Wondering how to get more health club members? What’s the best way to get more students at your yoga studio, or more clients for your weight loss program?
These seven strategies offer realistic, achievable, and solidly sustainable ways to increase your revenues with real-world examples from a variety of fitness and wellness sectors.
Which strategies fit your business goals best?
1. Sell new services or products
Your wellness center decides to add new programs and services which are significantly different from what you currently offer. They may be substantially broader OR substantially narrower in scope than your current offerings.
- Your healthy lifestyle business has traditionally focused on nutrition. You hire a clinical exercise specialist and begin offering a new program which includes nutrition and adds a new exercise element.
- Your yoga studio has a great regional reputation, but you’ve historically offered only group classes. You add brand-new teacher training programs that result in Yoga Alliance RYT-200/500 certification.
- Your healthy weight center has historically offered a single eight-week program. You decide to add an advanced program available only to graduates of the initial program.
Sometimes this strategy allows you to retain customers you’d otherwise lose, or attract an entirely new customer segment:
- Your fitness center adds a simplified membership—use of cardio equipment only. It doesn’t include use of the strength area, group fitness, the spa, or any other facilities or services.
- Your discount gym adds a monthly massage subscription package that competes with discount massage franchises.
2. Cross-sell existing services to current customers
- Your triathlon coaching business promotes running groups to your cycling clients, and cycling training to the running groups.
3. Cross-sell products to services customers and vice-versa
In this scenario, you sell products to customers who normally only buy services and vice-versa.
- Your nutrition business offers its weight loss counseling clients the opportunity to buy portion-control plates, food scales, and fast-food calorie and nutrition guides.
- Your gym market sports nutrition counseling to members who routinely buy nutritional supplements.
4. Upsell your services to current clients
Offer an upgraded or enhanced version of the program or service that your customer currently uses.
- Your fitness center offers an aquatics add-on that allows members to use the pool and wet areas, or a court sports add-on that lets them use the basketball courts.
- Your weight management program offers an enhanced version at a higher price that includes more group support sessions plus additional individual coaching.
- Your corporate wellness business offers employee workshops. You add one-on-one executive wellness coaching.
- Your yoga studio offers a package that combines regular weekly classes with a quarterly workshop with an invited guest instructor.
5. Increase utilization
You continue to offer the same services to the same clients, and grow revenue by increasing the number of visits or other measure of consumption by client. Or, you slightly reduce the amount of service you provide to each client, allowing you to see more clients and thus bill more in the same amount of time.
This approach works especially well if you bill by the appointment, hour or session or offer other consumption-driven products or services.
There’s an indirect benefit, too—if you offer other services, simply getting customers through the door more frequently increases your ability to sell them something new.
- Your wellness center currently schedules 60-minute appointments with most clients. You convert to 50-minute appointments which allows your clinic to serve almost 20% more clients on average.
- You offer your corporate wellness customers a monthly lunch-n-learn package which gives them a price break if they hire your firm to provide two classes a month rather than just one.
- Most of your clients only use your health club’s tennis coaching services and facilities during the summer. You develop weekend and between-semester intensive programs to keep them involved year-round.
6. Get more new customers
Your wellness business emphasizes getting new customers rather than expanding your lineup of products and services, or selling more to current customers.
- You encourage customers to post online reviews to attract more new customers.
- You routinely offer a free class experience to encourage potential clients to dip a toe in the water.
7. Raise prices
Don’t forget the obvious. You’d be surprised at how many examples like these we encounter:
- A medically-based weight loss program hasn’t raised its prices in three years because they benchmark their prices against mass market weight loss providers Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig, even though their highly-specialized program is led by a licensed therapist and specializes in working with women experiencing depression accompanied by other health concerns like fibromyalgia and IBS. Wrong!
- A health coach who’s a nurse practitioner, certified diabetes educator and certified personal trainer and works with people with chronic health issues is basing her prices on what a non-certified life coach charges. They’re not remotely the same profession, and life coaches generally make a LOT less.
- A degreed, experienced and highly-certified exercise science professional with deep expertise in rehabbing serious musculoskeletal issues benchmarks his prices against personal trainers at the local big-box gym.
