LA Fitness: strategic thinking and time-sensitive sending

It's nearing that time of year again when people start thinking about New Year's resolutions, and following the seasonal over-indulgence, the one most people consider is joining a gym, whether it's to shed those Christmas pounds or just get fitter.

For gyms and health clubs such as LA Fitness, one of the best-known personal fitness brands in the UK, this is a great opportunity to benefit from the nation's sudden burst of motivation.

However, as time goes on and enthusiasm starts to wane, the battle is on to get members to keep up their attendance and not let their membership lapse.

In the past, LA Fitness has used a combination of phone calls and direct mail to reach members as renewal dates have approached.

Making it quick and easy

What they needed was to make the renewal process as easy and accessible as possible.

As one of only two fitness clubs in the UK to have taken their joining process online, LA Fitness are already ahead of the game when it comes to making the customer journey quick and simple.

Having seen the benefit of moving the registration process online, they realised that they might also be able to improve renewal rates through the website.

Driving traffic to new areas

However, unlike signing up for membership, which is largely self-motivated, the success of online renewals required an effective traffic-driver.

They created an email marketing campaign, targeting people whose memberships were close to expiring.

With all the necessary contact information to run campaigns personalised to every recipient on their database, LA Fitness created a friendly, offer-based email, with a clear and simple message linking to the renewals page of their site.

Catching people at the right time

Given the importance of membership renewals to the business, they wanted to make sure as many people would open and read the email as possible. However, as with contacting customers by telephone, that means catching the customer at the right time.

To help them achieve this, LA Fitness added a new piece of functionality – Intelligent Time Sending – to their PureResponse email marketing software.

Intelligent Time Sending analyses all the information on when each recipient had opened or read previous newsletters, or signed up to the website, calculating the optimum time and day to deliver each message.

Seeing the benefits

Usually, their monthly email newsletters get an open rate of around 20%, and even though the nature of this campaign provided an added reason to open the mail, the resulting 33% open rate demonstrates a significant uplift.

As a result, Chris Morey, Direct Marketing Manager at LA Fitness, is talking to the company's digital marketing agency about using Intelligent Time Sending on all future email newsletters, to make sure they too arrive at the time each customer is likely to read and engage with them.

Click here to find out more about using Intelligent Time Sending for your campaigns.