Matt Burton, the director of Digital Strategy and Innovation at Equinox, knows just how important it is to create extraordinary experiences for your customers. Not just because it makes for happy customers and higher retention rates, but it can actually close more deals.
That’s why he puts in-person events at the forefront of his marketing model, which is built on 3 major tenets: community, engagement, and scale.
Using these 3 principles, a killer events program, and a ton of customer data, Matt was able to get better customer engagement, less churn, and, ultimately, everyone’s goal — more customers.
Read on for their strategy.
Equinox’s strategy for keeping customers engaged is by taking them out of the gym.
When Matt dug into customer data, he discovered that their most devoted members would go to the gym an hour a day, 5-6 days a week. But when they went to the gym, they wouldn’t interact with anyone else (they’d come in, do their class, and leave).
That left a lot of open opportunities for when their customers weren’t directly interacting with the brand.
Events filled that open space, by allowing members to interact with each other and the Equinox brand in different environments and in different ways — all organically. Every event also allowed for a plus one, which gave non-members the chance to also participate, and eventually learn more about Equinox.
Experiences can build community, but they can also make people more vested in your brand. And everyone knows -- retaining customers is a lot easier when they are bought into your brand, especially when they change roles from customer to advocate.
To increase and maintain customer engagement, Equinox looked at how their customers connected with every part of the business. For events, they looked at who attended, what they were interested in, how many times they came back, etc.
Equinox leveraged this knowledge to their advantage, combining it with other behavioral data to create highly personalized messaging and offers. But it didn’t stop there. They would look at how their efforts impacted retention rates even after multiple iterations, to figure out exactly what was working.
Sure, you want to build community and increase customer engagement — but how do you do that effectively for a brand that has 90+ clubs in 13 different markets and is growing by the minute?
Equinox needed to have a system in place that could enable this type of scaling — and that’s where data and technology come into play.
For their marketing tech stack, they wanted to make sure they built a system where all their technologies were talking to each other (integrations are key) and that they could make smart decisions based on the data.
Before putting the most effective systems in place, they had to think ahead by asking 3 critical questions:
1. What are the potential issues/challenges?
2. Which teams need to be involved?
3. How do get the field managers or the teams at the clubs involved?
These questions are just the beginning. See how Equinox built and scaled their marketing architecture in this exclusive video:
We all know event data is important. But does it even matter if you don't know what to do with it? Learn how to effectively use and distribute your event data.
