How Wellfit Turbo Charged Member Engagement with Keepme

About Wellfit

Wellfit is the operator of four health clubs in Dubai: two large family leisure clubs and two small community clubs, with a total of 9,000+ members. The first club opened in late 2021 and Keepme has been in place since April 2022.

Its two family clubs are “malls of active living for everyone”, says Gareth Bacon, Head of Product, Member Experience and Digital, as he describes an offering that spans gym floor fitness and signature ‘club in club’ group exercise studios, martial arts and boxing, gymnastics, football, padel, parkour, swimming, track running and more. A popular passport membership allows members to use the facilities at either club.

As a result, there are many distinct member journeys, yet extracting and crunching the data to communicate in a relevant way with each member was previously a “laborious and time-consuming process”, says Bacon. 

“We’d download data dumps from our various CRM systems, categorizing members based on things like visit frequency, PT and group exercise participation, then farm that out to gym marketing software systems to design member interactions. Finally, it would reach our member experience teams, who would action it all. Understandably they spent a lot of time wondering when and how the data would come to them.

The overarching goal?

“To drive an extra 1–3 percent member retention.”

The requirement: A platform that made everything seamless

“Within the gym management software market, there are various solutions that – like Keepme – offer gym automations,” says Bacon. “But what Keepme uniquely offers is the ability to integrate with any fitness industry software platform that has an API.” 

And that matters, because Wellfit’s data is drawn from a large number of sources: member management software, of course, including visit data, bookings and so on, but also Spivi performance software in signature group exercise classes, and strength and cardio workout tracking on the gym floor. The result is a rich vein of data around the preferences and actions of all members – and it’s all drawn in to Keepme.  

There’s also more visibility around communications, says Bacon. “Compared to the systems we used previously, we now have far greater insight into how our customers are interacting with what we put in front of them.

“The Keepme team is also very open to new ideas and has developed an A/B testing module for us. When we set up an automated piece of communication, we’ll be able to deploy two different options. Keepme will then monitor success rates and switch off the one that isn’t working as well.

“We’ve also worked with Keepme to flip some of our gym automations, sending them to our member experience team rather than out to members. It’s new so we’re still setting these up, but for example, if a regular customer hasn’t been to the facility for 14 days, Keepme will now push a request to our team to call them. Another example would be a sudden drop in a member’s Keepme score – the score that tells us how likely that member is to renew at their next opportunity.”

Add gym automations, and keep it simple​

It isn’t always about picking up the phone, though. “We’re 60 percent digital, 40 percent human, with gym automations our primary use of Keepme at the moment,” says Bacon. 

“It’s very easy to set them up using Keepme’s drop-down menus and we currently have around 60 member-facing automations in place: everything from our onboarding journey to a sudden Keepme score drop, to referral requests from high-frequency members and high NPS scorers. We also build specific gym automations based on members’ interests: strength training, for example, and specific types and styles of class. And we’re working on journeys to nudge members towards 10 visits a month, which we know is the precursor to high lifetime value.

“Then there’s our no-show monthly payment automation. We know from our own analysis that monthly members who don’t attend in the first four days of their membership are 80 percent less likely to make their first payment, so we email no-shows with a café voucher and an invitation to come in for a PT consultation. That’s proving to be particularly successful automation, with a 65 percent open rate and 17 percent click-through. Milestone automations are good too: members love things like birthdays and class counts.

“In short, Keepme is allowing us to deliver a seamless and very specific, hyper-personalized member experience, and to track how well the communications are performing.”

“It’s also encouraging our teams to think outside the box in terms of how we speak to members, although we’ve learned that it’s best to keep gym automations simple. Our best results have come from very targeted journeys: offering a specific solution for a specific problem with no more than one or two triggers and touch points. The bigger the automation trail, the less impactful it becomes: open and click-through rates drop.”

Wellfit is not currently using Keepme for gym lead generation, but alongside its many gym automations, each club uses Keepme to create monthly campaigns for targeted subsets of medium- and high-risk members. These members are identified by their Keepme Scores, with scores tracked pre- and post-campaign to measure campaign success.

Keepme is also used to measure retention, with the average Keepme Score up from 61 to 71 percent since Keepme was implemented.

This figure is steadily rising and, says Bacon, was 91 percent accurate in December’s renewals: 91 percent of members identified as low-risk did indeed renew.

No-show automated email 'proving to be particularly successful'

Big results in a small timeframe

Which brings us to the results, with Bacon spotlighting four KPIs in particular.

The first is member dormancy, which pre-Keepme was 28-30 percent. Within 60 days of putting gym automations in place to address this issue, dormancy had dropped by 7 percent; since June 2022, it has consistently been around 21 percent.

“Could other factors be at play here? Possibly, although with few outbound calls happening at that time, it would be a huge coincidence for this dormancy improvement not to be down to Keepme’s automations.

“Our award-winning member experience team – Member Experience of the Year in the REPs UAE 2023 awards – is certainly fully behind the drive and use of Keepme. Team members are able to carry out their roles more efficiently with Keepme implemented into the business.”

The next is uptake of Wellfit’s PT taster package. In October 2022, a new journey was implemented to cover new joiners’ first 14 days, with a mix of digital and human touch points – a journey that had previously been human-only, with around 20 percent uptake.

Within a month of adding gym automations to the mix, the uptake had risen to 35 percent.

“We know that’s down to Keepme, because the email calls-to-action trigger tickets for our team to handle,” says Bacon.

Third is the aforementioned collections improvement, ensuring monthly members make their payments.

“It’s a small win, with only around 200 monthly members affected, but with automations in place we’re now at almost 100 percent first time collections. That saves a lot of chasing up by our team.”

The final measure is upgrades, as Bacon explains:

He concludes: