3 Ways to Survey Your Gym Members to Increase Retention

Fitness studio owners spend most of their time trying to find new clients. Ads, intro offers, and first-class free discounts are overused to attract new clients, but gym owners rarely check in to retain their membership.

Have you asked your clients how their experience has been lately? You may be surprised by what you learn.

Quarterly Surveys

The quarterly survey is my favorite tool to combat membership churn in the wellness industry. Free tools such as Survey Monkey enable you to build templates to easily survey your clients. By asking key questions and analyzing the data, you can then strategically improve your business each quarter by:

1. Adjusting your studio’s class schedule based on attendance and client feedback.

2. Identifying trends before they snowball into a problem.

3. Prioritizing what clients love about your gym.

4. Training staff to stay ahead of competition and attrition.

To build your survey, ask questions that help you discover what your clients honestly want, love, and dislike about your business. Keep it short (ten questions or fewer) and customize your boutique fitness survey based on your gym’s clientele and culture. I’ve highlighted my favorites in bold. 

Intro Question:

• What kind of membership or class package client do you have? (this helps you filter and weigh the responses. A VIP unlimited member’s response is more impactful than a ClassPass client on your business’s bottom line).

Class Questions: 

• Rank your ideal class times

• Rank your favorite class modalities

• If we were to add a new class time/style, which would you attend?

• What would you add or change if you were in charge of the schedule?

Culture Questions- on a scale of 1-5:

• Do you feel welcome and valued when you walk into our studio?

• Do your instructors care about your experience and know your name?

• Do you feel connected to our community members?

• Do you participate in our events? If not, why?

Studio Questions:

• Are you enjoying your classes? 

• Please grade our class: difficulty/teachers/customization/music/format

• Is the studio clean and stocked when you enter?

• What do you love about our studio?*

• What would you like us to change or improve? Please be constructive and specific.*

Encourage Members to Respond

You spend precious time building your survey, send it out, and...crickets. You’ll need to remind your clients that their feedback is crucial to your success as a small business owner. I’m not above pleading when it comes to encouraging replies.

First- Let your clients know what to expect. No one likes to be surprised by a giant, time-consuming survey. Then, add a heart-felt ask:

“Without your feedback, we cannot evolve and grow to be the studio of your dreams! Please take two minutes to help us improve.”

Your clients will come to expect and even look forward to these quarterly surveys, but it will take time. Eventually, they will learn that surveys fall under the category of “this is what we do here,” which is one of my favorite coaching terms for standard operations at your studio.

Anytime one of my clients or instructors has a suggestion or a complaint, I remind them to please put it in writing in the upcoming survey so that I can act on their request. Now, the client feels heard, I have documentation, and I’m not constantly dodging demands.

Annual Surveys

Once a year, I craft a more in-depth survey that guides teacher evaluations, staff management, scheduling, and general studio optimization as a gym owner. I include the two above questions* as well as a line for each of my instructors that states:

“Please rank each of our teachers with one being “I avoid this instructor” and five, “I will rearrange my schedule to make it to this instructor’s class.” Please also include constructive, specific feedback to be anonymously shared with the instructor to clarify your score.”

When I share my feedback survey, studio owners are often concerned about coming across as harsh or overly corporate. But when I poll my past and present instructors, feedback is not only overwhelmingly appreciated; it directly contributes to our long staff tenures. 

In a survey by Review Snap, 75% of employees reported that they consider feedback critical for their performance, and multiple studies link employee engagement with reliable feedback. After gathering your survey results, schedule a sit down with each instructor to discuss the client feedback, and make a plan together. Feedback doesn’t need to be harmful to be effective. Remember to offer praise as well. 

Analyze Your Data

The number one mistake I see business owners make is forgetting to follow through with their data. As the responses come in, take time to analyze the client feedback and give yourself a few days to digest it. I know it’s challenging, but try to avoid snap fixes which often lead to over-corrections.

Block your schedule for a few hours and dive into each question to investigate: 

• What are the clients telling you?

• Are there trends that can be identified? For example, is there a time that many clients would love to see on the schedule or a teacher that isn’t performing well?

• What actions can you take to make the most of your survey?

Of course, you want your clients to feel heard, but take the surveys with a grain of salt. Like a statistics bell curve, throw out the outliers- the most glowing response and the most disgruntled. Neither will do you any favors if you dwell on them too long. You’re looking for feedback to help develop your studio, not hurt your feelings.

You may want to include a checkbox at the end of the survey that asks, “may we share your feedback anonymously?” Now you have two uses for your survey- internal improvements and external marketing with glowing testimonials from your “what do you love?” question.  

Lastly, remember that -in the end, it’s your studio, and you know better than anyone what challenges that brings. Even if an overwhelming majority of your studio requests 7 AM classes on the survey, you have the right to say, “we’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work.” 

The “Was it Us?” Text

This is one of my favorite tools, and it’s incredibly effective when used correctly. Let’s say you have a new introductory client that you adore. You know she’s going to purchase a membership and stay forever, and then- she’s gone. What happened?

If you don’t know, you risk repeating the experience in the future, so you need to ask. Email isn’t a great tool in this case because it’s too easy to ignore. You’ll want to be a little more forward to get results. The good news is that it’s easy. Simply send the client a text message- it will look something like this:

“Hi client, this is X, the owner of Y studio. Thank you so much for spending two weeks with us. As a small, heart-based business, it means so much to me that you’d choose to spend your free- time <insert verb- working out/ practicing/cycling, etc.) with us. I’m bummed we haven’t seen you since your intro special expired. As a small business owner, I was wondering if there is something we could have done better that would have encouraged you to stay? I appreciate your feedback so that I can use it to continue to grow and improve. I hope you had a great two weeks and that we get to see you again soon.”

There are three common responses to this message. 

1. Nothing. You never hear from the client again, in which case you are in exactly the same position you were before. Nothing lost or gained.

2. Honest feedback. They didn’t like the music, the classes didn’t fit their schedule, or they needed childcare (I’ve heard all of these before). You can now decide if it’s something you want to offer or if this client would be better served elsewhere.

3. The best case scenario: “Oh, I loved it! What are my options again?” This response is surprisingly common. More often than not, your sales pitch was either ineffective or completely missed. Here’s your chance to save the sale.

These three tools will allow you to enhance the parts of your business that clients love, improve what doesn’t work, and add what clients are looking for. Even better, once you build your survey templates, you can make minor adjustments and send them out without piling more onto your daily to-do list. It’s more expensive to find new clients than keep your current ones, so make the most of the tools in your arsenal to keep them forever.