How to Create Online Training Contracts

​If you're an online personal trainer you need to make your contract work with your sales process  by moving your personal training contract online. Your clients are already there, so it makes sense. How do you start the process? Can you simply place your offline contract online?

When your personal training contract was offline, your customer’s signature was proof of acceptance. That was all you needed to enforce your contract and avoid conflict.

Online, it's a bit different. You must make sure your customer agrees to the terms and there are four requirements for acceptance of online terms.

1. Opportunity to Review Terms

It's not enough to simply tell your clients that the they need to agree to your terms, you need to make the contract available for your customers to read. It doesn’t really matter that they choose not to read the the contract as we would expect most clients to do. But, you have to give them an adequate opportunity to read it. This is can be done by:

• linking to the legal page on the footer of your website
• including a link in every service email to your customer
• including a link in every invoice to your customer
• including a notice in the login screen or dashboard of your online service

2. Agreeing to Terms

Acceptance of your contract comes from taking some action online. That can be clicking a box, but typically (and to make sure it's legally binding) it's more than that. Your customers are actually accepting your terms by reading your blog, commenting on your blog, using your information, downloading your white paper. But you have to make sure to give them notice at every opportunity to remind them of the contract.

When it comes to agreeing to your terms when the user is purchasing a specific service, always have the user agree twice. You can do this with a regular contact from by having a check box that says "I Agree" and a button that says "I Agree".

​Just be aware that the terms of service need to above or next to your check box or button so it's clear what the user is agreeing to.

3. Taking Action

If you've gone through steps one a two, your customer will be bound by the contract by taking the action. Now that the user has taken an action, you need a record of it.

The easiest way to do this is to have the contact from submitted to your email inbox and filed in a designated folder for safe keeping. A submitted form will show details of what the user clicked and when.

4. Notice of Terms For Existing Clients

If you're a face to face personal trainer and you want to move clients online, adequate notice of terms simply means you need to inform your existing clients that their contract will be taken online. This is pretty easy. You send them a link to your contract page, and require them to acknowledge in some way.

If you're changing the terms of a contract that existing clients have already signed, you need to give notice of terms. This means you don't need to get them to agree again, you just need to let them know that what they have agreed to is changing.

You can do this with pop ups, banners on your website or a message when a user signs in to your online training service.

Free Templates

Coaching Agreement
This is an agreement verifying the expectations for both you and your client during your sessions.
Download ​

Online Training Informed Consent
Train clients online? You need an informed consent personal training form specific to your online clients.
Download ​

In an ongoing effort to make the lives of personal trainers easier, we've created the New Client Kit. A 15 part series of plug and play, white label personal trainer forms that you can add your logo to, add to your website and print out. Here are a few related forms for you to download. Completely FREE!

You can also download the rest of the New Client Kit and access fitness marketing execution plans, cheat sheets, how to guides, checklist and templates to streamline your fitness business success! Check out the Fitness Marketing Lab.