The Gym Owners Guide to Black Friday


Oct 25, 2023

 by Josh E.
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It’s almost November, and as a gym owner, you are probably starting to worry about the slump in sales as everyone starts to prepare for the holidays.

But a huge opportunity is coming up soon, and that is Black Friday.

Traditionally, Black Friday has been thought of as the day to get incredible discounts on all sorts of products.  And since it is already a universally promoted day for shopping, you can use that to your advantage and increase your revenue for the month.

Here are a few ways that you can maximize Black Friday deals in your gym.

 

Paid-in-Full Memberships

A surefire way to increase your money collected is to offer a discounted paid-in-full membership. Most gyms that do BF deals will offer an annual membership at a discounted rate. Some of the more common offers include:

  • Get 3 months free when you pay for the year
  • 10-25% off annual membership
  • Lifetime memberships (if you do this one we recommend only offering a limited number)

PIFs are great because they can give your cash flow an awesome boost going into December, but they do have their drawbacks.

The biggest drawback to a PIF is that you will not receive any more revenue from that member until the end of that term.  And if you sell too many PIFs then you will find yourself in a cash flow problem pretty quickly.

The best way to offer any kind of paid-in-full offer is to limit the number of these memberships to a select few.  This also creates urgency and can motivate a potential client to sign up.

 

EFT Offers

If you are more interested in growing your monthly residual revenue, then focusing your BF offers on services that will grow your EFT is the way to go.

Some of the same types of offers as PIFs can be modified to create an EFT offer.

  • The get 3 months free offer can be honored but instead of a PIF the full dollar amount is broken up into 12 payments
  • Same for a percentage off of an annual membership. Just reduce the monthly amount by that % and have them sign a contract for 12 months



Products or Services

If you sell supplements or services like personal training or nutrition coaching, Black Friday deals can be a way to move through inventory that has been sitting for a while, or add significant revenue to the bottom line and provide clients of your trainers.

Some examples of popular supplement offers:

  • Buy 1, get 1 free
  • Buy 1 , get 1 at 50% off
  • Buy 3, get 1 free
  • Bundle a group of products together and offer a discount

 

An EFT offer is also a great way to increase revenue in additional services like personal training or nutrition coaching. You can easily tailor any offer to provide a deal for services like these and really add to your bottom line, while also increasing your average revenue per member.

 

Make a Plan and Execute

The most important thing when it comes to capitalizing on BF is to know what you are trying to accomplish by offering a BF deal. Once you have your goal outcome decided, then you can decide on the specific offers you want to create in order to achieve that goal.

Once you have done all that, you can start letting people know what your offers are.  Start by educating your team on what you are trying to accomplish, and what the specific offers are. Then send out an email to your list giving everyone the opportunity to take advantage of the offers early.

If you have the budget, using social media ads can also help you get the message out to a bigger audience and increase overall revenue.

 

Black Friday is a day that is already designed to help you grow your business, if you use it to your advantage. Decide on your desired outcome, create your offers, and start letting everyone knows about them.