Boost Retention 5–10 pts: AMS Insurance Renewal Reminders for Agencies
AMS first playbook for independent agencies: start 90 days out with email, SMS, and calls, respect TCPA, and aim for 5–10 point retention lift.
Turn on class reminders inside your gym’s app or portal, then confirm push notifications are allowed at the phone level for that app. Add SMS or email as a backup channel, and switch on waitlist alerts so you catch open spots the moment they free up. If alerts still don’t show up, work through the troubleshooting checklist below before assuming your gym’s system is broken.
TL;DR:
- Enabling notifications in both the gym app and your phone settings is crucial, and each app may have separate toggles for reminders, confirmation alerts, and waitlist alerts.
- Phone operating systems often block notifications, so checking and adjusting settings on iPhone and Android, including permissions and battery restrictions, is essential for reliable alerts.
- Using multiple channels like push notifications, SMS, and email together improves the likelihood of catching last-minute waitlist openings, with push and SMS being most immediate.
- Ensuring your contact details are correct, sending test notifications, and re-enabling app permissions can fix most missed alerts before contacting your gym.
- Automated, multi-channel reminder systems like Upriser help gyms ensure members receive timely updates, reducing missed classes and waitlist inefficiencies.
Most booking apps bury notification controls in one of two places: your profile settings or the individual class screen. Start with your profile. Look for a path like Profile > Settings > Notifications, where you’ll usually find toggles for booking confirmations, reminders, and promotional messages. Some apps split these into separate switches; others bundle them into one “class alerts” setting.
The second location lives inside the class itself. Open Booking > Class Details, and look for a reminders option before you confirm your spot. This is where apps like Classta let studios configure multiple reminder timings per class, commonly one hour before, two hours before, or a full day out, sent by email or text depending on what the studio has set up on their end.
A few things to check and enable while you’re in there:
If your gym uses a third-party notification app rather than building alerts into its own platform, you may need to install that separately. The REMIND app, for example, requires downloading the app, creating an account, and joining a specific class code before it will send you updates about cancellations or schedule changes. It’s an extra step, but skipping it means missing anything that app handles.
Once you’ve booked, most apps offer a one-tap option to add the class to your personal calendar straight from the confirmation email or in-app screen. Do this every time. A calendar entry with a built-in alert is a second layer of protection that doesn’t depend on the gym’s notification system working correctly.
Even a perfectly configured gym app won’t alert you if your phone is blocking it at the operating system level. This is the single most common reason members say they “never get notifications” when the app itself is sending them just fine.
On iPhone:
On Android:
If notifications are technically arriving but you’re not noticing them, check that sound and vibration aren’t set to silent for that app and that lock screen previews are visible rather than hidden for privacy.
No single channel is reliable on its own, which is exactly why smart gyms use more than one. Push notifications are the fastest but depend entirely on your phone cooperating, as covered above. SMS is nearly as immediate and doesn’t rely on an app being open or even installed correctly. Email is slower to notice but holds the most detail, class descriptions, instructor names, cancellation policies, so it’s better for planning than for split-second alerts. WhatsApp and similar messaging apps sit in between: notoriously high open rates, often above what email or push alone can manage, according to one industry breakdown showing a combined email and WhatsApp approach reaching roughly high attendance.
The practical sequence that covers your bases:
Pro Tip: If your gym lets you pick which channel handles which alert type, put waitlist promotions on push or SMS only. Email is too slow for a spot that might get grabbed in minutes, and you don’t want your inbox handling time-sensitive openings.
To avoid drowning in messages, turn off promotional notifications separately from class reminders if your app allows it. Most platforms let you opt out of marketing pings while keeping the alerts that actually affect your bookings.
Waitlist systems work one of two ways: manual, where a staff member calls or emails the next person on the list, or automatic, where the software instantly promotes you and fires off a notification the second a spot opens. Automatic systems are now standard at most studios, and they only work in your favor if your notification settings are ready to catch them.
Timing is tighter than most members realize. Cancellations often happen close to the late-cancel cutoff, sometimes just minutes before class starts, which means the system needs to reach you and get a response fast. Reminders and waitlist promotions timed around that cancellation window measurably increase how many freed spots actually get filled, rather than going to waste.
That speed requirement is why email alone almost never works for waitlist alerts. By the time you open your inbox, the spot is usually gone to whoever got the push or text first.
To put yourself in the best position:
Work through these in order. Most missed notification problems get solved in the first three steps.
Studios that manage attendance manually, without automated reminders, tend to see more no-shows and slower waitlist turnover, which is part of why automated attendance tracking has become standard practice even at smaller class-based businesses. If your gym still runs on a paper sign-in sheet and a phone tree, notification problems are less about your settings and more about the system itself.
If you want a fully separate backup layer, a personal automation tool like IFTTT can send you a scheduled reminder at a time you choose, independent of whatever the gym’s app decides to do. It won’t know about last-minute cancellations, but it’s a solid failsafe for recurring classes you never want to forget.
Studios ask members to enable push, SMS, and email, not because one system, isn’t good enough, but because member phones behave unpredictably in ways no single channel can outrun. A push notification silenced by Do Not Disturb, an SMS filtered by a carrier, an email buried in Promotions, each channel fails for different, unrelated reasons. Redundancy is the fix.
There’s a business logic behind it too. Every no-show is an empty spot that could have gone to someone on the waitlist, and every slow waitlist promotion is a member who gave up and booked somewhere else. Multi-channel reminders shrink both problems at once, which is exactly why the studios that treat notifications as an afterthought tend to have the emptiest waitlists and the most frustrated members standing outside a “full” class that had three no-shows.
What surprises most members is how much of this is solvable on their end in under five minutes. You don’t need your gym to fix anything if your own settings are the actual bottleneck, and in my experience working through this topic, they usually are.
— Brent
Plenty of gyms still run reminders through whatever their booking software ships with by default, which explains why so many members fall through the cracks between apps, carriers, and inboxes. Upriser closes that gap by automating push, SMS, and email from one system, so a gym doesn’t have to manually configure three separate tools just to cover its bases.
For members, that means faster waitlist promotions (a push or text goes out the instant a spot frees up, not whenever staff notice), and reminders that actually reflect your booking, not a generic blast to the whole roster. Fewer missed classes, fewer scrambled mornings, less guessing about whether your spot is confirmed.
If your gym’s notifications have been unreliable, that’s worth raising with the front desk directly. Ask whether they use a platform built for this, or point them toward Upriser’s page for gyms and health clubs to see how automated, multi-channel reminders work in practice.
A few official references back up the steps above, useful if you want to dig into vendor-specific settings:
