Gympass Drives Revenue, Clicks, and New Users by Personalizing the Wellness Experience with Braze

Gympass’ global network of 50,000+ gyms, studios, trainers, and wellbeing apps gives businesses the solution they need to help their employees achieve work-life wellness and become the healthiest versions of themselves. Operating under a B2B2C business model, over 10,000 employers work with Gympass to offer their employees subsidized access to Gympass’ network to help them meet their needs at work, at home, or on the go.

At the core of the wellness brand’s success is a hyperfocus on the user experience and engagement that’s carried out on a data-informed, personalized basis. Gympass recognizes that every person’s wellness journey is unique, and with so many tools and experiences available to users through membership, each individual is empowered to pursue what feels right for them, right now.

Gympass is dedicated to making wellness a reality for its users by driving genuine behavior change, and as with many individualized services thriving in the digital age, it’s all powered by user data. Actions users take within the app offer insight into their relationship with wellness—whether they’re exercising or not, or what types of activities they’re looking for (e.g. meditation, yoga, cardio).

The primary problem Gympass was trying to solve through more effective engagement was simple: Help users understand how Gympass could enable them to improve their personal wellbeing by incentivizing them to create and achieve their wellness goals through customized approaches.

Prior to adopting Braze, Gympass’ marketers found themselves at an operational impasse, handcuffed by a customer engagement platform that didn’t have the capacity to run their thousands of campaigns simultaneously. This capability gap was limiting their ability to launch new campaigns, to experiment, and, ultimately, to grow.

They needed a marketing stack that supported sophisticated customization with relatively low effort, along with easy-to-use tools driven by automation. That way, the Marketing team’s Growth Specialists could focus on experimentation, conversion rate optimization, and strategy, rather than manually executing and managing a large number of ongoing campaigns. The core need they wanted to meet? Operational efficiency and the ability to carry out agile work.

With Braze, Gympass found a low-lift, scalable option for global and ongoing/triggered campaigns, enabling teams across the company to operate more efficiently, and ultimately, drive stronger results across all areas of the business. They utilize A/B testing and decision splits within the Braze platform to scrutinize their hypotheses and improve conversion rates. In addition, they used segments with visual filters to help generate actionable insights about user cohorts and campaign performance.

Paving the Path to Wellness through Personalization

Working toward wellness can be daunting, overwhelming, and exhausting. It takes determination and a willingness to push through discomfort. How could Gympass make the process of building wellness habits a smoother experience for their users?

They hypothesized that if they could personalize the user experience with marketing communications triggered through the user journey, they could become more effective at driving higher conversion and engagement rates.

Unlike traditional gym memberships and subscription models that profit from breakage, user engagement is a key driver of success at Gympass. To achieve that success, usage is critical—simply “subscribing” to wellness doesn’t drive results for clients any more than a long-forgotten gym membership that happens to be enrolled in automatic billing.

Through evidenced-based marketing campaigns, Gympass organizes and systematizes communication touch-points to push users through the decision-making process, minimizing friction as each individual eases into their wellness groove. Based on in-app surveys and user behavior data derived from the product, they identify users’ habits, which triggers personalized emails, push notifications, and in-app messages with customized recommendations.

Using Canvas Flow, our journey orchestration tool, the Gympass team creates customer journeys with multiple campaign stages. Each user could be enrolled in the flow for a time period ranging from one to 120 days, depending on how they interacted with communications and within the product itself. These campaigns were triggered by actions taken in the product, such as when the user created an account, searched for a specific activity (think yoga, HIIT, meditation), or explored Gympass’ partners.

Through this flow, Gympass leveraged their series of survey questions through in-app messaging to identify users' interests and characteristics and ultimately build robust, individualized profiles. They customized campaigns based on users’ survey answers, predicting what plans and partners they would be interested in based on the information captured.

When asked how Braze strengthens the relationship between Gympass and their clients, they said clients love to see the personalization they offer. Businesses that opt into Gympass ultimately want to offer the most value they can to their employees through a world-class wellness experience. The personalized journey has proven not only to be a tool for conversion and engagement, but it’s also something that’s top of mind for their sales and client success teams, making them better equipped to communicate Gympass’ value to prospects and clients.

Gympass Results: Hyper-Personalization Drives Revenue, Clicks, and New Users

By delivering personalized engagement experiences that catered to the individual, Gympass drove 25% net-new revenue within its new subscriber revenue stream and achieved up to 70% click rates, all while increasing sign-up volume by 3X.

Key Takeaways

• Providing a personalized user experience begins with understanding who you’re serving and what they need from you. Leverage user behavior data in order to cater to the individual.
• In-app surveys are a simple way to engage and learn about your users, motivating them to provide zero-party data that will help you better serve them.
• Marketing automation frees up the idea people so they can focus on pushing the brand forward instead of executing sluggish manual tasks.

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