In this Ask Evan episode, Evan Carmichael answers a question from newsletter reader Ajith, who is opening a gym and struggling to attract and retain members in its first year. Evan shares a series of practical, low‑cost marketing and retention tactics aimed at driving foot traffic and building loyalty. He recommends partnering with local retailers and offering referral commissions, using direct mail and sponsoring community fitness events to increase visibility, and positioning the gym as a community leader. To keep members engaged, he suggests launching a value‑rich newsletter, offering interesting recurring classes with free or discounted friend passes, and creating short instructional videos featuring trainers answering common questions. Throughout, he emphasizes the importance of “wowing” customers, making referrals easy, and providing consistent, helpful content that encourages members to stay beyond the initial New Year’s resolution surge. The episode ends with a call for viewers to like, comment, and submit further questions.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my newsletter readers, Ajith, who is opening up a gym. He's, he's managing it and he wanted my advice on how to make it profitable. It's in its first year and he's kind of struggling to get it going. So thank you for the question. From my experience with gyms, at least here in Canada, the first challenge is getting people to come into the door. So what a lot of businesses here will do, a lot of the gyms here, is partner up with local retailers and give them a commission for when they refer people to come into the gym. So they'll have little boxes at the retail outlets and you can sign up there, leave your contact information, somebody will call you, and they get a commission a lot of times if somebody does come up and sign up with the gym. So that's one way to do it. Direct mail is another really common way to do it. I try to look at how can you get involved in the community and how can you either sponsor or get involved with different events around your community that are, that are related to fitness and activity. If people are going on a run or there's an awareness campaign, to try to get involved in those things and be seen in the community as a leader. I think the bigger challenge is getting people to stay, and one of my favorite ways to get more business is to really wow your customers and get them to keep coming back, and then also bring their friends, right? A referred customer is going to spend more with you, be more loyal, ask less questions, and definitely a lot less headaches in dealing with brand new customers who have no point of contact with you yet. So I'd definitely focus on wowing your customers, and I think it's hard with gyms because a lot of times people might come in in January and sign up because, you know, New Year's resolution and they want to, you know, lose the weight that they gained over the holidays. And then, you know, within the next month everybody drops off. So if people aren't coming back, then it's harder to get them to sign up again on an ongoing basis, and they're not going to bring their friends along to, to come and try out the gym. So a couple of ideas that might help you. First, you definitely want to have a newsletter. So get people on your newsletter, have either a weekly or monthly newsletter that goes out and has lots of valuable information and tips and ideas and resources to help them get, you know, the type of body that they want. Not too much promotional stuff, but a lot of value-add. You can promote, you know, the new class that you have coming up, things like that, but make sure every newsletter has a lot of value-add content that people look forward to receiving from you on a regular basis. The second thing is having classes, and you want to have interesting things that people want to come back to as an added bonus to becoming part of the gym, and maybe even make it so they can bring a friend to it, or either at a free price or really discounted price, or you can bring your friend once for free, because you want people to bring their friends, feel like it's a comfortable environment, and hopefully the friend will sign up. So if you have a Zumba class or karate class that lasts, say, 8 weeks, 9 weeks, maybe they can bring their friend for free to the first, you know, 5 classes and gets them hooked, and then, you know, afterwards they'd have to sign up for membership. You want to make it easy for people to be able to bring their friends, refer them, and make it a fun experience. Now, if somebody's coming with their friend, they're more likely to stick with it than if somebody's coming by themselves. So again, it's that challenge. How do I get people to come back, you know, after that motivation in January is gone? Another thing you might want to do is try to create some videos just like this, and you can answer questions from people. Maybe not you if you're not kind of the expert on personal fitness, but get some of your trainers or your class teachers to answer questions from your customers. And think about the most common questions that are always asked. And the goal here is to be seen as not only experts, but also really friendly people, and people that you want to go and learn from. So if I was watching a video of somebody who's a karate expert, and I really wanted to learn karate, but maybe didn't have the courage to do, didn't know if it was for me or not, but there were these videos that were really helpful and valuable, and the person seemed really knowledgeable and friendly, and I know that he's in my area, I'm probably going to go and sign up and check out a class. And so that's a great way to be able to connect with your community and showcase your staff and your trainers and your teachers as experts and friendly people and put your gym in a really positive light. Then you can promote that, you know, promote that on your signage, promote it in any sponsorship deals that you do. Get people coming and watch the videos, and the more they watch it and the more they like what they see and the more time they spend watching your videos, the more likely they're going to want to come and sign up and keep coming back to the classes that you have. So hopefully there's a few ideas that can help you solve that challenge. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up. I'd also love to hear what you have to think about it. If you want to leave a comment under the video, or if you have another question for your business, feel free to leave it in the comment section below. I always read those and try to respond to as many as I can. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.
