It’s a sad old story: every January millions of people sign up for fitness club memberships with the very best of intentions, but few stick with their resolutions beyond the first 2 or 3 months. At Island Fitness, we want to buck this trend. We want our new members to succeed, to achieve their goals, and to stay around for years, not weeks! Read the article below for our 3 Insider Secrets.
In hopes of discovering efficacious tools to enhance success rates, we’ve run various internal reports analyzing new member usage habits to ascertain how they correlate with member retention. The results have been fascinating. Here are 3 of the most effective actions we’ve discovered that strongly predict long-term success for new members at Island Fitness.
Don’t procrastinate: sign up sooner rather than later. For the past 5 years we’ve offered a very low joining fee for the entire month of January, from the 1st through the 31st. Our statistics indicate that people who sign up for an annual membership at the beginning of January are significantly more likely to stick with their workouts than the people who put it off until the very last day of the sale to join. For example, the first 12 people who joined with annual memberships in January of 2017 have accrued an average of 86 visits, and 10 of the 12 have checked in within the past month. But the last 12 people, who all joined on January 31st, have an average of only 17 visits so far, and only 1 of the 12 has checked in within the past month. If you make joining a priority, according to our data you’ll also make working out a priority!
Schedule your Ortho-Kinetics assessment. All new annual memberships at Island Fitness include 3 one-hour Ortho-Kinetics assessment sessions with a trainer at no charge. The goal of these sessions is to help new members learn more about how their bodies move, and to help them start developing personalized fitness programs based on their individual findings. Our reports consistently show that members who complete the 3 Ortho-Kinetic assessment sessions are twice as likely to still be using the club regularly 6 months later.
Find a group fitness class you enjoy. All Island Fitness memberships include over 50 group fitness classes per week, at no extra charge.According to our data, people who participate in at least one group fitness class per month are almost twice as likely to still be using the club regularly 6 months after joining. Better yet, people who participate in at least one group fitness class per week are 4 times more likely to still be using the club 6 months after joining.
So the take-away advice for new members seems to be: Be pro-active; act sooner rather than later; participate and take advantage of opportunities; don’t try to go it alone. Let 2018 be the year you give it your very best shot, and remember: Island Fitness is on your team!