How to Develop Gym Business: Optimization Tips All Successful Gym Owners Use 

Running a successful gym isn’t easy, especially during quarantine. With all the new conditions businesses have to meet, like having ready hand sanitizing stations and following capacity rules, running a gym these days often feels more like running a hospital. Besides these new obvious challenges to your gym’s success, there are more subtle ones that still may be keeping you from where you want to be. 

Customer satisfaction is a key component in how to have a successful gym. If you make an effort and impress new customers, they’re likely to become regulars. A good way to make an outstanding first impression with new customers is to have a seamless, error-free gym registration and booking process. An automatic booking plugin like Booknetic provides your business with the software and tools you need to be a successful gym owner. In this blog post, we’ll give you a few battle-tested pieces of advice to boost customer satisfaction and ensure your gym will thrive during these challenging times. 

Tips for Successful Gym Business

Gyms are competitive businesses by nature, people go there to exercise and improve, and a little healthy competition builds comradery. In the same way, there is competition for your clients going on between your gyms and others, competition made all the more intense by the coronavirus pandemic. 

As public spaces in high demand that could be quarantined again, people are expecting more out of their gyms and won’t hesitate to try another if their current one is dissatisfying. To be a successful gym owner and win the competition,you need to start using reliable strategies that boost customer satisfaction. Here are a few that we recommend implementing immediately. 

1. Communicate with Clients

In today’s competitive environment, it’s difficult to find new clients, let alone turn them into long-term members. Communication is key to building lasting relationships with your clients. Establish online presence and engage your clients over social media, email-campaigns and questionnaires - this will help you get to know them better and provide you with useful feedback. At the same time, don’t forget the simplest form of communication - face-to-face one. Be sure you and your staff are greeting clients and showing a genuine interest in their health and fitness management plan. 

2. Have a Strong Gym Culture

Being a successful gym owner is about more than just balancing the budget at the end of the month. It’s your responsibility to create a welcoming environment where customers feel comfortable and make sure that your staff behaves appropriately. Assembling a helpful and professional staff is a vital component of managing a gym business. Make it part of your gym’s mission to make clients feel welcome and put in place protocols for your staff to follow. Create a healthy, helpful gym culture where every client feels at home and appreciated. 

3. Use the Best Equipment You Can

Unless you’re a serious powerlifter or gym-rat, no one likes a gym filled with outdated or rusted weights and machines. The modern gym is a place of both cleanliness and convenience. A place where members come to work hard but also relieve stress. It’s a great idea to have a massage therapist or two on your staff to provide clients with an extra level of physical recovery.It is also a good way to upsell the customers and increase the average income of a gym owner. Again, an appointment scheduling plugin can make sure the therapist’s workflow is smooth and not appointments overlap. 

As far as your equipment is concerned, display the best weights and machines nearest the entrances and windows to impress those coming by and raise their interest. Allocate the personnel responsible for the maintenance and checking of the equipment functionality daily to ensure your customer’s satisfaction and safety. 

4. Use Automated Booking

These days, people prefer to make appointments on their own, and the number of appointments made online is only growing. Make sure your site is adapted to both desktop and mobile view. Adding an online booking plugin like Booknetic to your website, your customers will be able to register and schedule sessions on their own time, meaning less work for you. Automation can really turn a struggling business into a success. Our booking plugin allows you to fully automate the booking process and reduce expenses, while improving customer experience. 

5. Give Several Payment Options

Successful gyms are those that make sure to cover all of their client’s payment options. Whether cash, card, or payment app like Paypal or GooglePay, your business needs to be ready to handle all kinds of cash flow. It’s also recommended to use booking plugins like ours that automatically process payment online, giving you and your customers one less thing to do at the gym. What’s more, Booknetic sends your clients notifications on previous and upcoming payments, making sure everyone is kept in the loop. 

Final Thoughts

Providing your customers with a gym they want to come back to is no easy task, especially in today’s market. How to manage a gym successfully? Place customer satisfaction first and implement the advice above to impress first-timers and long-term clients alike. Booknetic can give your gym an advantage over the competition, automating everything from booking to the payments process. A convenient plugin that will make your work life at the gym easier, we welcome you to try a free demo and experience the convenience of Booknetic for yourself.