The cost of replacing a lost member with a new one can reach up to five times more than the cost of retaining them. For that reason, you have to turn your attention to member adoption and integration.
One of the best ways to ensure your clients feel like they’re being over-delivered is to do unexpected things. This doesn’t need to be big things, just small things they would never expect to receive.
What if that can be automated to ensure every client gets that? Well, luckily there is a way and we are going to share that with you. Before we can, it’s important to understand how this works and why this is good for business.
When the brain is surprised by receiving something unexpected the dose of stimulus is the same whether it’s a big gesture or a small gesture. This is why relatively small but unexpected gifts from friends can carry so much meaning, because the stimulus is the same as a much larger gift, and we attach to that gift as a reminder of the feeling.
So even the smallest gestures, which often get overlooked, can have large amounts of reciprocity with customers.
This brings into play the “law of reciprocity”, The law of reciprocity is a social psychology principle that states that when people received something, they feel compelled to return the favor or they feel indebted until they do so. Naturally, the human brain wants to repay.
How do customers repay? They’re more thoughtful when it comes to holds and cancellations, they mention your name to a few more friends, they become support agents within your membership community and they bother you about trivial things a lot less.
That all customer service is really, how much reciprocity can you build?
And keeping and retaining customers is significantly less expensive and less work than replacing them, so be sure to make capital investments in member indoctrination, integration into your community, and into small gestures that trigger the law of reciprocity.
The cool thing is, in 2022, we can automate some of these real-world gestures with gifts very inexpensively and without thinking about it. Here at Big Little Gyms we’ve built tools like Gymnetics that can do exactly that.
We did this at my gym for years, and we used it to not only create a pool of reciprocity with our members but to also introduce them to new products and upsells they otherwise would have never inquired about. This is how we doubled revenues year-over-year almost every year we were in business… You make your membership extra “sticky”.
What kinds of things are you doing to over-deliver to your gyms membership?
