80: How to bring back ex-members to increase revenue

Dan explains a simple client reactivation system for fitness businesses, show how to track resurrection rate, and share easy steps to win back ex-members.

5 things you’ll learn:

• How to build a list of ex-clients and calculate a monthly resurrection rate for your fitness business.
• How to improve offboarding with quick exit interviews that record clear reasons for leaving.
• How to trigger win-back messages the moment a client’s original blocker is removed.
• How to use Fresh Start timing and milestone contacts to lift replies and bookings.
• How to reach past clients with Meta Custom Audience ads and a direct booking link.

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Transcription:

If you’re looking for a new way to grow your business, generate a list of all your previous clients and members. I’ve never seen anyone do this and not be shocked  by how long that list is.

There’s a huge number of people who, at some point, used your service, but are no longer paying customers. People who once needed you, but who, for some reason, got to the point where they didn’t need you any more.

And this list provides an opportunity for reactivation – converting ex-clients back into current clients.

And that’s what I want to discuss, a strategy guide to client reactivation.

Generally, we spend most of our time on two things, client retention, and lead generation. We build systems and pipelines for lead generation, and we design client journeys to provide valuable experiences to keep people around. But once they leave our business, too many businesses cut them lose, going back to focus on retention and new leads. And sure, these things are important (particularly retention), but reactivation often seems to be forgotten. I want to fix that.

But first, there are five things you need to do before even beginning to think about client reactivation. I’ve spoken a lot about these before (and I’ll give you some recommended content if you want to dig deeper), but I’m not going to go into detail, but let me summarise what you need to do BEFORE you start the process of reactivating past clients.

1: Provide a remarkable experience so people don’t leave in the first place. Check out my article ‘Delivering an Experience: The Strategy of ‘Being Different’ or listen to episode 69 of the podcast.

2: Build a system to alert you of your three clients who are at highest risk of departure each week and add value to them that week. Read my article ‘Increase retention to 98% using this 10 minute strategy’ or listen to episode 26 of the podcast.

3: Conduct an exit interview with all departing clients, and identify the reason they’re leaving. Keep a table of all the reasons for departure in seperate columns, with the list of all the people who left for that reason under the heading.

4: Identify how long into their client journey each customer is when they leave. Identify the most common time to leave (for example, it might be between four and 6 months, and increase the experience people are receiving for the eight weeks leading up to that point. This will plug your biggest leak. Read: ‘The Only Thing Fitness Business Owners Need to Do For Retention’.

5: Make sure memberships on hold (dormant customers) receive weekly contacts of some kind.

Ok, so assuming you’re doing those five things, we can move onto some ideas to help you reactivate your past clients. If you’re not doing those five things, the strategies we’re about to discuss won’t work as well.

It’s really common for business owners to bump into ex customers who say to them ‘oh, I’ve been meaning to get back in touch with you guys’. It’s definitely something I’ve experienced. This tells me people are open to working with you again, they just need a bit of a nudge to take that first step.

Firstly, what gets measured gets managed. So start measuring what’s called your ‘resurrection rate’. This is the percentage of past clients who you come back to you each month. We calculate this by dividing the number of returning clients in a month by the number of past clients at the start of the month. For example, if you start March with a list of 200 ex members, and during the month of March three of them restart, that’s 3 / 200, or 1.5%. So your resurrection rate is 1.5%. This number will allow you to gauge the success of the reactivation strategies.

Ok, so once you’ve started measuring your resurrection rate, we can start the process of increasing it.

 

Client departure:

And we begin with the client departure. How can you make this a great experience? People expect a great experience to START their journey with you, but it’ll really blow their mind if the END of their journey is equally remarkable. How you do this is up to you, but the litmus test is whether your departing client tells a friend about how good the departure experience was. That’s the definition of ‘remarkable’ – able to be remarked about. As part of this departure, you need to have some sort of exit interview or survey which will tell you why they left.

 

Removing reasons for departure:

And this brings us to the next strategy. Contact your ex clients when their reason for departure has been removed. Remember I spoke about keeping a table of all client departures, with each client listed under their reason for departure? This where you can use that. For example, if you launch online programming, contact all ex clients who left because they were moving away from your gym. If you’re introducing a new, cheaper option, contact all clients who left for financial reasons. If you’ve built a new system to help clients exercise around an injury, let all your clients know who left due to injury.

 

Service updates:

Similar to this, you can contact past clients with any announcements about new products or services you’re offering, introducing new staff, announcing changes to the facility, or anything else that indicates a change in how you’re doing business or the experience people can expect from you.

If you’re about to launch a service that is limited to a certain number of people, use this scarcity as a tactic to encourage re engagement – maybe you can offer this limited service to ex clients first, giving them 24 hours to register their interest before you open up the opportunity to everyone else.

 

The fresh start theory:

With a bit of knowledge of marketing psychology, we can take advantage of what’s called the ‘fresh start theory’.

This well research phenomenon tells us that people like to start something new or undergo a big behaviour change on a Monday, the first day of the month or the first day of the year etc. So, make sure you’re timing your communications with them to be just prior to a new week, month or year. For example, you might contact your database of ex clients at the start of the new year saying something like, ‘We know a lot of people are wanted to take back control of their health this year – just wanted to let you know we’re here to help and ready when you are.’

 

Milestone contacts:

You should also be contacting people during milestone moments in their life.

Again, we’re not trying to make a hard sell here – or even a soft sell for that matter. You’ll remember I was talking about the number of people who express interest in returning to your business after bumping into you in person. Contacting people during milestone moments in their life just provides a ‘virtual bump’.

They should receive a handwritten birthday card in the mail for every birthday. You should make a particular effort when people are approaching a major milestone birthday. People who’ve just turned 29, 39, 49, 59, 69 etc. are more likely to be wanting to get back into exercise. The most common age for people to run their first marathon is 40, with peaks of participation at the start of every new decade of life. Take advantage of this to help them along their milestone journey.

You can also contact them on their anniversary of starting with you. Maybe they initially started in the lead up to summer, or when the weather meant they couldn’t get outside to run. Whatever their reason for contacting you at a certain time of year – that reason may reemerge on their anniversary of starting every year.

 

Content Marketing:

Staying front of mind is key, and this is where content marketing becomes important. The purpose of content marketing as a general marketing strategy is to position you as an expert to your target client. This becomes doubly important as a reactivation strategy, as a way to remind your previous clients that you’re still there, and available to help solve their problems. As part of your regular content marketing, you should be email everyone in your email network fortnightly with your latest articles, videos, podcast episodes, carousels, infographics, or whatever other medium you choose to use. Past clients should definitely remain a part of this email network.

Make sure that a percentage of your content is about topics that are specifically relevant to people who you’re hoping to attract back to your business. Maybe tips about how to restart exercise after a break, how to rebuild a broken exercise habit, or the psychology of loss aversion and the ease with which a person can maintain a baseline level of strength and fitness.

 

Paid Advertising:

While paid advertising is commonly used for new cold-lead generation, it’s not often used for internal marketing (for example upselling your current clients), or to attract old clients back in. For example, within Meta, you can create a ‘Custom Audience from a Customer List’. This is where you can have an advert running that is visible only to past clients. You don’t need to re-sell them on your service, or educate them about what you do, because they already know that. Instead, you should have a very strong call to action to make it as clear and simple as possible for them to restart. Because this custom audience list size will be very small, you can achieve a lot of success here from a tiny budget (the minimum Meta will allow).

 

General Engagement:

Regularly engaging with your ex clients on social media by commenting on their posts is another great way to stay front-of-mind. Again, this should be 0% sales, and 100% general interest and encouragement.

 

Final thoughts:

Ok, some final thoughts that run through all these ideas.

Make as many of your communications as possible, as one-on-one and individualised as possible. A personal email is much more likely to be read than an email to a mailing list. And finally, the general feeling of all communications is ‘we’re ready when you are’. You just want to make sure you’re remaining front of mind, so when they’re ready to restart, you’re the first business they think of.

A strong reactivation strategy deserves a place right next to retention and lead generation on the podium of business growth strategies. If you’re not prioritising reactivation, it’s time to start.

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Your action steps:

• Export every past client into one spreadsheet, add a ‘reason for leaving’ tag, and start tracking your monthly resurrection rate.
• Set calendar reminders to contact people when their blocker is solved, for example new pricing, online options, or injury support.
• Schedule Fresh Start messages before Mondays, new months, and the new year, and send birthday and join-anniversary notes.
• Keep ex-clients on your fortnightly email with ‘restart’ tips, simple plans, and a one-click booking link.
• Upload the past-client email list to Meta Custom Audiences and run a small-budget ad that sends straight to booking.

If you enjoyed this, you’ll also enjoy the following, they’re some of my most popular articles and podcasts on topics similar to this one:

• ‘The one page fitness marketing checklist. Just do these things‘ or listen to episode 79 of the podcast.
• ‘Delivering an Experience: The Strategy of ‘Being Different’ or listen to episode 69 of the podcast.
• ‘Increase retention to 98% using this 10 minute strategy’ or listen to episode 26 of the podcast.
• ‘The Only Thing Fitness Business Owners Need to Do For Retention’.