As a personal trainer, retaining clients is vital. It’s impossible to predict how successful you’ll be at finding new PT clients, so having a group of regulars that you work with every week is how you maintain a consistent income.
However, there is one situation that every business fears, and that is an economic slowdown. When a slowdown happens, you’ll find that personal trainer services aren’t in such high demand - which means that you could be in for a rough ride.
Thankfully, there are a few strategies you can use to retain personal training clients during this time. Let’s look at what you can do to keep your business going during a difficult period.
Before we can talk about how to retain clients during an economic slowdown, we need to make sure that everybody understands what an economic slowdown is.
So, an economic slowdown is what we would describe as a situation where the country's economic growth has slowed down, but it hasn’t stopped entirely. We measure growth in GDP - the Gross Domestic Product. This figure is all about the health of a country economically.
So, if the country's economic growth went from 6% to 4%, this would be an economic slowdown. It can happen for a range of factors, but it’s most often because the cost of living has gone up and inflation is rising. The result is that people don’t have as much disposable income or money to spend on things like a personal trainer, which is bad news for you.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom. You can do things to retain clients and make sure that you promote yourself still. Let’s talk about a few of them now.
Group training sessions can be a good way to retain clients and introduce a few new ones. A group training session can be a great way to offer a slight discount on the session to appeal to a family unit or some friends.
It’s often the case that entire groups of people make a pact to get in shape together. You can work with this by offering a training course that everyone does together two or three times a week, and it’s at a discounted price.
This method can be quite successful. People love working out with their friends or family members because it can be a fun social activity, and the thought of a good deal is a great way to keep customers during an economic slowdown.
Marketing is an effective tool for retaining personal training clients during an economic slowdown. Marketing is a resource you can use to promote yourself, and if you study the trends for personal trainers, you can tailor your marketing strategies to maximise retention.
For example, after the COVID-19 pandemic, 83% of all personal trainers said that they would continue to offer online classes and support to people. That suggests that the flexibility of online support is popular and might encourage people to hire you during a downturn.
If you add some stats to your marketing, you can appeal to many prospective customers or convince existing ones to stay with you. For example, did you know that a previous study found people lost 9% of their body weight when they embarked on a 24-week course with a personal trainer? By showing people the facts and marketing to your target audience in the right way, you can retain clients even during quiet periods.
Promoting your brand is always essential as a personal trainer. You have to create your brand identity and market it on your own, which means that brand awareness must be high to succeed.
Within marketing, there’s a principle called ‘the rule of seven.’ This revolves around the idea that a prospective client needs to see your brand seven times before they interact with it - that means you need to promote yourself as much as you can.
There are many ways to raise brand awareness. Having a complete set of social media profiles and a website is a good idea, and so is using PT merchandise to create a community. You should also make sure to share testimony from happy clients! These are all things you can do to improve brand awareness and make sure you retain clients during an economic slowdown.
If you’re going to retain clients during an economic slowdown, you need to stay in contact with people as much as you can - it makes a lot of difference!
Whether this is a quick phone call every few weeks to see how they’re doing or an email campaign where you provide encouragement, following up with clients is a good way to keep them invested. Ultimately, their fitness journey should be ongoing, and it’s all about them - if you style your conversations around those principles, you’ll do well.
Clients love a personal touch and want to feel like they’re important. Taking the time to ask them how they’re doing and providing a few choice words to support their journey is a great way to do this.
As a personal trainer, you’ve spent a long time building up a reputation among your client base. They trust you with their fitness journey and helping them to achieve their goals. That means you have a responsibility to maintain that trust if you are going to retain clients.
A lot of personal trainers will try out products and give recommendations to their clients. However, even if a financial incentive is involved, you should never review something you don’t believe in. If the product isn’t great, and you’re affiliated with it, you’ll do nothing but alienate your client base and damage their trust in you.
You can review things, of course, but don’t compromise on your integrity for a quick endorsement. Trust can take a long time to build and seconds to destroy.
If there is one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic taught us, it’s that digital services are very popular. Online shopping, streaming, and services like banking are all available digitally, and they fit into a faster pace of life.
As a personal trainer, you probably developed some online courses to provide to people during the lockdown. It was necessary to adapt to thrive in the middle of exceptional circumstances, and you should keep these services running if you want to retain clients during an economic slowdown.
These resources allow for flexibility and help to cut costs for travel. Plus, in some cases, it means you can offer a slight discount - you’re still bringing in clients, and they don’t have to pay as much.
If you want to retain clients during economic slowdowns, you need to remind them why the services you provide are important. This means that you need to give as much support as you can.
Make sure that you have the nutritional knowledge they need and that you provide proper support when they finish up the session. If there were ever a time to go above and beyond, this would be it.
Clients love being taken care of and made to feel like the services they are getting are custom-made for them. They will be a lot more motivated to keep working with you and using your services if you’ve gone out of your way to make them feel important.
As a personal trainer, what makes you stand out from the crowd? What separates you from the rest of your industry? You have a unique selling point, and you need to push that when you interact with clients.
Whether it’s providing 24/7 support, offering nutritional plans, or a loyalty scheme, make sure that you promote your unique selling point wherever you can to retain clients. At the end of the day, people work with you for a reason, and you can’t forget that during tough times.
Retaining clients during an economic slowdown is a tough business. You need to try and push for people to put their fitness first and to work with you, but there are strategies you can implement to help with this.
During an economic slowdown, clients become less inclined to spend money on services like a personal trainer, which is why you need to remind them of the benefits something like this can offer. They need to work with a personal trainer to continue a precisely-developed fitness journey that grows and evolves with them. That’s an important reason to offer discounts and compromise a little to keep clients on board.
During a challenging period, it’s important to focus on your branding and push your brand identity as much as you can. If you want a good way to do that, you should look at what we offer. We provide custom clothing that you can create using your logo and contact details. This passive form of branding - which is on display everywhere you go, helps to fulfil the ‘rule of seven’ that we talked about. Check it out, and see how it can help you retain clients.
Sources:
https://runrepeat.com/personal-trainer-statistics#how-effective-are-personal-trainers
