Do joining-fee promotions bring members who stay?

Whether waived or slashed joining fees bring a gym members who leave quickly, and how to compare cancellations by the offer each member joined on.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 5 min read · For Fitness businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya

January in Johannesburg, the back-to-work weeks in Nairobi, the weeks after Easter in Lagos: every gym has its sign-up season, and most meet it with a promotion. No joining fee. Half-price first month. Bring a friend and both join free. The front desk is busy, the new-member count looks excellent, and the owner feels the campaign worked.

Three or four months later the picture can look different. Some of those members stopped coming after week two, then stopped paying, then cancelled. The question is whether the promotion brought in people who were always going to leave, and whether the gym can tell. This article draws on Harvard Business Review's treatment of customer churn to show how a gym can measure it, compare members by the offer they joined on, and decide which promotions are worth repeating.

The deal-seeker problem

Harvard Business Review, in a 2014 article by Gallo, warns that a high churn rate is often the result of poor customer acquisition, because heavy upfront price promotion attracts deal seekers who leave when they find a better deal elsewhere.

For a gym, the mechanism is easy to picture. A member who joined because the joining fee was waived has paid nothing to commit. When the gym across the road waives its fee next season, the same member has every reason to move. A member who paid the full joining fee, by contrast, has something invested and a reason to get value from it.

That does not mean promotions are a mistake. It means their success cannot be measured by sign-ups alone.

Measure churn by month

HBR, quoting Jill Avery, defines the customer churn rate as the percentage of customers who end their relationship with a company in a particular period: the customers who left during the period divided by total customers at the beginning of the period. It notes that an annual rate is the default for most companies, but that businesses which price monthly, gyms among them, track churn by month.

A worked example in words. At the start of March the gym has a known number of active members. During March, some cancel or are cancelled for non-payment. Divide the March leavers by the members at the start of March, and that is the March churn rate. Do the same every month, and the trend shows whether the gym is holding its members or replacing them.

Members who join during the month are left out of that month's calculation; they enter next month's starting count.

Compare by the offer members joined on

HBR also reports Avery's recommendation to look at churn rates by customer segment, to show which types of customers are at risk and may need an intervention. For a gym, the most useful segment is often the offer a member joined on.

Keep a simple monthly table with one row for each offer:

Fill it in from your membership records each month. After a few months, the comparison answers the question directly: do members on the waived-fee offer leave faster than members who paid in full? If they do, the next campaign might discount something other than the joining fee, such as a free personal training session, which costs less and attracts people who want to train.

There is no target number

It is tempting to ask what a "good" churn rate is for a gym. HBR quotes Avery as saying there is no magic churn number: what is acceptable varies widely by business model and depends on how quickly and efficiently a company can acquire customers and how profitable they are. A gym that signs members cheaply through referrals can live with more churn than one that pays heavily for advertising.

So compare the gym against itself: this year's January intake against last year's, the waived-fee group against the full-fee group. The HBR article on keeping the right customers explains how churn is calculated, why monthly businesses track it monthly, and why segments matter.

Keeping promotions and payments honest in Achekam

Achekam does not calculate churn or tag members by campaign; the table above is kept by the gym. What Achekam does is make sure the money side of a promotion is controlled and visible.

Discounts at the front desk. Line and whole-sale discounts can be given at the till, and above the business's cashier limit only a supervisor or manager can give them, which the server checks again. That stops a promotion from quietly growing at the desk into bigger discounts than the owner approved, and it means each discount is a recorded decision.

Joining-fee invoices. When a member joins on account, the joining fee and first month go on a customer invoice. Invoices start as drafts that can be changed or deleted, and issuing one takes the next number in its sequence and posts it to the ledger, so the promotion's real income is in the books from day one. How that first invoice is built is covered in invoicing a joining fee and the first month.

Members who stop paying. Receivables are aged into 0-30, 31-60, 61-90, 91-120 and over 120 days, with overdue totals. A promotion that brings in deal seekers often shows up here before it shows in cancellations: members who stop paying in month two or three. Check the aged list each month against your offer table. Members who need help spreading payments are covered in a payment plan for a member who is behind.

Before the next campaign

Set up the offer table now, using last season's intake if your records allow. Decide in advance how many months you will track the new campaign's members before judging it. Then, when the next sign-up season comes, run the promotion with a clear question: not "how many joined?" but "how many are still here?"

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.