Fitness and Gym App Retention Rate: How-to Increase Guide

Many offline businesses in the fitness industry come to the point where they wonder: “What else can I do?”.

They’re well-known, have loyal clients, and make good revenue. Some decide to open a new fitness studio but in another area, for instance. Yet, it costs a pretty penny.

Nowadays, one of the best decisions we see for improving your fitness app retention rate is developing your own app. By 2027, with a strong focus on gym mobile app retention, the online fitness industry is expected to reach $59,2 million.

❔What is the Churn Rate, and why should you pay attention?

Churn rate, the flip side of health app retention rate, measures the percentage of users who stop using a health app within a specific timeframe. Mobile app retention benchmarks can help gauge the effectiveness of a health app's retention efforts compared to industry standards.

📢 How Mobile Apps Influence Reach In the Fitness Industry?

To understand how mobile applications help grow the fitness industry, we reached out to one of the project managers at Stormotion 👇

Let's take a closer look at several key advantages 👇

Extend your clientele 📈

As a fitness business owner, you're likely dealing with the fact that customers of your business are the ones who either live or work nearby.

The retention rate for fitness applications shows that location impacts user engagement less significantly. Clients can be from another city area or even another country.

What is great about having your own app is converting your current offline customers into app users, allowing them to take different workshops, do additional training, or track their activity in the app. It works the other way around too: you can attract new users into your app and turn them into offline visitors of your gym or fitness studio.

In terms of improving reach and enhancing the retention rate for fitness mobile apps, they can attract many new digital-only clients.

By offering a mobile app, you allow them to balance their time between the road and home, facilitating exercises from their living spaces. Thus, you attract this huge group of clients as well.

You could also consider developing a complete React Native fitness app that seamlessly integrates with your BLE-based (Bluetooth Low Energy) fitness equipment. Thus, you attract this huge group of clients as well.

Stay stable in any situation 🗻

The COVID-19 pandemic showed us that you never know how things are going to be tomorrow. Thus, it’s essential to always have a backup plan. Stay productive in any situation by utilizing a mobile app to maintain client engagement, even during unpredictable times.

If you are a fitness business owner, a mobile app focused on gym mobile app retention can be the solution, ensuring that even during a global lockdown or severe weather, customers remain engaged and continue using your services.

With such a solution, new users can join your community despite everything.

Speaking of coronavirus, gyms are in the top places where it’s easy to get corona. However, remote fitness services significantly help to “flatten the curve” and stop the spreading of the virus. That is why providing customers with an app will help them stay safe and still use your services which can be crucial for many people.

Moreover, some people won’t go to a physical gym even if it’s not locked — they’re simply afraid, and it’s understandable. But either way, you cover their needs as well.

Offering an app expands your value proposition, making it possible to meet the diverse needs of all current or potential clients effectively.

Reuse your content ♻

With a fitness app, you can experiment with your content — record any class or course once and then offer it to multiple clients. It will significantly improve the RoI (return on investment) from your services compared to offline ones.

Integrating step trackers, calorie counters, and exercise lists enhances the functionality-to-user engagement ratio, enriching the app's utility.

In terms of reach, you can offer various pre-recorded courses to different categories of clients. They can be:

• Experienced athletes — intensive workouts with various types of exercises on different muscle groups.
• Newbies — base, not too challenging workouts (cardio, stretching, and full-body workouts).
• Enterprises whose policy includes exercise breaks for workers, etc.
• Pregnant women — a very calm exercise for muscle tone or yoga.
• Elderly.
• Families.

What’s great about such services is that it gives clients an impression of an in-person workout/class/course, thus, keeps you more motivated. Coaches often provide encouragement by saying uplifting phrases like “Keep going!”, “You’re doing great” in a recording to make classes more vibrant.

It’s a good idea to improve and freshen the content from time to time to retain users, stay ahead of the competition, and bring additional values to the customers.

Work with more clients in a shorter time ⏰

If you’re an owner of an offline business in this industry, you know how the installation of a dedicated app can streamline and reduce the time spent on private or group classes and workouts. To properly help every class participant coaches have to spend quite a while talking to each one of them during and after it.

With an app, interacting with a much wider audience becomes effortless through options like live streaming.

If it’s a private class it’s easier for a coach to hold classes one after one via an app:

• No time needed for the way to and back.
• More flexible timetable.
• Ability to control workload.

Besides, spaces, where classes take place and equipment, need to be cleaned and disinfected after every single one of them.

However, when people take it online (meaning from their homes, yards, parks, and so on) it becomes of no importance, at least, not as often as after offline ones.

Consequently, it’ll significantly improve time-efficiency and allow you to hold more classes in less time.

Case Study: Peloton 🚲

Peloton is a perfect example of how to increase reach and sales via with help of a fitness app — last year the number of online subscriptions increased by 13%.

Quite an advantage of their app is the number of Tech Giants they’ve partnered with (Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, etc.). This gives them a powerful reach boost.

With their app, they make sure that every need that could possibly arise is covered — from on-demand and live classes to watching series while exercising.

When the COVID-pandemic is raging, thanks to their digital services Peloton only increases its revenue and stock size — on the 10th of September it hit $98.61 billion which is an absolute maximum ever reached.

It means that new people from all over the world keep joining and start using their services because they’re safe, well-organized, and able to meet the needs of most clients.

If you’d like to know more details about Peloton and similar apps, check out this article:

You can create a separate tab where you’ll provide information about your business, all licenses, your coaches and trainers, their work experience, maybe even their hobbies to make it more personal.

Moreover, you could show them that their personal information is safe and be compliant with different regulations like GDPR. If you want to know about it more you could check out our post about GDPR:

Personal approach 🙌

If people can adopt your personalized approach and feel that something is made just for them, it’ll noticeably increase your gym mobile app retention rate.

An app, particularly one focused on women's health, can offer personalized services. Learning how to build a women's health tracking app can significantly enhance this personal approach. It can be a push notification with a text saying “Hey, [Name]! Have a great day!” or anything positive, lovely, and showing that you care.

If you provide pre-recorded classes and workouts, consider adding some supportive phrases while recording to create some kind of interaction between a real or digital (AI-based) coach and users.

Generally, you build your app in a way where it calls everybody by their names, uses “You” instead of general phrases like “For all customers” — makes everything to make them feel treated personally and uniquely.

Recognition and reminders 🔔

Fitness apps retention strongly depends on whether you stay in people’s subconsciousness and background or not. That means, as more users see your brand and feel like it’s “integrated” in their minds they’re more likely to stay. This principle applies to health app retention rate as well.

By running marketing campaigns for your brand in an app, constantly reaching out to your clients, you unintentionally become known and remembered.

Here are some ideas on how to increase fitness mobile apps retention and stay top of customers’ mind:

• Send weekly updates. You can send an overall report on progress made which will remind a user of your app and give additional valuevalue proposition.
• Provide useful information (daily activity reports, workout recommendations, etc.). In this case, users could find it in your app instead of using other tools (Apple Health, Google Fit, fitness trackers, etc.) and think of you one more time.
• Connect to Social Media. With Social Sign Up, users can share their progress and achievements which is indispensable for brand recognition.

And last but not least, the icon of your app will always be in front of users eyes.

It’s important since gen-z and millenials (that are the target audience for most fitness businesses) unlock their phones 79 and 63 times per day respectively. It’s not possible to create such brand recognition without an app — neither with a website nor with offline marketing.

Another big method of winning users’ attention and improving health and fitness app retention rate is push-notifications.

We all know that sometimes the culture of hustle drags us so much that we can't think about anything but our career, grades, and being successful. In such a flow of goals and tasks we sometimes simply forget about caring for our well-being and physical state.

Push-notifications can help us get back to the “reality” and push us a little bit to get that workout done and stay engaged.

You can send push notifications for every occasion. For instance, if a user missed the training you can remind them about it with a friendly notification that you “Miss them” or do it in advance (30 minutes before the workout).

For you as a business owner, push-notifications are a great tool to increase sales by sending personalized offers to your members.

Bear in mind, you shouldn’t be too intrusive with this one — too much is never good.

Additional value 🎁

If clients get more than they’ve expected, they’re much less likely to leave — it’s a golden rule. Thus, fitness studio app or gym mobile app retention can be improved via implementing this rule.

An app in addition to your offline services is a perfect value to provide.

Let’s imagine a situation:

A customer walks in, starts his workout but doesn’t remember how you do jumping jacks correctly. Oh, what a pity, all trainers are busy with other clients right now. Why don’t we try to predict their behavior in such a situation:

Result: no misunderstanding and dissatisfaction.

Moreover, you can allow users to book sessions in advance from your app, conduct contactless payments (which is of high importance during the pandemic), provide a list of all classes you offer directly in an app, and so on.

Of course, there are other ways of providing additional value but an app makes this process easier and more beneficial in the long run.

Feedback 💌

Knowing what your customers want and constant improvement are the key to success.

With an app, it’s no more than a hiccup to collect feedback — you can conduct various surveys, ask to rate your app or/and services at one tap, leave a comment after a workout.

Besides, you could use the info from various feedback forms to improve your marketing strategy and work on some weak points of your business — improvement is growth.

Case Study: Equinox 🏋️‍♂️

Equinox Group is an extremely wide-spread American luxury fitness company founded in 1991 (pretty impressive, right?). It owns separate lifestyle brands like Equinox, Equinox Hotels, Precision Run, Furthermore, PURE Yoga, Blink Fitness, and SoulCycle.

Either way, now we’d like to take a closer look at their app “Equinox”, which first came on the market in 2009, went through many changes, and includes every single step we’ve mentioned to increase their fitness club membership retention.

Of course, depending on the type of your app and services you provide achievements will vary.

• Points.

This feature follows from the previous one. For completing achievements users can get in-app points or currency.

It works as a double motivation to keep engaged and use your services.

It’s also a great idea to offer rewards for completing tasks (merch, little things like water bottles, free classes or check-lists, etc.).

Keep in mind that rewards should be proportionate to the task difficulty and benefit it brings to you as a business owner. Let’s say, there is more profit from a business point of view for referrals coming in and becoming a new client than there is if someone makes 2000 push-ups.

• Leaderboards.

Competition is what keeps many people on track. In the fitness industry, it works very well.

The desire to be on top and do better than others can do magic — many people will keep going just to be the first.

Along with leaderboards, you could add challenges to your app (30-days yoga challenge, for instance). Trying to complete it with someone else can really help not to give up and make it to the end.

Besides, you could add a Social Sign Up along with leaderboards to share the results in Social Media, therefore, strengthen the motivation to work smart & hard.

Progress & Goals Tracking 🔍

In the fitness industry, there is an unwritten rule:

Without progress tracking there is no progress.

It’s of high importance that your customers can _see and feel their progress. You can help them with it by implementing various trackers or goal-setting features — it’ll increase your fitness app engagement.

These two things help them visualize what they can’t observe. Thus, it’ll keep them engaged and motivated.

You can use progress tracking as a great tool for making sure that clients are using your services — calculate the number of visits or workouts needed to reach the goal (for example, lose 5 pounds or burn 500 calories a day).

After it, you’ll be able to send the notifications in case they miss the training or don’t do enough for their goal.

Sure thing, it shouldn’t aggressive and intrusive — try something soft and friendly:

Hi, [Name]! Seems you’re having a busy week, huh?:) We just wanted to remind you that for [name the goal] you should do 2 more workouts this week. We miss you!

You can use their goals to improve your targeted marketing campaigns and make personalized offers to increase your revenue.

Device & App Synchronization 🔀

Nowadays many people have additional devices and applications apart from their phones — fitness bracelets, smartwatches, various activity and sleep trackers, smart scales, apps for running track, calorie count, etc.

To improve poor user experience and engagement you could make it possible to synchronize one’s device with your app to immediately transfer any important data about activity or state of health.

It’s convenient since users won’t have to switch between apps to track steps in one app and a heart rate in another.

You could also use this data for marketing and personalization purposes — if a user wants to lose some weight but doesn’t move enough (which is easy to track if an app is connected to a fitness tracker, for instance) you could make them a corresponding offer. Take a look:

Hey, [Name]! It seems you haven’t been moving enough for your goal (Then you provide statistics). To catch up on this movement shortage you could sign up for our Sunday Zumba Classes. The first class is free — here’s your coupon. We’re looking forward to seeing you!

To access users’ health or fitness data presented by different services such as Google Fit, Apple Health, etc., or other devices, you’ll have to integrate their public API. If you want to know more about this technical part you can check out this article:

Customization 📱

Customization is an extremely strong advantage of mobile fitness app development services — most clients stay really engaged when they feel that something is done to meet their needs and desires.

In the first place, it’s about providing customized features for workouts and nutrition. App users should be able to choose the duration of a workout, add exercises to the routine, choose what muscle groups to primarily work on, etc.

However, customization isn’t only about working out. It can be a personal avatar, a profile theme, and color, a font, where you want your progress bar to be, and what sound to use for notifications.

This perk of having an app is just the key to keep users engaged — nothing helps with it more than a feeling of being unique and getting a personal approach.

Case Study: 24GO by 24 Hour Fitness 🕕

24 Hour Fitness is a chain of gyms with more than 430 locations. Despite their offline success, they’ve created a 24GO app to supplement training and improve the user experience which turned out to be a big success.

In the app, they combine all engagement app's features of a mobile app, thus, take the maximum out of it.

They provide:

• Goal setting.
• Custom workouts.
• Audio & Video Coached and Live workouts.
• Personalization (for schedule, intensity, etc.).
• Pairing with other devices and applications.
• Progress tracking.
• Achievements and other gamification features.

We’re sure that a big part of their success is thanks to their well-developed app which improves engagement and user-experience online as well as offline.