According to statistics, it costs five times more to attract new clients to your business than to retain the ones you already have.
While grinding between all the online marketing solutions you hear about from colleagues, friends, gurus or articles like this one, you may not realise how much time you spend trying to attract new clients. If you invest in paid ads as well, your investment will be even higher.
Parallel to that you can look at how much effort you put in to keep your current clients and how much value they bring to the table. You’ll realise they are well worth a huge amount of your focus.
If you spend a little more time to make your current clients feel unique and valued by over delivering on their expectations, you won't only have one long-term loyal client, but they will bring their friends and family when they need help with their fitness.
So, how do you make your online personal training clients feel that they are the centre of your business? It's quite simple if you think about it, you genuinely put them there. Here are five ways to wow your clients, so they never want to leave.
1. Client of the Month
There are a few ways to pick a client. You can either broadcast standard criteria for which they can aim, and the best performer gets to be the client of the month, or you can assess them individually based on their progress and choose the one that improved the most in a specific area of their lifestyle.The first option is best suited for athletes or a team of people who are highly competitive and have very similar goals to hit. The latter suits general population best, because they may be at different stages of their fitness journey and/or have a variety of targets that you can't really compare.
2. Loyalty Programs
When you think of any of the chain coffee shops, grocery stores, almost any online businesses and even airlines nowadays, they all have a form of loyalty offer to their customers that encourages them to keep coming back and use their services over their competitors.You can use that principle and create a gamified system using the tools available to you to incentivise your clients to come back for more. Whether that's giving them weekly/monthly targets to hit and giving out prizes to the best performers or creating a referral system where the more of their friends and family join, the more goodies or even discounts they get, offer something that fits with your business model and your clients actually appreciate.
3. Educate
The more knowledgeable your clients think you are, the more they will trust you. The more they trust you, the more likely they will stick with you. If that couples with real results and fantastic life transformations you deliver, you will become not only their trainer, but their coach and leader towards a brighter future.Create educational materials, hold a webinar or a workshop that's only available to members, create groups and forums where you discuss specific problems, or launch a Newsletter with your latest articles, resources and Q&As.
Remember, when you create content, you are creating assets. Articles, videos, pictures, info-graphics and all else can be re-used and re-purposed, so think of it as an investment in your business and in your clients’ success.
While you don't need to create anything even close to this size the PT Distinction University is a great example of how we use education to help our members.
4. Ask for Feedback
You can create online surveys and feedback forms about your services, a specific product or an event you held to gauge how your clients rate their experience with you. Listening to what they have to say will help you identify how you can please your clients even more. Aim to make their realistic suggestions a reality in one way or another.This way you can create strategies for business development and growth that provides even better service for the people you want to serve. If you change something based on feedback, thank them and let them know how that will help everybody and emphasise the importance of coming to you with ideas in the future too.
5. Build a Tribe
Community spirit is always going to be a stronger motivator than individual conversations between you and your clients. There is so much your story can provide, but a group of like-minded people who are or have already been going through the same struggles will make your clients feel they are not alone.Create a "Members Only" area, whether that's in a Facebook group, on your website or within a dedicated group chat on PT Distinction, and encourage members to ask questions, start discussions, share experiences and tips.
If you keep engagement levels high, there will be a day when the community will become its entity and people will want to stay because of the relationship they built with other members. You will find that will take a lot of demand off of your shoulders.
