How to Retain Clients as a Personal Trainer

As a personal trainer, you know that while you may get a huge influx of new clients at the beginning of the year, the retention rate of those new clients is shockingly low. While you can’t ensure that everyone sticks to their New Years’ workout resolutions, there are actions you can take in order to increase your new client retention rate. 

Personal Training Client Retention 

The New Year is the biggest time of the year for personal trainers. New clients book training sessions with hopes and dreams of bettering themselves, getting into a new workout routine, and making sure they stick to their New Years’ Resolutions this time around.  Unfortunately, many of these New Year clients will not, in fact, stick to their resolutions. 

As a personal trainer, this can be frustrating. You have all these new clients to start the year, but by the end of January,  fewer than half keep coming back. 

While the drop off rate is expected, that doesn’t make it any less frustrating, so what can you, as a fitness trainer, do to help your clients achieve their goals while increasing your client retention rate? 

In order to truly maximize your retention rates, you need to have a well thought-out approach and find out what truly matters to your clients.

Why is Client Retention Important for Personal Trainers?

While getting new clients is important for personal trainers, client retention is even more important. Client retention is less expensive and (usually) easier than finding brand new clients. 

 If you want to earn six figures as a fitness trainer, then long term clients are an essential component. These long term clients are not the only key to a steady income, but also your best source of new clients through word of mouth referrals. 

Retaining long-term clients allows you to focus on what’s important, namely high quality service and results-based training.

So How Do I Retain More Clients as a Trainer?

Put the Personal, in Personal Trainer

This may seem like an obvious solution, but sometimes it is the small things that mean the most. People want to know that you care about their health when they hire you as a trainer, so make sure you are letting them know. 

If you can talk to your clients about their life and goals, and remember small details that they have told you, it really will go a long way. They will feel that connection, feel that you care about more than just getting a payment from them, and therefore be more likely to come back. 

Remembering little personal information is great, but you may be thinking “how”? It would be impossible to just remember everything, but if you keep notes on all of your clients (as you should be) then it would be easy to add in personal information so you can recall it before all of their sessions. You can easily track all of your client information when you use PocketSuite to run your fitness business.

Keep in Contact with your Clients

You should be keeping in touch with your clients between sessions. This goes along with those personal touches, and really shows that you care. 

Not only should you be sending  things like promotional offers and appointment reminders, but you should also be sending messages just checking up on your clients. Ask how they are feeling, how they are doing, show that you care. This will help you build a rapport with them, making it more likely that they will continue booking sessions with you. 

You should also nurture your client relationships by doing things like sending weekly emails with things like tips for a healthy lifestyle and words of support and encouragement.  It is also important to keep past clients in the loop with any changes you make to your programs and training methods in case some of them were looking to invest in personal training help again in the near future.

Make Your Sessions Exciting

Let’s face it, if your sessions lack excitement in any way then your clients are likely to get bored of training with you.

We know this might sound a little direct, but we’d rather get straight to the point and steer you in the right direction when it comes to such an important side of your business. We’re here to give you the best fitness client retention strategies after all, so there’s no point in wasting your time!

To keep your training sessions exciting and fun for your clients, you can try some of these recommendations: 

Adding personal touches and making workouts fun, is one of the main keys to success when it comes to client retention in the fitness industry. 

Be Specific About What Your Clients Should Do Between Sessions. 

One of the biggest issue a lot of people have actually takes place outside of the gym. Many people just don’t know what they should be doing between training sessions. 

What should they eat? Should they do other workouts on their own? People who are just starting out simply won’t know, and they have a tendency to get frustrated and then just give up all together. 

By giving your new clients more specific instructions, it helps to give them structure and ensure they aren’t getting frustrated.  Take the time to make a game plan with your client that helps them with things like what to eat, at home workouts, and how they will be achieving their goals with this targeted plan. 

It may take a little extra time, but it will increase your client retention, and in the long run, help you make a more steady income. 

Retain More Clients with the Best CRM for Personal Trainers

Let’s face it, there is a lot you can do to retain your clients, but without an effective customer relation management software (CRM), then it is like fighting an uphill battle. 

Having a CRM that is built specifically with the needs of fitness professionals in mind is something that you really need to invest in for your business.  PocketSuite is the premier CRM and booking app for personal trainers. It offers everything you need to run your business, make more money, and retain more clients. 

With features such as appointment reminders, client notes, text messaging capabilities, easy payment processing, and the ability to easily build out classes and packages, PocketSuite is the only fitness training software you will ever need. 

It will save you time and frustration. No more spreadsheets to update because you will have built in client notes. You won’t need expensive payment processors because PocketSuite has it built in with the best rate on the market. There’s no need to have a separate booking app, because PocketSuite does that too. 

Having an easy to use client interface will also allow you to retain more clients. When it is easy for clients to book with you and pay their invoices, they are much more likely to book with you over and over again. 

The most important thing to remember is that as long as you go above and beyond for your clients using all the retention strategies that we’ve mentioned in our list, your client retention rate should soar.