How Mobile Apps Help to Increase Reach, Retention & Engagement in the Fitness Industry

According to Allied Market Research, the online fitness industry is expected to witness the highest annual growth rate (~33%) compared to other industries because of the shut down of fitness studios and gyms all over the world because of the COVID-19.

If you have any business in the fitness industry — a gym, yoga or fitness studio, health club — or planning on starting it, or just interested in how exactly fitness apps help to increase reach and retention, this article is just the key for you.

📢 How Mobile Apps Influence Reach In the Fitness Industry?

Offline businesses in the fitness industry can have many clients, yet the number is always limited.

Such fitness businesses face many limitations: from their strong dependence on location to space in studios to the number of customers their coaches can work with.

Developing a fitness app significantly improves the situation.

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 or it doesn’t take them much time to get there.

With a fitness app, things change. The location doesn’t have such a strong impact anymore. Clients can be from anywhere — from another city area to another country.

🔁 How Mobile Apps Influence Retention In the Fitness Industry?

Customer retention in the fitness industry is another important indicator that helps owners track the success of their businesses.

A mobile app can greatly help you with it and provide many ways to boost gym member retention. Let’s dive a little deeper and see what they are!

Transparency 📖

When customers trust you, they’re much more likely to stay with you. To increase the retention rate, fitness apps owners always try to create a trusting relationship with their users. One of the best ways to do it is to stay as transparent as possible and get people to know you as well as possible.

With an app, it's a piece of cake — the storage of information is roughly unlimited, and you can provide as much of it as you wish.

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.

That means, it:

• Provides a lot of information and trainers and the company itself — Transparency.
• Greets customers by names, takes their personal goals into account, learns their habits — Personal approach.
• Sends reminders about what’s coming up and provides gift cards — Reminders.
• Allow to schedule and book sessions in the app — Additional value.
• Provides feedback form for any suggestions regarding the company’s services and app features — Feedback.

Such membership retention strategies for the fitness club are really great and will work in most cases.

💥 Fitness Apps & Engagement

Apart from reach and retention, mobile fitness apps really help to improve the engagement of your customers — it’s a real catch for this purpose.

They can work as a complement during offline activities or increase motivation and engagement outside the gym.

Gamification 🎮

Emotions and feelings have a crucial role in our lives. It’s scientifically proven that challenges and games increase the level of motivation and concentration. It helps keep up with exercising or eating healthy and optimize this process.

Mobile apps work really well for this purpose. Thus, to increase gym mobile app engagement gamification is one of the first steps you should consider taking.

In the fitness industry, gamification is already wide-used and most apps have basic gamification features (achievements and challenges). Generally, gamification elements are:

• Achievements

Different achievements and tasks give users more motivation to keep going and don’t stop. You should never underestimate the power of the beautiful “Tick” sound when finishing the task — it’s a strong boost of motivation.

For the fitness industry, they can be completely various:

1. Do X action N times per week.
2. Run 5 km at the fastest time.
3. Keep sticking to the diet for N days.
4. Reference points (Do 1,5,10,25,50, and so on workouts in general).
5. Bring a friend.
6. Complete a profile.

💡 Takeaways

The fitness app is a great instrument to increase your business’ reach, retention, and engagement. Now you fully understand what steps you should take to get the most out of it.

Why don’t we briefly summarize them:

1. To improve reach you can offer pre-recorded or accompanying instruction classes and workouts & be able to provide your services in any situation via an app.
2. To improve retention you can use your app as an information base. You should also try and provide a personal approach, make your clients know you via reminders, provide additional value through an app, and accept feedback along with suggestions.
3. To improve engagement via an app you can implement various gamification features, boost motivation with help of goal tracking, and keep your clients engaged by offering customization elements.

If you have any more questions or want to start getting benefits from developing your fitness app, feel free to drop us a line. We’ll see how we can make your ideas real!