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 wit