In the competitive world of fitness training, gyms, studios, and trainers are constantly looking for new ideas to grow fitness revenue, drive sales, and increase member retention. With the proliferation of health and wellness education and the increase of technology in the fitness space, there are now countless ways for fitness businesses to integrate additional services into their business model to generate more revenue.
According to IHRSA, "It costs 9x as much to acquire a new member than it does to keep an existing one.” Member retention is important and providing additional services for your members should be key. when it comes to driving revenue, It is easier to increase the average spend per member each week versus acquiring new members.
Businesses also need to provide additional methods for training to meet their members where and when they prefer to work out, as technology now allows for trainers to reach potential customers that didn’t necessarily have the time to workout before.
With the ability to reach more customers than ever before, it becomes critical for fitness entrepreneurs to diversify their offerings in order to sustain their business. Let’s examine some of the strategies that fitness businesses can enact to keep members coming and grow their business.
Some of the Top Fitness Trends continue to be strength training, functional fitness training, HIIT, circuit training, group exercise training, and personal training according to the annual ACSM Worldwide Fitness Trends Survey. So let's look at the ways you can capitalize on these trends by generating new revenue streams and providing services to reinforce member retention.
Ways To Grow Fitness Business Revenue
1. Expand Health and Wellness Services Offered
While customers may initially come to your business with training/working out in mind, offering services that give customers a more comprehensive approach to health and wellness is certainly something that fitness businesses should consider. By combining fitness, self-care, and wellness under one roof, health clubs offer a variety of services to improve our overall health and wellbeing in a physical, emotional, social, and spiritual way.
Personal trainers can provide valuable holistic advice, from recovery and wellness to fitness and nutrition and receive ongoing mentoring and development to ensure clients reach their goals. For example, adding nutrition consultations makes a ton of sense, as diet and training need to complement each other in order to be effective.
Businesses can also think about offering mindfulness and mental coaching that provides clients strategies to deal with day-to-day stress and improve overall well-being.
These additional services can give you a leg up on your competition and help improve customer satisfaction and retention.
2. Offer Fitness and Nutritional Products
Another idea to produce more income for businesses is to sell additional fitness products to their customers. This could include fitness equipment, fitness apparel, and nutritional supplements. With the at-home training and supplement spaces continuing to grow, it makes a lot of sense for fitness businesses to explore revenue opportunities in these areas. For gyms or studios with facilities that have plenty of space, they could also consider offering a smoothie or snack bar.
An additional step businesses can take is branding their own products to sell to customers. This is potentially a great way for businesses to establish and create more awareness around their brand.
3. Offer One-On-One Or Small Group Personal Training
According to the annual ACSM Global Fitness Trends, personal training has been a Top 10 Trend since 2006. One-on-one training continues to be a strong trend as the profession of personal training becomes more accessible online, in health clubs, in the home, and work sites. Personal training includes fitness testing and goal setting with the trainer collaborating one-on-one with a client to prescribe workouts specific to his or her individual needs and goals.
Small group personal training is also very popular because it still offers personalized programming, motivation, and accountability to the client, but at a lower price than on-on-one training.
4. Include Virtual Training Sessions
With the evolution of technology, it’s become almost mandatory for fitness businesses to include some sort of digital classes for their members. Whether it’s one-on-one sessions, small group training, or a group fitness class, virtual training allows businesses to tap into a wider customer base than was possible before, as proximity to a training facility no longer becomes an obstacle.
Virtual training can be complementary to the regular fitness membership or included in the personal training package. According to the Deloitte European Health & Fitness market report, digital on-demand classes are growing as a complementary add-on to the membership. Offering virtual fitness opportunities helps to increase member retention and usage because members can work out in their preferred environment, whether that is in the facility, outside, at home, or while traveling.
Virtual training is specifically important for individual personal trainers to add to their services, as they can increase revenue by attracting more customers and deliver sessions in their client’s preferred work out environment.
5. Create An App For On-Demand Content
Another way for fitness businesses to take advantage of the expanded audience that technology allows them to reach is to offer training and educational courses online. This is an incredibly efficient way to conduct a training session for both the business and the customer; it’s a product you can create once and sell countless times as a trainer and can access whenever you want as a customer. With the variety of workouts that trainers can cover, it’s a great way for businesses to create a lot of inventory, while also providing content for free or premium content to purchase.
Recent research shows the use of free digital live and on-demand fitness content has increased for home fitness users, but fee based offerings have stagnated. So it is best to continue to offer live streaming and on-demand classes as a complementary offering.
There are several virtual fitness products that allow you to brand and upload your own video content.
6. Host Special Fitness Classes
Running specialty fitness classes allows you to take advantage of growing trends within the fitness space, as customers clearly enjoy the group dynamic and change in routine that these types of events offer. It's also a great way to increase inventory without incurring any additional cost, as you can build the workout around the equipment you have at your facility. By building your own little community within your members, you can increase loyalty to your business and increase the customer experience.
For gym owners looking for ideas on how to go about programming their fitness challenge, incorporating the VertiMax resistance equipment into the fitness class is a no-brainer. With multiple attachments allowing for simultaneous users, a wide range of motion built to accommodate a variety of exercises, and the flexibility to move it into just about any workout space, VertiMax offers a ton of options for any group training session.
7. Start a Referral Program
A simple way to help increase your word-of-mouthing marketing is by offering a referral program to your current members that allows them to earn rewards as they refer new customers to your business. Offering a free group training session or discounted merchandise are common rewards issues in these types of programs. This is an excellent tool to help boost your customer retention while also reducing the amount your business needs to spend on marketing.
8. Plan a Fitness Retreat
For businesses looking to target more high-end members, offering a fitness retreat is a unique way to engage your current members and attract some new ones. Fitness retreats are vacations built around health and wellness activities, in which the unconventional setting helps participants to improve their habits and push their fitness boundaries with support from a group. They will usually offer tough workouts like HIIT or circuit training, while also including less strenuous activities like yoga or meditation. This change in dynamic is really a great way to build trust in your fitness expertise with your customers and solidify customer loyalty.
9. Provide Corporate Fitness Solutions
More and more well-run companies are providing health and wellness solutions to their employees as part of their benefits package or as a corporate activity. For fitness business owners, this is definitely something to explore, as it could be an opportunity to boost revenue from booking monthly classes with a company or from selling your educational content to them. This also has the added bonus of introducing your business to potential customers.
10. Partner with Local Businesses
Get out in your local community. For those fitness businesses that don’t have the ability to provide certain aspects of a comprehensive health and wellness experience to their members, partnering with a non-competitor who offers complimentary services is an effective way to expand services to your members while also increasing awareness of your business with potential customers. For example, gyms or studios that don’t have the space/capacity to have an in-house smoothie bar could partner with an outside smoothie bar to provide this as an offering to customers.
11. Invest in New Equipment
Sometimes the best way for you to increase revenue for your fitness business isn’t by offering additional training or services to your members, but by improving what you provide in your standard offering. Upgrading your equipment is one of the best ways to help your customers reach their fitness goals and increase customer retention.
For health clubs, gyms and studios that are looking for new equipment, VertiMax can help increase member engagement with fun and motivating workouts. The patented resistance training equipment is easy to add and fits in any space restrictions that a facility has. The VertiMax V8 platform is so versatile you can set it up or move it around in just about any space. The Raptor is also portable and it can be attached to a squat rack, a wall, a fence, a sled, or a portable mounting device.
VertiMax equipment is an affordable investment, costing much less than a treadmill. You can also train up to 5 people at a time on the V8 and up to 2 at a time on the Raptor. So it is a great addition to personal training for small groups of clients.
VertiMax has been successful in getting countless professional and collegiate athletes to perform at an elite level, so there’s no doubt that it can help your members improve their fitness performance as well.
Grow Your Fitness Business with VertiMax
Growing your business in the ever-crowded fitness training market is a tough task that will always require self-evaluation and strategic planning in order to attain some level of success. It’s become absolutely necessary for business owners to diversify their offerings to customers, in order to meet them where they are and provide services that are more tailored to their specific needs.
Facilities also need to continually review their equipment and programs to make sure they are providing value to their customers and helping them achieve their fitness goals. Check out how VertiMax V8 platforms and Raptors can provide more variety for members. Gyms or studios can use the VertiMax to add additional group workouts or fitness classes to their schedule to help grow their business. It’s also a great tool to help boost personal training sessions for any trainer, as the results customers see from a VertiMax workout will certainly be noticeable.
Visit VertiMax.com to find information on the many use cases for the VertiMax platforms and to see how you can help your clients take their training to an elite level. You can also contact our support team with any questions on how to begin onboarding and get started with VertiMax today.
Check out this article:
Four Factors for Designing a Functional Fitness Facility
1. Space
2. Equipment
3. Programming
4. Community
Bonus: Get Raptor Fit
The VertiMax RaptorFit solution brings in the new age of small group functional training.
Using patented VertiMax technology. The RaptorFit program allows your members to train using the exact same equipment as olympians and professional athletes around the world.
The RaptorFit solution is an all encompassing package that provides you a brand new revenue stream for your facility. We provide you everything you need in order to build, optimize and scale a successful functional fitness business inside your existing business.
Our goal is to provide you a turnkey solution that will bring you additional monthly revenue with very little work on your end. The deployment of the RaptorFit solution can be done in very small areas (or no area at all), and is customized based on your facility’s specific needs.
When you onboard RaptorFit, you’re not bringing on another class or training system, you’re joining a community. A community of like minded facilities, athletes, coaches and parents whose goal it is to inspire the athlete in all of us to become our very best
Sources:
ACSM 2023 Fitness Trends Article
ACSM Journal - Worldwide Survey of Fitness Trends for 2023
HIIT and Functional Fitness were listed as 2 of the top 10 fitness trends of 2018.
