Here Is the Strategy I Would Use to Get My Members to Stick Around Longer

You're getting new students in the door. Maybe you're even running ads to do it. But a few months later, they're gone—and you're right back to square one.

Your students aren't leaving because your classes are bad. They're leaving because nothing is pulling them back in. Their progress is invisible. And their brain—wired to focus on the gap between where they are and where they want to go—has no reason to keep showing up.

In this episode, Jackie Murphy breaks down why the "sign the wall at 100 classes" approach isn't cutting it anymore, and exactly how to build a gamified retention system for your yoga or Pilates studio. You'll learn how to make progress visible, recognize effort continuously, and always give your members a next level to work toward. 

Episode Outline:

[01:30] Why retention matters more than acquisition
[03:00] The real reason members leave
[04:45] The gap vs. the gain: why clients can't see their own progress
[06:00] Where the "sign the wall" approach falls short
[09:00] What gamification actually looks like in a studio
[18:30] How to measure the impact of your new system

Key Takeaways:

✔️ A healthy retention rate is ~90% over six months. If your churn is above 10%, fix your retention system before spending more on ads.
✔️ Members don't leave because your classes are bad. They leave because their progress is invisible and their effort goes unrecognized.
✔️ Gamification isn't gimmicky—it's a strategic system where progress is visible, effort is recognized, and there's always a next milestone ahead.

Quotes:

"Signing the wall is a finish line, not a step in a journey."

"Your students aren't leaving because your classes aren't good. They're leaving because their progress isn't being tracked and the effort feels unrecognized."

"When there's no scoreboard, no tracking, no 'you're so close'—there's no reason for them to stay."

FAQ Section:

What is a healthy member retention rate for a yoga or Pilates studio? Around 90% within six months—meaning churn stays at or below 10%. If you're consistently above that, a retention system is your first priority, not more leads.

Why do yoga and Pilates studio members cancel? Most members don't leave because of class quality. They leave because their progress isn't visible and their effort goes unrecognized. When clients don't feel like they're getting anywhere, they drift—even if they actually are making progress.

What is a gamified retention system for fitness studios? It's a strategic structure where members earn points, level up through tiered titles, and unlock rewards at class milestones. It makes progress visible, recognizes effort continuously, and always gives members a clear next goal.

How do I implement milestones in my fitness studio without expensive software? Most studio management software already tracks attendance. Set up automated email triggers at key milestones, create tiered titles, and use physical rewards like branded swag. No new technology required—just intentional setup.

What rewards actually keep studio members engaged? The most effective combination: exclusive content, progressive retail discounts, and physical swag like hoodies, grippy socks, or special mats. Physical items are

Work with Jackie Murphy

• Say Hi on Instagram @studioceoofficial
• 3 Marketing Mistakes Yoga & Pilates Business Owners Make:
  https://www.jackiegmurphy.com/3-marketing-mistakes
• Join The Studio CEO Program: https://www.jackiegmurphy.com/studioceo

Transcript

Welcome And Big Promise

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Welcome to the Studio CEO, the only podcast that empowers yoga and Pilates teachers and studio owners to step confidently into their role as CEO. If you are ready to show up with passion, take your business seriously, and scale to new heights without burning out, you are in the right place. I'm your host, Jackie Murphy, an award-winning certified business coach with over 12 years of experience inside the yoga industry. I have seen firsthand what it takes to build a profitable and scalable business. Join me as we dive into strategies, insights, and real-world advice that will help you grow your revenue, build a thriving team, and create a business that serves you as much as you serve your students. It's time to embrace your inner CEO and make more money without working more. This is just the beginning. Hello and welcome back to the Studio CEO Podcast. I am Jackie Murphy. I'm officially recording the first podcast in my new office. We have moved houses and we're somewhat settled in as much as you can be in the first week of living in a new house. And you are now currently in my new office. I have a beautiful view of a park across the street, a palm tree out of my window, and lots and lots of storage space in this office, which is awesome. So welcome to the podcast today. We're gonna dive into the strategy that I would be using if I had a studio and I wanted my members to stick around longer. Now, this can relate to any business. It really is the way that I would be improving my retention system to keep clients in the business longer. And that is so, so important because when you're getting new students in your business, if you're spending money on ads to acquire new leads, to convert them to paying members or paying students in your business, it is really important that your retention is so solid. A quote unquote normal retention rate in this industry is around 90% in a six-month time frame. Some people say within a 12-month time frame. Anything less than that just means that your churn, the number of people leaving, is a little bit too high. Now, there may be some months, like here in the US in the summertime, where your churn is a little bit higher or people are freezing their memberships and that goes up. But on average, throughout the whole year, you want to keep that churn at around 10%. So this makes it that your business becomes really profitable and sustainable, and you're not wasting money, wasting energy, wasting time on getting new students into your business only to see them leave a few months later. That can be so frustrating. And that can be why your monthly recurring revenue isn't growing the way that you want it to, why you feel like you're always just like one member in, one member out, like that revolving door feeling in your business. If that's what's going on, the first thing that I would look at is do we have a retention system? Do we have a strong retention strategy? How is it being used? And what is our current retention rate? Because listen, I believe that if you're listening to this podcast, you have developed your craft, your art, your service enough that you deliver solid classes, that you really care about the experience that your students are having. So your students aren't leaving because your classes aren't good. They're not leaving because you hired new instruction instructors. They often leave because their progress isn't being tracked. It feels invisible, and the effort feels unrecognized. When you stop going to a studio or when a client stops going to a studio, it can often mean that they didn't really see the full value of continuing to show up. They maybe didn't feel like they were getting anywhere. They didn't feel like they were making progress fast enough. They wanted progress faster, even if they were making progress. Oftentimes, this is true for my clients too in business. It's hard for us to see how far we have come ourselves. Your students, it's hard for them to recognize how far they have come themselves. For my clients, sometimes I'm like, they'll come to me and they'll be like, Oh, I wish I was growing faster. I have to be like, wait a second, like, look at all this data, look at what you've done, look at all this growth you've experienced. And they're like, oh yeah, I kind of forgot that. The same thing can happen with your students or with your clients. They don't know if they're making progress. Their brain is focused on wanting to grow, wanting a different outcome, not getting the result, quote unquote yet. Because it is so important that you teach them how to celebrate the effort, how to celebrate making any sort of progress, how to identify that and call it out and make it a big deal. If not, you are gonna see people drift away quicker. Now, let's talk about what I have seen so far in the industry, like what most studios are doing, and how we're gonna elevate that just a notch from this podcast. So maybe you do this in your studio, or you've seen a studio do this, or you've been on Peloton and you've seen Peloton do this. There is a current approach to milestones that is along the lines of when someone hits 100 classes, they get to put their name on the wall, or sign the bar, or they get to take a photo and you share it on Instagram celebrating their success. And there's nothing wrong with this. It is a very lovely way to create a celebration moment for your client. But the problem is that it really does nothing for the client except give them that one moment of celebration. They sign the wall on their class 100 or day 100. They feel awesome that day. They see the posts on Instagram of them and they're proud for a second. And then they go right back to it. Back to class 101, 102, 103. And there's nothing pulling them towards the next milestone. There's nothing visibly tracking their progress. And sometimes there's not even a next level for them to reach. Signing the wall is a finish line, not a step in a journey. Once they've crossed that finish line, there's not a huge reason in their brain to keep going. So this can fall short simply because it is missing that ongoing progress isn't tracked. So, for example, they don't know they're at 187 classes and they're only 13 classes away from the 200-class milestone because they don't see it unless they dig into their client profile, which most people are not gonna do. They don't see their progress accumulating. They're focused on today and what they want tomorrow and what they want next week. They're not looking at, oh my gosh, how far have I come and what have I gained? There's actually an entire book on this called The Gap in the Gain. I highly recommend it. But we are wired to focus on the gap between where we are and where we want to go. And it is literally something that you have to teach your clients to do to focus on the gain where they started and where they are now instead to keep them in the game. When there's no scoreboard, when there's no tracking, when there's no like, hey, you're so close, you're almost there, there's no reason for them to stay in it. There's no anticipation. They don't know what's coming next. They don't know about a 200-class exciting moment that they get to unlock. There's no carrot essentially pulling them forward. And you might be like, Jackie, I don't want to have carrots pulling my students forward. And I get it. I totally get it. But the human brain likes to be rewarded. We used to run challenges where they would put stickers up on a wall tracking their classes. And I can't tell you how those little tiny stickers did so much for people staying committed over the summer. We like to have that little physical marker, that carrot, telling us, here's what you get. You get a sticker, here's what you get when you do the next class or the next thing. You right now may not have ongoing recognition if there's no clear tracking, no clear anticipation. The celebration is lovely, right? Like when you hit that 100-class celebration, it's lovely. But then what about 500 classes? What about a thousand classes? Does it keep going? Is there a next level of growth for them or have they hit it and they're done? If months go by and there's no acknowledgement of their effort, they will start to wonder if you see them. And the opposite of that is true. If months go by and they haven't been there and there's no acknowledgement of their absence, they will start to wonder if you even know that they're a member. So you want to make sure that you're building this community aspect. Without the community aspect, they're just signing the wall as the individual. Peloton does the leaderboard, right? Like this idea of like friendly competition with your community, with the Peloton. That's one way to build this in. When your clients see your other clients progressing, it makes them want to progress too. You can use the community to uplift everyone together. So we want to go from having a moment where we're celebrating our clients to really having a system, a system of gamification. Now, don't let that word scare you, but you want a system where you can see your progress at all times. You know what's next, you know what you're working toward, the next reward, your effort is being recognized constantly, and there's another level to reach. This is gonna change your members' experience from hitting 100 classes and having one dopamine rush for the day to keeping them engaged for months or years. So let's talk about gamification. I am literally not telling you that you need to make your studio seem like a video game, right? The whole idea of turning your client retention into a game is just giving them something to continually play, to continually engage with. So, for example, let's think about this. One way that you could gamify your client retention system is setting up points, setting up like titles for different levels within the membership, setting up badges. We use Kajabi community for our studio CEO program and the mastermind. And inherently, Kajabi knows that gamification is so, so important that it puts everyone on a leaderboard. I can see who's the most active in the community. It gives you a different title, it gives you different milestone celebrations. If you hit something, it's like, yay, keep going. Here's the next one. That's exactly what this would look like in your business. Members could earn points for completing so many classes. They could have bonus points for attending workshops or trying the format that's like least popular. They could have points for finishing a challenge, bringing a friend. You could do this as a referral system too. And this could be something that they could build a point system within your studio. Another idea is you could create tiered titles so that members can like literally know their progress, right? You could um be a regular member if you're taking 26 to 50 classes. You could be committed if you've taken 51 to 100 classes. You could start to become a pro at 100 plus. Let's say that you start to become a studio legend at 200 plus at a thousand. They could join the one comma club, and it could be this club of people who've hit a thousand classes. Members could get an email, they would be alerted of their new level and what is the next level, and it would make it tangible and have the proof of the progress that they are making. Now, here's the next layer that really is gonna take this to the next level. You wanna layer real rewards for your clients on top of this. So, like, think about that picture at hitting 100 classes. That does nothing for them. But let's say that when they hit 100 classes, they get exclusive content. This could be like a bonus on-demand video, or it could be a uh, you know, pro-level member workshop only. It could be that they get a certain discount or their discount increases, right? They get 10% off retail as a regular member, but once they hit that one comma club, they're getting 20% off of retail. Like now there's a reason for me to want to get there as well. I think one of the things that we overlook that is so helpful to use is physical swag. Like, give them a 100-class sweatshirt or give them a one comma club sweatshirt or a pro member sweatshirt that they only get at that level. Let them wear it around town. Let them show people that they hit this milestone within their community. I love the idea of like if you are yoga studio having a mat that your members get at like a thousand classes. So when they're in class, everyone else in class can see that, oh, like they're a one comma club mat member. It all of a sudden makes everyone else be like, ooh, I want the mat, a free mat, that's awesome, right? But also it highlights like, look, this it's normal to take this level of classes with us. It's normal to stick around for years. It normalizes retention. If you were a Pilates studio, you could do like specific grippy socks. Maybe it's a certain color, or maybe it says something on them that they only get after I've hit a certain level of classes. I would continue with a recognition, the shout outs, the member spotlights, the Instagram, all of that, yes. But more importantly, can you recognize them consistently in classes? I truly think Peloton does a really, really good job of this because the recognition isn't so intermittent, right? Like it's not this one-time thing that happens. It's like every single class, you're gonna show up, you're gonna be on the leaderboard, you know they're calling out people's birthdays, they're calling out milestones, they're calling out new people. Like, build that into your community and your culture of teachers that they're looking at the booking software, they are celebrating milestones in class, they're recognizing that person, they're encouraging everyone else to hit that same milestone, like make it a part of a daily conversation instead. When you do this, the member experience is gonna change. They're gonna come in and they're like, oh, I'm new, I'm figuring this out, but I feel acknowledged already. I've hit 10 classes, I got an email, and then they're gonna start to feel stronger at 25 classes. They get another email, they've locked a bonus core video workout video. They see that they're halfway there to the 50 class milestone. There was always a carrot pulling them forward. Then they would hit 50 miles, 50 miles. They would hit a 50 class milestone. They level up to this committed member. Now they get their retail bonus. Now they get a shout out in the newsletter. Now they see they're halfway there towards getting the like special 100-class hoodie that they've already seen people wearing. Do you see this? It builds and builds and builds. There's always a next level for them to be working towards. Their effort is constantly being recognized, and they're a part of a community celebrating each other's progress. They are part of a community celebrating each other's progress. We are in a world where milestones, outcomes, and results are like the thing that's celebrated. It is so important that you get yourself and you create for your students a community where progress is celebrated. You're showing up, you're on the way there. Like, yes, when we hit the milestone, we're gonna celebrate. But before that, you're gonna hear from us. In between that, we care about you at 47 classes, we care about you at 50 classes. If you don't have that in your business as well, I will just tell you, you have to get into the studio CEO because I train, I literally rewire my clients' brains so that they are celebrating their progress. They're celebrating the habits they're creating, they're celebrating the rewiring of their brain to think like a CEO all the time. Yes, we celebrate outcomes, we celebrate results, those are incredible. But what's gonna keep you in the game is when you celebrate progress. Just remember people aren't gonna quit because your classes are bad, but they will fall away because nothing is pulling them back in. This gamification isn't gimmicky, it is a strategic design where progress is visible, effort is recognized continuously, and there is always a next level. Now, you may be thinking, like, oh my god, I need a fancy software to do this. I don't know how to set this up. But so many of our software systems already track attendance. That's what you need to know. That's what you need to track. And maybe there's some automation that you can set up where they hit a certain number of classes, they get automatically triggered. You're almost at your 50-class milestone. They hit 197, they get triggered at email, though they're almost at their 200-class milestone. You could decide on all the swag. You could start making it a big deal to have the one comic club mat, the hoodie, whatever you want to do, the grippy socks. You could decide to make this really visible and just keep a leaderboard, quote unquote, in your studio to show, like, look who is within these milestones and let it change and let it fluctuate. Don't let it be a bar that's signed one and done. Launch this, tell them, hey, we want to celebrate you. We're gonna track your progress to help you grow more. And then tell them where they're at. Tell them how many classes they have, tell them their next milestone. This is how you start to implement this in your studio. Now, as you do this, you want to track your average life cycle of a member or client before you implement this. And then you want to track your average life cycle of a member or client three months after you've implemented this, or six months after you've implemented this, or 12 months after you've implemented this. And you always want to be looking at how many members are within a milestone, 10 classes away, 15 classes away. And that is really who you want to focus on, keeping them in that to hit that next milestone. Okay. So I want you guys to take these strategies. You know, whatever stands out to you today and start to implement them into your business to improve your retention rate, which will naturally improve how profitable you are and the monthly recurring revenue that you have in your business, but it will also really, really help to build community. People want to be seen. They want to be celebrated. They want to know that you care about the progress that you're making. And they want to know that you're tracking their progress. So implement this into your studio and watch all of that happen. Now, I want to invite you to the three marketing mistakes masterclass. We are hosting another live encore version of this masterclass on March 23rd at 10 a.m. Eastern. You can click the link within the show notes to join us live for that masterclass if you missed it last time. I'll be breaking down three marketing mistakes that I see happen the most inside of the yoga and Pilates industry and telling you what you need to do to actually attract new students, new leads, new people into your business. Again, all of that is in the show notes, and I will talk to you in the next episode.