The Gym Group's digital-first approach leads to higher membership

The Gym Group has always put digital at the heart of its strategy to deliver customer experience, but this in itself presents challenges. After all, websites and other aspects of the digital infrastructure need to be updated to keep in line with competitors, but this can be disruptive.

Working with Rufus Leonard, the company managed to implement an extensive website upgrade without taking the site offline. To understand the full extent of this feat, it’s worth stating that this meant 115 sites, 350 staff and 500,000 customers were all transferred at exactly the same time.

The result is a website that reflects the expansion plans of The Gym Group in the future that will be able to adapt to new innovations as they occur. This dynamic approach has not gone unnoticed in the marketing industry and the project has even won awards.

It wasn’t just the website that saw an overhaul, with the on-site kiosks located within the gyms also upgraded. These are a vital part of the customer experience, as they help to deliver key services directly to clients.

All of this was complemented with a new membership management system and eCRM, but a key part of implementation is ensuring staff know how to use digital assets to their full potential. After two years of development work, the project team travelled across the country to ensure that all employees of The Gym Group were fully trained on the digital resources.

In order to assess the impact of this digital overhaul, the company reported a 35.5 per cent increase in membership in the six months that followed. This was coupled with a 24.3 per cent rise in profits compared to the previous year.

Building on this success, The Gym Group is now in the process of designing a native app that will allow users the same experience as its web platform.