As a fitness entrepreneur, you juggle a lot of responsibilities. You’re a marketer, a salesperson, and everything in between. On top of these roles, there’s the upkeep of day to day admin that keeps your gym running. Accurate payment processing, generating leads, tracking retention, and ensuring your service excels member expectations are all essential aspects of running a fitness business.
But as your business grows, so does the need for implementing a solution that can improve efficiency, so you can spend more time focusing on growth. With so many options to choose from, how do you know what the best gym management software is for your fitness business?
In this article, we’ll take a look at six options and highlight the benefits they offer to specific types of fitness businesses. First, we’ll dive into how gym management software can help your business and some of the features you can expect from Glofox.
How Gym Management Software Can Help Grow Your Business
Gym management software provides all-in-one software solutions for running your fitness business. Most platforms will offer features such as online bookings, lead and membership management, payment processing, and recurring payments, reporting, and other necessary administrative tasks. A good software provider will also be able to provide you with a mobile app, which has many benefits in terms of creating a personalized and convenient customer service.
5 Helpful Tools You Can Expect From Glofox
1. Marketing Tools
Efficient integration should make marketing seamless across all of your platforms, from social media and email campaigns to your website. With Glofox, you can use tools like automated messaging and push notifications to create and maintain a relationship with gym members from the moment they sign up.
2. Sales Tools
As your fitness business grows, managing a sales pipeline becomes more challenging for you and your staff. With marketing tools driving leads into your sales funnel, Glofox sales tools can help you turn those leads or trials into committed members. With access to detailed reports, you can prioritize outreach, segment leads and message specific groups, and create automation to boost conversions. Say goodbye to tasks like tracking multiple spreadsheets and hello to one straightforward dashboard.
3. Member Experience Tools
In the fitness industry, you don’t have a business without members. This makes the customers experience the number one priority for you as a fitness entrepreneur. Your staff, studio, and classes might deliver a great customer experience, but Glofox can take this to the next level.
Everything in today’s world is about convenience, so provide it for your customers! With the Glofox app, or one explicitly branded to your studio, you can stay connected with members and keep your branding at the forefront. A feature like this brings efficiency and ease to the customer experience. Tasks such as creating a profile, online booking, making payments, and membership amendments are all made under one management platform.
4. Retention Tools
Member retention is crucial for gym owners. Your retention strategy (or at least a successful one) will rely heavily on data, including business performance reports and customer information. Glofox gives you access to this all-important customer information, and it’s your go-to insight for personalizing communications and helping them make the most out of their membership. It all comes down to the simple ways that you use the information.
5. Management
Make the day-to-day running of your fitness business an efficient and straightforward process. Accept payments from anywhere, benefit from transparent pricing, and manage payments within the Glofox platform. With scheduling features, you and your staff can quickly set up and easily manage tasks like class schedules and memberships. Check-in on your dashboard anytime, from any place; you can monitor and update your program from a laptop or tablet, or our dedicated admin app.
As your fitness studio grows, it’ll become harder for you or your sales team to manage new leads. Having control over simple tasks like lead management is key to growing your business. Glofox brings efficiency and transparency to these aspects, so you can focus on the areas that you’re really passionate about.
What Does Your Fitness Business Need?
Before you decide which software is best for your business, it’s essential to identify the areas that you’d need the software to help with. Deciding this early on means you’re less likely to experience problems or regret your choice in the long-run.
Every gym management software has its strengths, and some cater to more niche areas of fitness than others.
Below, we’ve curated a list of six alternative choices and highlighted what they do best, as well as which fitness niche they’re best suited to.
6 Niche Options For Gym Management Software
1. PT Hub
Best for: Tracking client progress
Price: Available for a 30-day free trial, basic plan starting from €10 a month
PT Hub is an online web and mobile app that combines nutrition advice and training plans with the aspects of typical gym management software. Paperless onboarding and the ability to build a profile for each of your clients to track their progress makes it an excellent choice for personal trainers. Its stand out feature is its integration with FitBit. With this, both trainers and clients can track and monitor calorie burn, steps taken, floors climbed, distance covered, and more.
Tasks such as scheduling, payments, and creating training plans can be automated through the software. With this, trainers can instead focus their energy on their client’s progress and performance.
The software has over 7,500 exercises and 6,000+ food items covering supermarkets, restaurants, and supplements that a coach can curate to suit the needs of an individual client. PT hub’s flexible subscription means you can cancel your account at any time. So, there’s no commitment if the software doesn’t meet your needs. Although, if you’re ready to commit, you can choose the annual subscription option, which works out more cost-effective.
Whether you’re just getting started in personal training, or have already successfully grown a client base; PT Hub could make your life easier.
2. Trainerize
Best for: Creating engaging training plans
Price: Available for a 30-day free trial (with one client only) basic plan starting from €4.50 a month
As a personal trainer, the ability to monitor individual training regimes is crucial. Similarly to PT Hub, you can use Trainerize to do this alongside secure in-app payments and nutrition programming.
Trainerize is an excellent option for creating personalized training plans. Users can easily set reps and cycles by writing the instructions in the app. Perhaps the best feature for creating training plans with Trainerize is the ability to upload video exercises. This is a great asset for enabling clients to follow proper form and instruction should they wish to train outside of your sessions with them.
The Customer
Engagement Playbook
for Your Fitness
Business
Discover more It also makes for a program that’s easier to follow than the text-based alternative alone. The software has a range of built-in videos to choose from, search the library using relevant keywords, and you’re sure to find what you’re looking for. Alternatively, you can embed YouTube videos or upload your own content to deliver a personalized user experience.
Trainerize shares similar features to PT Hub, but at a lower cost. If you’re a PT considering which software to use, your best bet is to try the free trials that these providers offer. This is the only real way to see how the software can meet your needs.
3. Martialytics
Best for: Martial arts schools
Price: Free 30-day trial available, basic plan starting from €35 a month for up to 50 students
Martialytics is martial arts school software that’s simple and smart. Its key features have been designed to make life easier in terms of managing, grading, and belt tracking students. The software’s ‘Traffic Light’ solution allows you to organize your students into how ready to grade they are, giving a clear overview of your school. You can promote students individually or as a group and make grading notes that you can review again to help with future performance.
The martial arts-focused software is well-known for its usability and simplicity, as user feedback has been key to developing a user-friendly interface.
4. SimplyBook.Me
Best for: Scheduling and managing appointments
Price: Free 14-day trial available, basic plan starting from €8 a month
SimplyBook.Me is primarily a scheduling software designed to solve the demanding needs of a growing business. While the software isn’t precisely fitness-focused, it does offer features suitable for a fitness center. Book appointments, events, and set up a membership efficiently with the services available. There’s a range of aspects that are good for scheduling and managing bookings in real-time. SimplyBook.Me offers a variety of options for payment, including PayPal, Stripe, and credit card, with the opportunity to accept cash upon arrival as well.
Overall, the gym management software covers the basics with efficient features to schedule classes, and help with organization.
5. Jack Rabbit Dance
Best for: Term based dance schools
Price: Free 30-day trial available, basic plan starting from $45 a month for up to 100 students
This gym management software provider features tools that take the stress out of running a dance school. Jack Rabbit Dance provides the basics of gym management software such as payment processing, scheduling, class management, and reporting. More specifically, the software includes bespoke services relevant to dance schools.
Tools for measuring costume size, as well as ordering costumes, can eliminate chaos; you can input and record measurements directly into the software. Use online tools to organize orders, vendors, and fees when ordering costumes. Manage recital details in one place, including songs, performers, conflicts, and programs. You can also Assign classes to multiple recitals and track songs by length for each performance.
6. Beyond the Whiteboard
Best for: CrossFit gyms
Price: Free 30-day trial available, basic plan starting from $80 for up to 50 members
Beyond the Whiteboard’s features are tailored to help CrossFit members reach their goals and for coaches to help them get there. The web-based software enables members to log daily workouts so they can track their progress. Coaches also have access to this information so they can help members improve. Members can create their own ‘squads’ and invite family and friends to participate in a private group where they can share workouts, records, and messages.
With regular input, members can track their training day consistency over time, to see if their effort matches their goals. The app encourages healthy competition with worldwide gym, and private squad leaderboards so members and teams can view how they stack up against the rest and find new goals to aim towards. If you need inspiration, you have access to over 5 million workouts and detailed filters to narrow down exactly which exercise you’re looking for.
With its detailed workout tracking and motivating leaderboards, Beyond the Whiteboard makes for an exceptional member experience for CrossFit goers.
In Summary
We can see from these examples that there are appropriate options for many niches of the fitness industry. The key takeaways are:
Focus on your needs. Keep the needs of your business at the forefront of your mind to make sure you’re exploring the best-suited options. Book a demo/use the free trial. This step is crucial in helping you understand how you’ll use the software day-to-day and whether it’s aligned with your broader business needs.
Without these steps, it’s more likely that you’ll make the mistake of picking software for the wrong reasons. It could be the attraction of a seemingly cost-effective solution or an option that sells a host of features that you might not even need. But remember: If it’s cheap because it doesn’t offer enough features to meet your business needs, you’ll only have the stress of changing your software over at some point. And if it boasts numerous features you’ll never use, why over complicate your dashboard and waste your money?
Know your business needs and know what you want from your provider.
Let your gym management software do the rest.
