PureGym Boosts Conversions 206% with Braze-Powered Cross-Channel Campaigns

It happens every New Year’s: People sign up for gym memberships with the best of intentions, but then taper off on working out as time goes by. Like many fitness businesses, PureGym, which has almost 300 gyms in the United Kingdom, needed to address high rates of membership churn—that is, users who bought memberships but cancelled them. To encourage former members to rejoin, PureGym worked with Braze Alloys solutions partner ConsultMyApp to leverage the Braze Canvas customer journey management feature to launch, test, and refine a cross-channel campaign that was segmented and personalized to speak more effectively to different audience groups.

Reaching Out to Former Members to Drive Conversions

Reaching a wide range of former PureGym members—from people who’d placed a gym membership in an online shopping basket but didn’t complete the purchase, to people who paid visits to gyms but let their memberships lapse—demanded a comprehensive cross-channel campaign. Since PureGym’s in-house engineering resources were limited, PureGym worked with ConsultMyApp to run Braze-powered email and SMS campaigns from start to finish—developing creative content, optimizing campaigns, and using data to inform future offers to former members.

Using Braze Canvas to build the campaign, PureGym and ConsultMyApp relied on both email and SMS to get around the problem posed by out-of-date phone numbers and email addresses for former members. By leveraging these two channels in tandem, they increased their chances of being able to reach more of these target users than if they had used SMS or email alone. Instead of sending emails to ex-members every day, which reduced deliverability rates and dampened engagement, ConsultMyApp suggested lowering frequency, adding personalization, and generating excitement with countdown timer GIFs. In addition, PureGym added retargeting emails for people who’d opened previous emails but hadn’t converted.

PureGym also began leveraging Braze native SMS campaigns, a channel it had avoided with its previous CRM solution because of high cost. Running a cross-channel campaign in Braze Canvas allowed PureGym to manage sending and retargeting across both messaging channels seamlessly and within a single platform.

PureGym was also able to reduce the time and cost needed to run a multivariate, cross-channel campaign. The company used the Braze platform’s Connected Content feature to easily manage and deliver discounts, instead of assigning that task to its internal development team and found that combining email and SMS in a single solution also saved the time it used to take in splitting sends across separate platforms and analysing results separately.

Final Thoughts

In many industries, re-engaging with former customers is an effective way to improve conversions and boost revenue, since people who already know your brand are especially likely to be receptive to campaigns. The key is optimizing and retargeting those messages based on the unique needs and behaviors of former customers—like those who abandoned shopping carts versus those who opened offer emails but didn’t convert. Cross-channel campaigns like the one launched by PureGym and ConsultMyApp reach former gym members at the right time, with the right messages, using Braze Canvas, emails, and SMS.

To learn more about creating a cross-channel campaign with Braze Canvas that can drive stronger engagement, read the article “5 Ingredients For A Successful Braze Canvas Recipe.”

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