No API Required: Keepme's Smart But Simple Sales Setup

If the last twelve months has taught us anything, there’s no shortage of forward thinking leisure operators ready to unlock innovation and drastically improve their membership sales and retention performance with help from AI & automation. A range of charitable operators, local authorities, leisure trusts and community interest companies (CICs) have all realised how doing this supports operationally stretched teams. Not to mention alleviating the unrelenting pressure of going toe-to-toe with commercial operators from the private sector, boasting smart back-of-house technology, superior marketing budgets, and in many cases, access to in-house data scientists. 

For a platform so effective and sophisticated in its capabilities, adding Keepme to your organisation as a highly effective plug-in to work alongside your Leisure Management System (LMS) has never been so straightforward, all thanks to some smart tweaks we made in the latest version.

Whether you’re staying put with a legacy LMS system, or about to upgrade or migrate completely in the next twelve months or so, Keepme can be built, sent live, and driving a measurable impact on your membership revenue in no time at all. Making the age old problem of technical clunkiness between systems even less of a headache.

For context, just five short months ago, version 3.0 of Keepme was rolled out to our customers thanks to a monumental effort from our product, customer success, and development teams. Looking back, it was a challenging but hugely rewarding time for us. It was our biggest raft of feature updates and enhancements to date since starting the business. Thirty four to be exact! The best part of it all? Every specific feature addition and improvement we made in Keepme was ideated and driven based on feedback from our amazing customers, spanning sixteen fitness markets globally.

So why am I writing this blog now?

Well with all the excitement around that launch, it was easy to be swept up in shiny new features and get engrossed in the newer aspects of Keepme such as our generative AI content tool, Creator.

What this meant, was all the arguably less glamorous (but hugely important) functional improvements in the back end of these Keepme features struggled to get their share of the limelight. The fact is they are deserving of our attention purely for how simple they are to set up, when we come to build them for you.

So in this piece, I’m going to run through how easy the setup now is for leisure operators thanks to improvements and enhancements we’ve made to the Keepme platform behind the scenes. And in the spirit of how much we love scoring leads and members here at Keepme, I’ve provided an ‘ease of setup’ score between 1-5! (1 being difficult and 5 being mega simple!)

Keepme's Sales Features: Everything you need to increase your membership sales

In the latest version of the platform, our entire Sales suite is non-dependent on API connectivity, but thanks to some clever new scripts, still has the ability to auto-sync your leads into the application and recognise and update when leads have become members. All thanks to some clever low-touch integration with your transactional welcome emails in the LMS system.

For setup, you are required to spend some time on a top-level list of every which way your club(s) receive new enquiries and leads. We then put the wheels in motion to ensure 100% of these lead sources are tracked so you can start training a time deprecation model on which leads are the strongest versus the weakest!

Ease of setup score: 4

Keepme Smart Content Production: The generative AI tool that transforms the output of your leisure marketing team

From an operator’s perspective, one of the best aspects of the new Creator module is that the training data required to start drastically improving your execution of engaging content for sales leads and members is simply your leisure organisation’s brand voice. In order to achieve this freakishly accurate reflection of your brand, we combine training data from web pages indexable from your website’s URL with the simple prompts and instructions you give your organisation’s Large Language Model (LLM) in Creator.

For setup here, you are required to do nothing more than paste in your leisure organisation’s URL into the Brand Voice area of your settings and some sample text from a descriptive portion of your website (usually the About Us page/section works well here) and just like that, you’re up and running with Creator and ready to start prompting it! 

Ease of setup score: 5

WhatsApp Business Integration: Your ticket to better open rates through more direct communication with prospective members

Admittedly, we have seen the setup and creation of Business profiles with WhatsApp and Meta occasionally throw a few curveballs in the direction of Keepme customers. But mainly in countries where the use of WhatsApp among business entities is more tightly governed. Whether it's waiting for the approval and verification of business ownership, or simply configuring and accessing your new business profile. It’s definitely got a few steps to it, but the juice is absolutely worth the squeeze. Whether it’s the higher engagement rates, ability to send richer content, deliverability speed and reliability, Keepme has had the smartest WhatsApp integration in fitness since 2019. 

For comprehensive step-by-step setup guidance, our brilliant team have published this WhatsApp Business Best Practice Guide which covers everything from setup, to templates and more!

Ease of setup score: 3

Smart Automations: A personalised way of meeting prospective members exactly where they are with the right message at the right time, every time!

Our Automations tools are universally available across our sales and membership modules. So if you’re looking to turn your top of funnel sales communications into a fine tuned machine that consistently delivers results like these from BH Live, you can get started right from your first login to Keepme. You even have access to example journeys in our Automations Library. Within a matter of clicks, you can be systematically driving more sales and freeing up team members from the dread of manually copying and pasting the same follow ups to potential members.

What’s more, there is absolutely no setup required from your end for this one. Our dedicated Customer Success team ensure all your branded HTML assets for emails are in the platform ready for when you first get going and will even help you create your first automations during the build process. 

Ease of setup score: 5

N.B While we've scored this at the super easy end of the scale, it's worth mentioned too that every Keepme customer gets access to Keepme Academy, so learning to set-up and manage automations doesn't require a prompt engineering degree or 20 years in the marketing field!

Scheduler: A branded booking-meets-automation solution for optimising your Tours and Trials performance

In January 2024 we launched our latest module in Keepme Scheduler is dedicated to helping you improve your ability to capture the commitment of sales leads for initiatives you can ideate and set-up in seconds.

This could be an open weekend event for free day-pass participants or a tour booking landing page that runs all year round to turn tentative interest into firm booked, face to face conversations with your member-facing team. Because we all know, nothing gives a new member the confirmation they need to join than an excellent tour of your facilities.

To set this up, you are just a matter of clicks away from an on-brand, effective Scheduler landing page complete with an integrated booking widget that talks to your team’s calendars. With only a simple authentication needed from your side to get up and running in seconds!

Ease of setup score: 5

Keepme Membership including NPS surveys: The sector’s leading AI-meets-automation tool for consistently improving member retention and engagement 

Thanks to wizards behind the scenes at Keepme, our Membership features (including smart NPS surveys) is now the only part of Keepme dependent on an API connection via approximately forty basic data fields that any enterprise quality LMS/MMS system should not struggle to make available to you as their customer.

For some time, it’s been a widely held belief that every centralised database storing your member data should always have an API as standard. In the vast majority of cases, this is really easy to access but sometimes, certain systems won’t make this freely available due to having older technical architecture. 

Once you have access to an API for your member data, it’s smooth sailing from this point onwards. As our dedicated data science and development team do all the heavy lifting to cleanse and make your member data AI model ready.

If you have any questions at all about whether you have an API or access to one, it’s always a good idea to check with your LMS account manager and share our data requirements with them.

Ease of setup score: 4

Keepme + Gladstone

We are officially working with Gladstone to make our smart technology widely available in the UK leisure sector.

If you're one of over 500 Health and Leisure Operators already using Gladstone, connect with Keepme to unlock the power in your data and automate your marketing and sales strategies.

So there you have it, a complete walkthrough of Keepme’s main features and hopefully a good grasp of just how simple it is to set up Keepme and its broad range of functionality in your leisure organisation. If you'd like a quick chat with us to determine what features are most important to you, do not hesitate to book in for a no-obligations call with our team in sales!