When you review your marketing plans and the allocation of the funds needed to run it, where is the majority spent. 

Most clubs will have a substantial amount in what could be classified as new member acquisition. Most of the marketing seminars or discussion that I get involved in are all about ways to acquire new members.  Where is the money to drive our existing members to the programs that already exist at our club, where is the money spend on keeping the members we have active in the club.

The challenge that should be put forth is the amount of money that needs to be spent in our member induction and member retention programs.  For a small fraction of our advertising budget we can spend money on retaining the member we have.

To keep this all in monetary prospective,  you can spend half of one mail campaign and have a full year worth of a system that will improve your retention, therefore building your membership and your EFT every month. While it is important to keep our EFT healthy, it is just as important to make sure that we keep every member that we have as long as possible. We need to ensure that we are allocating money to keeping the member involved. Much of the issue becomes having the relationship with the member that ensures we know that the member will communicate with us and let us know when their program needs a tweak. This takes a few dollars to be spent with your employees and training them to have the eyes and ears to identify issues before they become cancellations.

Involved members spend money at your club.

We all know that many times it takes us months to recoup the new member acquisition expenses.  The money we get monthly from an existing member is cleaner and the work involved with them becomes less and less as they mature as a member. As our club becomes more and more successful we are able to afford to invest in more programs. It is important fact that we need to have a diverse offering that encompasses many levels of challenges to provide the member with reasons to stay.

We need to learn to keep the members we have and make sure that our business plans are not directed to much in a forward direction and that we are being attentive to the backdoor of our club.

So as we look at our plans for 2010. Let’s take some time to look at what we can do to get our members involved and to make sure that their success in their interest level stays as high as possible.