When a member gets frustrated with something 90% of the time they won’t tell you. They’ll just find another gym. In an industry with a high attrition rate, your members’ feedback really matters. Your fitness marketing dollars are wasted if you don’t listen to your members.
Encourage your members to provide honest feedback. You want to hear the negative comments as well as the positive so that you can respond to members and fix problems while they’re still small (and not after the problems have become too large and costly to fix).
One way to this is to survey your members and allow them to comment anonymously. You can do a paper-based survey or put out comment cards, but if you want to make it really easy for members, create an online survey. For example, Survey Monkey is a free service that you can use to create questions for your members to answer and encourage feedback on things they like and don’t like. You can also use it to collect demographic information, which you can use to tailor your fitness marketing campaigns.
Take your members’ complaints seriously once you have their feedback. There is nothing more annoying to a member than giving the feedback and not seeing action taken to remedy the situation. Let’s say that a few members have complained that the elliptical machines are always being hogged in the afternoon. Once you’ve had a chance to observe that, you can add more ellipticals or post signs to get members to give up the machines after 30 minutes when people are waiting.
The bottom line is, your fitness marketing strategy should always include a mechanism for honest feedback from your members. These are the people that keep your gym in business, and if they’re happy, they’ll keep coming back.