Optimizing Revenue: The Impact Of A Gym Membership Booking Software On Your Business

No matter what kind of fitness business you run, it's time to discover the savvy ways that you can optimize your revenue and increase your profit with gym membership software.

CrossFit gym owners, boxing gyms, yoga studios, martial arts schools and more are using gym management software to optimize everything from their staff's productivity to the customer journey to everyday business operations.

Along the way, they're discovering that gym membership software improves employee satisfaction as well as enhances the customer experience – and that optimizing their gym's revenue with an all in one solution can drive higher profits.

Let's dive into how you can take advantage of the tools available in gym management software to access these benefits, optimize your revenue, and grow your fitness business!

a smiling guy pointing his phone for gym membership booking software

Who Uses Gym Management Software?

When you adopt a gym management software, everybody who interacts with your business as a manager, trainer or instructor, and front desk or other employee will use the gym management system. And, of course, your members and customers will use it too. Let's break it down:

Trainers and instructors use gym management software to manage their schedule of fitness classes, view class registrations, and access customer data.

Fitness center employees (such as your front desk staff) will use the software to enroll new members, sell memberships or retail products, process payments, and help new members select classes.

Customers use the online booking system to view class scheduling, sign up for classes and workshops, and pay online. They can update their customer information any time, purchase memberships, sign waivers, and view gym policies and updates.

The gym owner and managers will use the gym software to handle all of the business operations: from payroll to scheduling, marketing tools to business reports, and the fun stuff – like introducing new classes.

Users at every level benefit from the opportunities that great gym management software will bring to your fitness businesses. So, when you're looking to optimize revenue for your business by leveraging the tools available with your software platform, you want to start by considering each user's journey. Then, you want to think about how you can make the most of your tools to improve their experience and increase satisfaction, as well as generate higher profit.

a smiling lady in a treadmill in a fitness center

Understanding Revenue Optimization For Fitness Centers

Revenue optimization is how you manage customer acquisition, customer retention, expansion revenue, and pricing strategy to improve your business's overall health and drive profits. These strategies must be approached with a holistic view; changing one area will affect the others.

For example, changing your pricing strategy affects your acquisition, retention, and expansion capabilities. Lowering prices may bring in new customers, but will lower your profit on initial sales. However, it may help increase your customer retention and drive higher expansion revenue sales.

Improving customer retention will promote new customer acquisition and opportunities for expansion sales revenue. Satisfied customers bring in new clients as they spread word of your business (that will increase customer acquisition), and current customers tend to bring in more revenue from cross-selling and upselling (which are examples of expansion revenue) than new customers.

Retention and expansion provides more sustainable profit than acquisition, so your pricing strategy should focus on how to optimize those revenue streams rather than placing all of your profit strategy into new member acquisition. Bundling services such as class packs, monthly memberships, workshops, or limited-run class series focused on certain fitness goals or skills are some of the most common ways to encourage customer retention and create recurring expansion revenue.

Gym management software programs can help you optimize each of these strategies. Key features will help your gym acquire new members and support member retention. Marketing features can further generate expansion revenue. And, most importantly, data and analytics reporting can guide you to make confident decisions on pricing strategies as well as give you insight into how your fitness studio is performing in each of these areas.

Gym Membership Software Features To Optimize The Customer Experience

When optimizing your acquisition and retention efforts, make every step of the user's journey with your gym club management software a great experience for your gym's members. This means that, when you're looking for a gym membership management software, you should make sure it has the key features that they are looking for. And today's gym members are looking for convenience, first and foremost.

Online Bookings And Payment Processing

Gym clients want to handle all of their gym membership needs in one centralized location, such as an online booking page. And offering a mobile friendly client app definitely provides today's gym owners with a greater competitive advantage. This type of scheduling software that allows your members to book classes from anywhere, at any time, is crucial.

Your gym's members are busy people; they're often booking classes on-the-go. Convenient, user-friendly online booking allows them to sign up for a last minute class if they have unexpected free time. And it also allows those with tight schedules to manage schedules for their fitness routines several weeks in advance. And, for those busy members, gym management software has automated reminders to help them keep track of the classes they've booked.

Going beyond class schedule management, the best gym management software will allow your clients to update their own customer data and payment preferences, sign waivers, and effortlessly manage their type or tier of membership.

For example, they can update their preferred payment method on their own time, with no hiccups in their automated billing cycles. So, even if a client has recently replaced their credit card, they won't have to worry about making it to class with enough time to update their payment information with the front desk. They can do it online, or via their app, anytime.

Membership Management Features

High-pressure sales tactics are a huge turn-off for today's consumers. When your members decide to change or upgrade their membership type, it should be an easy process for them. It's frustrating to have to make these kinds of decisions on the spot while standing at the gym's front desk – especially if there are other people waiting in line. Your gym membership management software will enable you to create clearly understandable membership choices that your customers can navigate, weigh their options on their own time, then make a selection with zero pressure.

And yet, this is an area where you can optimize your retention and expansion strategies with perks and offerings such as membership discounts, class credits, rewards programs, and even retail sales.

Great Gym Management Software To Optimize Your Staff

One of the most remarkable features of the best gym management software is how it can optimize your staff's productivity.

The powerful automation tools that come with gym management systems tremendously reduce the burden of administrative tasks on you and your staff. When your staff is weighed down with tedious tasks because they are using outdated gym management tools, it can negatively affect your customers' experience at the gym, and it can also have a detrimental effect on your staff's job satisfaction.

Maximize Staff Productivity With A Great Gym Management System

Freeing your staff from time-consuming tasks, such as booking classes, creating gym schedules, updating member information, processing payments, inventory management, etc. is a serious game changer for your gym management – and a huge step towards optimizing your revenue.

Scheduling Software With Room Booking Features

Creating schedules for your gym can be a monster-sized task without the help of gym management software. As soon as you think you've got the schedule done, something changes. Trainers get sick. Equipment breaks. Life happens and you have to adapt.

And even without the sudden changes that life throws your way, there are simply the complicated factors of making sure that classes are scheduled in the correct spaces in your gym, with the corresponding equipment, and without double booking any rooms or trainers.

Scheduling software can turn this beast of a task into an easy process with room booking features that make it simple to organize which class goes where, and when, and with which instructor. This feature alone makes gym software your new best friend!

Improve Staff Job Satisfaction And Increase Employee Retention

For smaller gyms and fitness clubs that don't have a front desk staff, these administrative duties tend to fall onto the trainers – and it can quickly wreak havoc on their class schedules. And even for the fitness studios with a front desk staff member, the sheer volume of administrative tasks can just become too overwhelming if you have a busy fitness center and are using outdated management tools.

When your team isn't doing what they love to do, or what they were hired to do, it can have a spiraling effect on their job dissatisfaction. This can lead to high turnover, which doesn't reflect well on your gym and can impact your customer retention. One of the highlights of belonging to a fitness center is the community that you find there. And if the people responsible for fostering that community are not consistent and recognizable, it will hinder that process – and likely your gym's growth.

With gym management software you can take these tasks off of your staff's list, or at least drastically reduce them, so that they can get back to doing what they love and what they were hired to do for you. And, by optimizing your staff with automated tools to handle administrative tasks, you avoid bloating your employee costs by having to hire more people to get those tasks done as your gym grows.

How Gym Owners Can Optimize Their Business Operations

The advantages that you get from a gym management software for your overall business operations are the next extension of your efforts to optimize your business and revenue.

With sophisticated tools for digital marketing, data and analytics reporting, and easier payroll and payment processing, you can recover a significant amount of time in your work week and make confident decisions about how to move your fitness centers forward.

Using Gym Management Software Marketing Tools To Optimize Revenue

Marketing tools, such as email campaigns, can assist you with your customer acquisition and retention efforts, as well as your expansion revenue. Each time you connect or engage with a potential or current client via email, SMS, or push notifications you have the potential to create revenue.

Highlighting limited series classes, workshops, or specialized personal training sessions, and advertising seasonal deals or discounts on retail products are all great ways to generate expansion revenue from existing customers. You can also acquire customers, who may have joined your email lists but have not yet taken to the leap to join your gym, with introductory pricing deals on new memberships.

Leverage Data And Analytics Reporting

From membership and retail product sales to class attendance reports, payroll, monthly revenue and more, your gym club management software can help you gain insightful and actionable data on how your business is performing. And the really great thing about gym management software is that it doesn't take a degree in business or finance to create reports specific to your personal needs, or to understand them.

With these reporting tools, you can see which streams of revenue in your business display the potential for further optimization or growth. For example: A recent email campaign increased customer interest in the topic of your latest workshop – and now those classes are showing consistent waitlists? Great, add more of those classes and generate more revenue. Retail sales are declining, so it's time to boost sales with bundles, discounts, or product awareness efforts, and wait to reorder until you know if the decline was due to lack of customer interest in those products or weak sales efforts.

STX Is The Best Gym Management Software To Help You Optimize Revenue

When you optimize your revenue with the help of a great gym membership booking software, the impact on your business is overwhelmingly positive. Happier, more satisfied employees who are committed to your business. Customer acquisition and retention improve. There are more opportunities to increase expansion revenue. You have access to tools that can help you create an effective pricing strategy.

And, best of all, you get to focus on running your gym while nurturing relationships with your staff and customers – instead of sitting behind a desk juggling administrative and operations tasks.

For all of these reasons, and more, gym owners are turning to STX Software as their gym membership booking system. STX helps gym owners streamline their business operations to optimize their revenue and achieve the growth they've been wanting for their fitness business.

You can give us a call at (800) 766-4778 or visit our website to book a live demo with our team. Contact us today to learn more about STX!

Diana Mason