Fitness First. Customer Engagement: Overview. Case Study

Transcription

1 Customer Engagement: Fitness First Overview Company Fitness First is a leading fitness brand Challenge To maximise the effectiveness of its marketing, Fitness First needed to turn raw customer data into a highly personalised conversation with its customers. Solution Fitness First chose GBG Marketing Services, offering bespoke database consultancy and enhancement. How GBG helped Fitness First Implemented a truly personalised programme Introduced automated reporting Set processes triggered by customer behaviour Improved customer experience and loyalty Increased gym visits by new customers by more than 250% USING IDENTITY INTELLIGENTLY

2 Fitness First sees new customer engagement soar by 250% thanks to GBG Marketing The most successful organisations recognise the value of understanding individual identities. GBG combines individual identity data with technology to provide clients with the identity data intelligence they need to make good business decisions. That s why Fitness First chose GBG Marketing Services to drive increased customer engagement from its marketing campaigns. GBG Marketing Services has a Single Customer View (SCV) database which provides a single, holistic view of your customers and prospects across different channels and areas of your business. With a SCV you will better understand how your customers interact with your business. Customer engagement will improve and processes will become simpler. Behavioural marketing from GBG will help you increase consumers engagement with your brand and return on investment by using identity data intelligence to create unique multichannel communications that are triggered by an individual s behaviour. Background A truly global fitness brand. Fitness First was founded in 1993 in the UK, where it now operates 75 clubs with 2,200 staff and over 189,000 members. Fitness First has over 377 clubs worldwide, reaching over 990,000 members in 16 countries. Fitness First offers innovative fitness equipment and classes, knowledgeable staff and professional advice all in a welcoming environment that keeps its members motivated. Its marketing activity encourages new and existing members to attend the gym more frequently and persuades lapsed customers to renew their memberships. With a new marketing infrastructure in place, the company was keen to improve its already successful programme. 82 clubs Fitness First was founded in 1993 in the UK, where it now operates 82 clubs with 2,200 staff and over 189,000 members. 16 countries 189,000 members. Fitness First is a global fitness brand with over 377 clubs worldwide, reaching over 990,000 members in 16 countries. 250% GBG s work drove a 250% increase in customer engagement.

3 The Challenge Maximising marketing effectiveness. Alongside consolidating customer information in a single database, Fitness First wanted to segment their customer base and design automated campaigns based on actual customer behaviour. Working closely with long-term partner GBG, Fitness First completely revamped its customer data and directchannel marketing processes. With campaign results and member visit data immediately fed back into the system at individual customer level, the SCV provides a solid base for analysis, reporting and planning. This gives Fitness First the accurate information it needs to understand the real value its marketing investment creates. With GBG now doing the spadework behind the scenes to support reporting, analytics and delivery, the in-house marketing team has more time to plan campaigns. Management of the SCV simply happens as planned and I have minimal involvement, says Rhian Reilly, CRM Manager at Fitness First. That leaves me free to concentrate on the more strategic side of my role. Marketing s priority was to optimise communications, the company s main customer channel. Only months after the new infrastructure went live, Fitness First was already running 30 different regular campaigns to members and gym visiting frequency was rising but the marketing team knew more was possible. Talking to GBG s consultants helped bring their ideas to life. We have workshops with GBG where we review and look in detail at improvements, says Reilly. They know how to get the most out of the marketing system, and have advised us exactly what should trigger a communication and where in the member lifecycle it should be sent. The Solution Implementing a truly personalised programme. The segmentation is based on different members visit patterns and helps to match communication type and frequency to visit rate and to the days and times that customers preferred to exercise. Overlaying external demographics, motivational data and contact preferences add detail to the picture. The quarterly newsletter was the first to benefit, with images, titles and articles tailored to each segment. But applying behavioural marketing techniques to the welcome programme offered even greater potential to improve the customer experience. Engagement is key to retention, says Reilly. The welcome programme is hugely important because behaviour in the first three months is highly related to whether a new customer will stay on as an active member or lapse after their first year. The existing welcome programme was one size fits all sending customers a pre-defined communication at a set time on two dates after a member joined. In the new welcome campaign, the timing and content of personalised s are based on each individual s data logged on the SCV. That data shows whether a member has opened or read the previous and crucially if they have visited their local club. If they don t visit for eight days in a row within their first month, they receive an encouragement to nudge them back to the gym, says Reilly. In our previous member programme, members get a reminder if they haven t visited in 14 days, regardless of how frequently they used to attend. Every member s visits are tracked individually and, when they do turn up, that resets the counter for another eight-day period. After that, they will be nudged again. The second innovation was to translate the motivational helping hand that Fitness First staff offer to members in the gym into personalised content. Every new member is now asked to complete an online What s your motivation? survey following their first gym visit. With the results recorded on the SCV, Fitness First then automatically selects the right motivational content for subsequent s in the welcome programme. Based on GBG s analysis of the customer journey, Fitness First instituted a behavioural marketing programme that automates and personalises all aspects of s sent to members, from the sending day and time to the creative and landing pages. They helped us with various data-led investigations and that led to a new segmentation, says Reilly.

4 The Benefits Triggered, personalised s boost customer engagement. The first behavioural marketing initiative personalising the regular member newsletter drove a 42% engagement increase measured by opens, reads and clickthrough. The revamped welcome programme delivered even greater benefits. Using data-driven, gentle nudges to help put the right visiting habits in place saw engagement measured in gym visits by new customers in the first month of membership rise by more than 250% over the old programme. That result will translate directly into a highly-profitable rise in end-of-year new member retention rates. All the hard work Fitness First and GBG had put into building the SCV, setting up triggering processes and building automated reporting made the improvements possible. With that identity data intelligence infrastructure in place, it was possible to optimise timing, immediately see the impact of any changes and prove the real bottom-line value of the work. It s a great example of insight-led consultancy and support driving real operational change, says Reilly. Engagement at these key junctures is what improves the customer experience and is a massive contributor to what makes for loyal, long-term members. By focusing on one vital part of the customer journey, GBG were able to help us massively improve in how we helped our members at a critical stage in their relationship with us. GBG were able to help us massively improve in how we helped our members at a critical stage in their relationship with us Rhian Reilly, CRM Manager, Fitness First. > Behavioural marketing consultancy from GBG drives 250% increase in customer engagement > Hosted SCV, reporting and consultancy from GBG supports automation and insight-driven marketing improvement.

5 It s a great example of insight-led consultancy and support driving real operational change. Rhian Reilly, CRM Manager, Fitness First. GBG products deployed: GBG Marketing Services helps our customers make the most of their databases, consolidating and enhancing everything they know. About GBG The most profitable organisations recognise the value of understanding the individual identity of their customers and employees. GBG combines this concept of identity with technology to create an environment of trust, so that organisations can employ people and connect, communicate and transact, safely and responsibly. We call this identity data intelligence. T +44 (0) E [email protected]