have already shown interest in your gym before — making them more of a “low-hanging fruit” than net-new members. 

The thing is, these people have lost their passion for the gym. And it’s up to you to help them find it again.

Win-back success starts with intel

To reconnect with dormant members, it helps to know a little bit about them. This fact-finding mission should start from the moment they first sign up — not when they’ve already left. 

With this in mind, encourage your staff and instructors to get to know your members. Make it easy for them to add notes about individual members to your CRM — they might have a conversation in the gym about what motivates the member, and this could provide good leverage for a future win-back campaign.

As well as all those ad-hoc conversations, capture more formal insights via feedback forms and surveys. For starters, add a question or two to your new membership form asking why they joined, such as:

Why did you decide to join our gym?

1. To make the most of a promotion / discount
2. For a free trial
3. Training for a specific event
4. Working towards a specific fitness goal
5. To meet new people
6. Other

You could also add these sorts of questions to feedback forms you send out during the year, or to your member engagement checklist.

And, if it does reach the point when a member actually leaves, try to find out why they don’t want to come back. It could be as simple as a change in work routine. Or an inability to get out of bed on cold winter mornings. 

Armed with these insights, you can start thinking about how best to appeal to these departing members. Your goal is to reignite that early motivation and remind them about all the benefits of joining your gym.

Win-back campaign ideas for your gym

There are loads of approaches for a win-back campaign. The route you take can really depend on who you’re targeting, and why they left. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Run a fitness challenge

This could target any lapsed members who participated in one of your challenges in the past. Let them know about your next challenge and encourage them to join in.

Offer a “welcome back” discount

This strategy could target anyone who may have left for financial reasons. Give them a special, limited-time offer (like, discounted membership, a free personal training session, or a waived sign-up fee) to make them feel like they’re getting a deal they can’t refuse. 

Hold workshops and events

‍If you know that a dormant member was interested in broader health and wellness topics, then invite them along to your next workshop or event. For example, someone who always talked about fueling for exercise wouldn’t want to miss a session with a nutritionist. Or someone who was focused on recovery would love an event with compression boots, massage guns, and ice baths.

Invite them to community meet-ups

‍This strategy could target dormant members who showed an interest in meeting new people when they joined. If you’re holding a BBQ or there’s a run club linked to your gym, invite them along. 

Incentivise with partnerships and perks

See if you can align your partnerships and collabs with what your members and target audience are interested in. This could be recovery tools, fitness gear, supplements, or something else entirely… anything that acts as an extra incentive to rejoin.

Just remember, whichever tactic you choose, try to personalise your email or offer as much as possible. Show these lapsed members that you’ve listened in the past and you still care about them — and they’ll be more likely to come back.

How Hapana can help

Hapana’s all-in-one platform helps you paint a fuller picture of your members, from operations to reporting to marketing. You can set up automated surveys to gather feedback. You can better connect with lapsed members via social media. You can set up custom tags in your member profiles. And you can easily segment lapsed members for more personalised targeting. 

To see how effective Hapana can be in helping you nail your next win-back campaign, get a demo today.