How AI Is Revolutionizing the Fitness Industry
Find more big fish, no matter your pond size. 
No, we’re not talking about dinner—we’re talking high-value members for your business in the fitness industry.
To start genuinely capitalizing on your current high-value members, you first need to identify when a member is likely to buy instead of only when they are capable of buying. After all, the success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60-70%, while the success of selling to a new customer is only 5-20%.
However, traditional purchase prediction models rely primarily on sociodemographics, largely ignoring the behavioral dynamics influencing members’ purchase ability.
You need to empower your club with the information it needs to target the right members, at the right times.
Find out why savvy health clubs everywhere are embracing AI-powered analytics to go beyond new memberships to drive revenue and start identifying new growth opportunities.
So, no matter the size or scale of your health club(s), below are just 5 ways the right artificial intelligence enables your clubs to thrive in (and beyond!) 2022.
1. Be Proactive 
If your health clubs are still relying solely on ordinary dashboards to “meet” your data analytics needs, the harsh reality is that you’re not.
Why?
Traditional dashboards are inherently reactive—they offer only a rearview mirror view of what happened in the past and leave you to do the rest. Furthermore, these dashboards do little to help you predict the future or take proactive action to impact your future.
That’s where the right AI empowers health clubs to become proactive with their revenue retention, all with less time, effort, and expense.
How?
Artificial intelligence dives deep below the aggregate, looking in all the places you may not think of (or have time to), and surfacing emerging trends, new opportunities, and potential issues at a very specific level.
So rather than dedicating your finite resources to high-cost advertising or promotions, you’ll immediately know where to focus action without speculating or guessing.
AI also allows for a proactive focus on revenue retention, not just member retention.
Imagine creating an automation that engages with high-value members whenever they reach a certain risk threshold? Segmenting members on value lets you be more cost-effective with rewards/incentives by targeting them towards members who are most likely to have a high ROI.
Attrition risk prediction is another huge advantage that your club should be leveraging over its competitors. By analyzing years of member behavior and attrition patterns in your clubs, the right AI will help you discover unique predictors of when your members are likely to cancel.
Just as it takes several touches to convince a member to buy, it takes more than one to convince a member to stay. Therefore, the sooner you know a member is at risk of canceling, the sooner you can start implementing meaningful interventions.
Imagine getting as much as a 3-month warning that a high-value member is considering leaving? Having such an early heads-up enables you to proactively win back a member before you’ve even lost them.
2. Cater to your Clientele 
Another powerful reason why health clubs and fitness centers across the country (and globe!) are embracing artificial intelligence? The ability to cater to their clientele like never before.
It’s no secret that the best revenue-generating assets are your current members.
However, only a small portion drives a large proportion of your profits.
Stop wasting money on free session offers and discounts to entice first-time buyers, and start developing more meaningful interactions with the people who are already proven purchasers—your current clients.
Steve Grant, director of GymHub, states, “your existing members already know, like, and trust you, [because] of this, they are more willing to pay extra money for convenience or additional services that you make available to them.”
The right AI empowers your club to start identifying more members that are likely to buy instead of only if they are capable of buying. This truly allows you to cater to their needs, even before they know it becomes one.
Most high-value members are easy to spot. The tricky thing is identifying who can become a high-value member.
Take personal training (PT) as an example. Increasing PT penetration is a common problem for many health clubs.
What’s compounding the issue?
Many clubs think that their best chance to sell PT services is when a new member signs up.
But in fact, a significant number of long-term PT purchasers don’t buy until after their 6th month of membership.
AI can give your club a distinct competitive advantage.
How?
By analyzing years of PT member behavior and purchase patterns in your club, AI explicitly identifies members who are highly likely to purchase right now and become long-term purchasers.
Utilizing the right AI tool can give your club a distinct competitive advantage.
One such tool that guarantees success? The data science platform, Easalytics. This revolutionary technology analyzes years of PT member behavior and purchase patterns in your club. It explicitly identifies members who are highly likely to purchase right now and become long-term purchasers.
The result? The power for your team to deliver a PT sales approach catered to members who are ready to engage with your offer by ensuring that communications are timely, relevant, and appropriate. You’ll also be doing your members a favor by avoiding ill-timed, low-probability interactions.
Another reason that your members will thank you? This tool also empowers you to personalize your member outreach in a way that far exceeds your MMS capabilities.
And even though over 80% of people don’t respond to surveys, the right tools in your toolbox will enable you to detect member experience issues long before your members express their discontent in a survey, on social media, or by canceling outright.
Actions speak louder than words, and your members are communicating with you.
The right AI helps you listen in ways like never before.
3. Save Money 
Another way that AI is revolutionizing the fitness industry? By giving gym owners and operators their time back. Every business knows:
Time = Money
Digging for actionable insights in traditional dashboards takes hours of dedicated manpower, and nothing guarantees you’ll even discover anything of note. But, especially during the unprecedented times of COVID, when over 1.4 million fitness professionals lost their jobs, the time of the staff you do have is critical.
If your club has been operating without crucial personnel, or your current employees are wearing multiple hats, now is the perfect time to implement a plan that gets your data working for you.
That’s where the right artificial intelligence becomes the perfect supplement to your existing human intelligence.
AI is never off the clock, so you’re never wasting its time. Let it (not you or your valuable employees!) spend the hours monitoring thousands of trends and micro trends daily, learning what’s typical and expected and what’s not. It will automatically ignore insignificant or expected trends while highlighting the significant and unexpected—bringing the information to the attention of those who need to know, when they need to know it.
No matter what (or who) your club is working with (or without), AI gives your ancillary departments the power to grow revenue with insights from your data that they can actually use.
Another way embracing AI can save your clubs money?
Eliminating technology sprawl.
Tech sprawl happens when you acquire a product for a particular use case, then another use case, and another, resulting in a bevy of tools with overlapping capabilities and features in which only 20-30% of a product’s functionality is being used.
In other words, it’s a practice that isn’t cost-effective, efficient, or sustainable.
The right AI will help you save both time and money.
Remember Easalytics?
Well, more good news is that this AI-powered platform was explicitly designed to be health club-centric. It offers key integrations with partners like HubSpot, Perkville, ABC Fitness Solutions, Club Automation, Club OS, and more to make your data evident and actionable.
Let the artificial intelligence push member-level analytics and data science outputs into your CRM to leverage its automations, not you or your employees. Easalytics will supercharge your dynamic lists and automations using your own clubs’ historic, current, and predicted member metrics as triggers! Your clubs end up having the information they need to create communications specifically targeting:
- Non-spenders
- Previous PT spenders
- Lost members
- Members at risk of leaving
Now you’re maximizing the value of not only your time, but also your paid services. Start pushing key retention metrics into your CRM, HubSpot, or rewards platform that lets you take advantage of member engagement options and automations.
By streamlining your technology and eliminating excessive dashboards with an AI-powered solution, your data works for you, not the other way around.
4. Increase Efficiency 
An IHRSA webinar from November 2021 emphasized to gym owners and operators the importance of new approaches to “turning data into actionable insights”:
“Look at how data analysis has changed through the pandemic, and new KPIs club operators should be tracking to succeed in the post-pandemic era. Participants will learn the basics of KPIs creation, data-warehousing, [and] predictive analytics.”
Sounds great in theory, right?
Although, in reality, a 60-minute lecture is not enough time to get the individualized attention that your club needs.
Sure, examples from other clubs are good.
But aren’t real examples from your member’s past data best?
And shouldn’t there be a way that you’re automatically alerted to the newest KPIs and trends without identifying and tracking them yourself?
That’s the beauty of the right AI platform. It will continuously monitor the 1,000s of KPI trends and segment subtrends—many of which are largely unknown or irrelevant (and for good reason).
Rather than spending hours (or days!) analyzing data and determining what’s actionable, begin increasing your efficiency by letting AI analyze your trends—highlighting what you need to know while ignoring the noise.
A truly effective AI platform will dive deeper than traditional dashboards or human analysts can (or care to) to uncover hidden revenue opportunities and actionable insights for improving member experience and retention by:
- Eliminating the need to dig through dozens of dashboards to monitor for intended or unintended trends and changes
- Pushing individual member data and metrics into systems where automations enable “set and forget” actions for efficiency (e.g., HubSpot, Perkville, etc.)
- Eliminating the need for dedicated analysts, or even analytics proficiency
Streamlining operational efficiency is a core component of an efficient and worthwhile AI solution.
Increasing the efficiency of time and materials is all about working smarter, not harder.
5. Uncover New Revenue Opportunities 
If your ears perked up at “uncover new revenue,” just wait.
When your club automatizes specific processes, certain paths for growth become clear.
How?
Traditional dashboards can give you tunnel vision as you focus only on the KPIs built for them. As a result, new opportunities or emerging issues are often hidden or easily overlooked, leaving you blindsided.
An insight trapped inside a dashboard is useless if unseen.
Stop worrying about what you’re missing.
In fact, stop missing things.
AI has empowered clubs to focus on their core KPIs and never worry about losing out on a significant trend or anomaly, no matter how deeply buried, without spending extra time looking for them.
Take AI technology from Easalytics, which digs beneath traditional purchase prediction models that rely primarily on sociodemographics to identify behavioral information.
What does this mean for your health club?
The power to identify when someone is likely to buy, as opposed to when someone can buy.
AI enables you to go beyond acquisition to drive revenue. As most gyms lose 50% of these members within 6 months, you probably already realize that relying solely on acquisition to drive revenue isn’t sustainable.
When utilized effectively, Artificial Intelligence is the way for your club to start uncovering new revenue opportunities with the members you already have.
Identifying high-value and underperforming members is a considerable benefit to AI technology as well.
They may be at opposite ends of the spectrum, but they’re both crucial.
By identifying both of these member segments, your clubs are better able to shape targeted marketing efforts to attract more members like your high-value players and messaging directly to underperforming members to get their spending levels to better resemble their peers.
For example, if you were able to identify that among active club users, males ages 55+ were underspending compared to other members, you would be able to target messaging about the benefits of specialized PT services and classes that are likely to appeal to that segment.
The result? An increase in average revenue per member for that segment.
Attracting more similar members to this group also helps offset flat acquisition periods with a higher proportion of these high-value members.
The sky is truly the limit with the right AI support.
Start Embracing AI to Meet the Needs of Your Health Clubs This Year.
If your business is ready to:
- Become proactive
- Cater to your clientele
- Save money
- Increase efficiency
- Uncover new revenue opportunities
Then you are ready for Easalytics.
Say goodbye to high attrition rates and hello to meaningful retention with the AI-powered data science platform made exclusively for the fitness industry.
Start being more cost-effective by targeting members with the highest ROI potential.
That’s the power of AI insights from Easalytics.
I want to get ahead of the trends.
