Gym Membership Cards & Studio Passes
Replace key fobs and plastic tags with a pass in the member's wallet — tier, status and class credits reflecting the record live, and a lock-screen channel to the members who have stopped turning up.
Try on AppExchangeWhat gyms and studios use Kemicard for
Membership & access
Member name, tier and barcode at the turnstile. Off-peak, full and corporate tiers are fields on the pass, so the door enforces what the record says.
Class packs & credits
Ten-class packs and drop-in credits shown on the pass and decremented as they are used — the member always knows what they have left without opening anything.
Retention messaging
The member who has not been in for three weeks is the one about to cancel. A geofenced nudge as they pass the building is the cheapest retention tool available.
Billing Problems Should Not Surface at the Front Desk
A failed card payment discovered at the turnstile, in front of a queue, is a bad experience for the member and a worse one for the staff member who has to explain it. It is also entirely avoidable.
Because the pass updates from the record, a payment failure or an expiring membership can reach the member days before it becomes a door problem — quietly, on their phone, with a link to fix it. The people who deal with it in advance never become a desk conversation at all.
- Status is live. Active, frozen, lapsed and cancelled are reflected on the pass, not on a printout behind the desk.
- Freezes work properly. A paused membership shows as paused and resumes on schedule without anyone reissuing anything.
- Cancellations revoke access. A plastic fob handed to a friend keeps working. A pass tied to the record does not.
Reaching the Member Who Has Gone Quiet
Attrition in fitness is rarely a decision; it is a drift. Someone stops coming, the direct debit runs for another few months out of inertia, and then it is cancelled. By the time the cancellation arrives the relationship ended weeks earlier.
Attendance data makes the drift visible while it is still reversible. A member whose scan frequency has halved is a specific, addressable person — and the pass they already carry is the channel.
Geofencing adds the timing. A notification as someone walks past the building on their way home from work lands differently to the same message at nine in the morning, because it asks for a decision they can act on immediately.
What Launching Actually Involves
- Design the template once. Logo, colours, and the fields that matter — name, tier, member number, expiry, barcode.
- Check the scanners. Most 2D readers handle a phone screen without any change. Older laser readers at turnstiles are the thing to test before launch, not after.
- Distribute through the welcome email. A new member who joins online has the pass before their first visit. Existing members get a link and a QR poster at the desk.
- Wire it to the record. Joins, freezes, upgrades and cancellations drive the pass through Flows — no double entry for the front desk.
- Keep fobs for the holdouts. A small number of members will want one. The barcode is shared, so the turnstile does not care.
Southgate Club, 5015 111 Street NW
Edmonton, AB T6H 4M6
Sat–Sun 7:00 AM – 9:00 PM
The Back of the Card: Everything the Front Desk Is Asked
Opening hours, the class timetable, the membership terms and how to freeze — answered without anyone queueing to ask.
Because the rows are Salesforce fields, a bank-holiday timetable or a new club opening reaches every member at once. No app, no email, no notice taped to the door.
Fitness, in practice
Gyms and studios have a sharper version of the membership problem than most sectors: the credential is used several times a week, the membership status changes often, and the economics depend almost entirely on retention rather than acquisition. All three point the same way. A card that is a printed snapshot is wrong more often here than anywhere else, and the cost of being wrong is a queue at a turnstile during the evening peak.
Boutique studios and large chains want different things from the same technology. A studio running class packs cares about credits, waitlists and instructor announcements — the pass is a relationship. A chain with many sites cares about access control, tier enforcement and the cost of replacing fobs at scale — the pass is infrastructure. Both are the same template model underneath, which is why it is worth designing the pass with both in mind even if you only need one today.
The gamification angle is real but easy to overdo. Visit counts and streaks on the pass work because they reflect something the member already cares about. Points balances for their own sake tend to be ignored. The test is whether the number on the card would change what someone does this week.
If your memberships, billing and class bookings already live in or sync to Salesforce, the pass renders from those records directly. See membership cards and access control for the mechanics.
Fitness & Studios — the brochure
A one-page summary for a conference table or an email, or the six-page version for the colleague who has to approve it. Both cover what you can issue, how it works, and the push and back-of-card examples for fitness and studios.
Further reading
From the blog
Retire the Key Fob
See member passes, class credits and geofenced retention messaging on your own data.