LifeFit Group and b.telligent
20% increase in email open rate due to improved personalisation
Background
With over 85 gyms, +2000 employees and over 250,000 members the LifeFit Group is the leading platform for health and fitness in Germany. Fitness First with more than 60 clubs, is a leading brand within the LifeFit Group. They aimed to create a targeted, efficient, customer focussed dialogue with their members and to increase the relevance of their communications.
Fitness First aspired to integrate their loyalty program into their marketing campaigns and provide empathetic, truly personalised communications. Fitness First also wanted to change their marketing process from a manual one to automated customer touch points.
This was made even more challenging by the Coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown. The financial implications from cancellations and contracts that had to be paused, meant that there was no room for creativity and expensive campaigns - the emphasis changed to supporting operational activities.
First customer data, second campaign, third action
It is crucial to have the right infrastructure in place when implementing a new marketing automation system and there are many questions that need answering before this can be done. Fitness First asked b.telligent for their help in implementing this new system. There were three parts to the process 1. Customer data 2. Campaign (Apteco Marketing Suite) 3. Action
The data source was Fitness First’s CRM system which b.telligent used to consolidate the customer data into a data mart to build a 360-degree view of their customers. This became the main input for the Apteco software. The data was fed into Designer to create a FastStats system to generate insights and to gain knowledge from the customer data. These insights were then actioned in Apteco's PeopleStage campaign automation software in the form of a 9-step milestone campaign to members, which was triggered by members training activity and rewarding their behaviours, and a 3-step new member mailing. Over 500,000 emails per month were sent to members. Over these campaigns the open rate increased to 45% (20% over the benchmark) and Fitness First saw an uplift in response rates, in member loyalty and retention rates.
With Apteco we found a solution to our mission. The Apteco marketing software helped us to achieve our goal of having a targeted dialogue with our customers, which is based on efficient communications, automation and personalisation.
Christian Noack , Senior Manager CRM, LifeFit Group
Christian Noack , Senior Manager CRM, LifeFit Group
The impact on the business
During the Covid-19 lockdown Fitness First had to shut down all venues and was hit hard by financial consequences like cancellations or pausing of contracts. This didn't leave much room for creative Marketing campaigns! It was necessary to bring creativity & efficiency established by the marketing team into the processes of other areas of the business - the Apteco Marketing Suite made a first-class contribution to this. Due to the campaign enablement, the infrastructure, customer data, and communication interfaces already in place, these could now be used during the pandemic to optimise operational processes, reduce costs and generate revenues. After Covid-19, there will be room again for marketing campaigns using the additional possibilities in channels and intelligence newly learned within the implementation of the service processes.
Automation of over 30,000 personalised reminder letters
On average 2,375 hours or 297 working days (8h/day) were saved
Payments were received notably much faster than ever before
The open rate increased by 20% and was attributed to personalisation
Due to digitalisation, there were substantial cost savings
The customer approach is now significantly more targeted and efficient
Data is our main competency, and the Apteco Marketing Suite is a data driven tool, this makes Apteco one of our most important partners.
Laurentius Malter , Customer engagement and martech, b.telligent
Laurentius Malter , Customer engagement and martech, b.telligent