Member Acquisition Cost for Gyms and Studios

Every fitness owner wants more members, and most try to get them by spending more on ads. But acquisition is a cost, and a membership business lives or dies on whether that cost is lower than what a member is worth. The owners who grow profitably treat member acquisition cost as a number to manage with the same rigor as rent or payroll, and they quickly discover that the cheapest member is rarely the one bought through the most expensive channel.

What Acquisition Actually Costs by Channel

The benchmarks vary widely, but the shape is consistent. Mindbody research puts paid acquisition for a boutique studio at $50 to $150 per new member through advertising, and IHRSA cites paid aggregator and channel leads around $40 or more. Organic channels, referrals, walk-ins, and on-site conversion tools, commonly drop the effective cost to $10 to $40 per member. The spread between the cheapest and most expensive channel is enormous, which is why a blended CAC that hides the mix is misleading and a per-channel view is essential.

Aggregators like ClassPass deserve special scrutiny. They charge for access to their audience and tend to deliver price-shopping users with little loyalty to your brand, so the headline lead cost understates the real cost once weak retention is included. IHRSA commentary notes the gap between an aggregator-sourced member and one acquired through your own site can be roughly tenfold over the relationship. Aggregators can fill off-peak capacity, but a business built on them is renting an audience it will never own, which is the strategic case for owning your own acquisition through your website recommender and qualification tools.

The Calculation Most Owners Get Wrong

CAC is total sales and marketing spend over a period divided by new members acquired in that same period. The error nearly everyone makes is counting only ad spend and ignoring the intro-offer discounts given to close the join and the staff time spent converting prospects. A studio that runs a half-price first month to land a member has spent that discount on acquisition just as surely as it spent the ad dollars, and leaving it out makes the channel look more efficient than it is. Real CAC is usually a third higher than the dashboard number.

The number only means something against value. The ratio of lifetime value to acquisition cost is the health metric of any membership business, and the standard rule of thumb is an LTV to CAC ratio of at least 3 to 1: a member should be worth at least three times what you paid to acquire them. A studio paying $120 for a member worth $400 over their tenure is healthy; one paying $120 for a member who churns in two months loses money on every join. That value side of the equation is the entire subject of member lifetime value, and CAC is meaningless without it.

Acquisition Is Seasonal, and the January Spike Distorts the Math

Fitness acquisition is one of the most seasonal in any industry, and an owner who measures CAC on an annual average misses what actually drives it. The new-year resolution surge concentrates demand into January and early February, when intent is high and search and ad costs are bid up by every competitor chasing the same resolutioners. IHRSA has long documented the January membership spike and the well-known spring drop-off that follows. The result is that January joins can carry an inflated acquisition cost on paid channels even as volume peaks, and many of those joins are the lowest-retaining cohort of the year.

The strategic read is to spend differently across the calendar rather than evenly. January traffic is abundant but expensive and fickle, so the disciplined play is to capture it efficiently through owned channels and conversion tools rather than overbidding on ads against the whole market, then lean into paid acquisition in the quieter, cheaper months when intent is lower but competition is thinner. An owner who computes a single blended annual CAC will never see this; the seasonal cohort view is what reveals when a member is cheap to acquire and likely to stay versus expensive and likely to fade.

The Attribution Mistakes That Make a Channel Look Cheap

Beyond leaving out discounts and labor, the subtler CAC error is misattribution: crediting the wrong channel for a join. A member who discovered the studio through a friend, researched it on the website, saw a retargeting ad, and finally joined after a walk-in is often credited entirely to the last ad they clicked, which overstates that ad's efficiency and understates the referral and the website that actually did the work. This last-touch bias quietly pushes budget toward paid channels that merely closed a member organic effort had already won. The fix is to ask new members how they first heard of you and to weight first-touch alongside last-touch.

The reverse mistake is also common: dismissing organic and content channels because no single click can be tied to them. Word of mouth, local reputation, and a well-optimized website rarely show up cleanly in an ad dashboard, so owners who only trust trackable clicks systematically underinvest in the cheapest acquisition they have. Mindbody operators consistently report that a large share of strong-studio joins come through referral and reputation, channels that are nearly invisible to last-touch attribution. Measuring CAC honestly means resisting the bias toward whatever is easiest to track rather than whatever actually produces members.

Local Search and Reputation, the Acquisition Most Studios Underbuild

A fitness studio is an intensely local business, and most of its highest-intent prospects are searching for a nearby option at the moment they are ready to act. That makes local search visibility, a complete and active business profile, genuine reviews, and a website that ranks for the neighborhood plus the format, one of the lowest cost-per-acquisition channels available, because the prospect arrives already in-market and already nearby. Unlike paid ads, the cost is mostly time and consistency rather than per-click spend, so the effective CAC of a join from local organic search is a fraction of a paid one.

Reviews are the compounding asset here. A steady flow of recent, specific reviews lifts both ranking and conversion, and the cheapest source of them is the members and class-takers already delighted with the experience. The mechanics of converting that local traffic once it lands are the subject of conversion rate optimization, because ranking for a local search is wasted if the website that receives the click leaks the visitor. The owner who builds local visibility and a converting site together turns the neighborhood itself into an acquisition channel that paid competitors cannot easily outbid.

Building a Referral System That Actually Produces Joins

Referrals are the cheapest and highest-retaining acquisition channel, but they rarely happen at scale by accident; they happen by design. Mindbody operators report that 30 to 40 percent of new members in strong studios arrive through referral, and the studios that hit those numbers run a deliberate system rather than hoping members spread the word. The components are simple: an explicit ask at the moment of a member's success, a reward that benefits both the referrer and the friend so it does not feel like the member is selling, and a frictionless way to actually make the introduction.

The economics of a referral program are unusually favorable because the reward is paid only on a successful join and the resulting member retains better than a paid-channel join, so even a generous incentive produces a lower effective CAC than most advertising. The common failure is making the program a passive poster on the wall that nobody acts on; the working version is a timed, personal ask built into the member journey at the high-satisfaction moments, such as a hit goal or a class milestone. Because referred members both cost less and stay longer, a strong referral engine is the single most effective way to pull a studio's blended CAC down without buying cheaper, lower-quality leads.

Lowering CAC Without Lowering Quality

The cheapest members come from two places: referrals and on-site conversion. A referred member arrives pre-qualified and retains better, at near-zero cost, and Mindbody operators report that 30 to 40 percent of new members in strong studios come through referral. The other lever is the website itself. The average wellness site converts under 3 percent of visitors, so most of the traffic you already pay to attract leaves without a trace. Interactive recommenders and readiness quizzes let prospects self-qualify, raising that conversion rate and capturing intent, which lowers cost per acquired member because you are monetizing traffic instead of buying more of it.

Acquisition and retention are two sides of the same coin. Every member you keep is a member you do not have to reacquire, so a few points of retention quietly lowers your effective CAC, which is why this reads alongside member retention economics. Owners who want to convert their own traffic and qualify prospects can stand up a structured lead generation setup for wellness businesses, turning the website from a brochure that leaks 97 percent of visitors into the lowest-cost acquisition channel they have.