by Fatema Mulla
A hugely popular national gym chain, Xercise4Less has shaken up the gym industry with highly affordable memberships and a focus on helping members smash their fitness goals. Their 4FiiT (Fun Inclusive Interval Training) personal training service has been a hit, due to the way each session is carefully crafted according to each members individuals needs and their regular 4FiiT Transformation Camps have been key to their success.
Xercise4Less uses the flexible Shopify eCommerce platform, a targeted social advertising strategy and ongoing influencer outreach to help grow their 4FiiT personal training service, make booking training sessions easier for gym members across the country.
We recently caught up with their Head of Customer Engagement, Joe Hall, to talk about their impressive success and growth, and how they became the popular gym chain they are today.
What is 4FiiT and how does it sit within Xercise4Less?
4FiiT is Xercise4Less' unique personal training concept. F__un I__nclusive I__nterval T__raining is delivered by our expert personal trainers and is designed to help our members achieve more than they ever thought possible. With many different types of personal training packages available on our member site we are able to meet our mission statement while giving each member more flexibility and a friction-less purchase experience.
Xercise4Less have worked to ensure their services are suitable for everyone by offering varying packages to meet the individual needs of all their different customers.
4FiiT training is becoming increasingly popular due to the expert guidance that members receive and the flexibility of the sessions with a range of different options - such as choosing from the number of sessions they take to the nature of the sessions, whether that’s a 1-2-1 training session or a couples training session - to suit each individual member.
Xercise4Less have used their social media advertising campaigns to target existing members, educating them on the benefits of 4FiiT and promoting the service through the use of an influencer marketing campaign to further promote the idea of their fun, inclusive, interval training service.
What are the key successes you've seen with 4FiiT?
The launch of our 8 Week Transformation Camps have changed many of our members lives.
Camp involves 3 fun inclusive interval sessions per week for 8 weeks, alongside weekly weigh ins, nutritional guidance and additional online personal trainer support via our app.
Through the use of our website, we have been able to make Transformation Camps available and accessible to all our members at the touch of a button.
Ensuring that their sessions and services are accessible to all their members is something Xercise4Less continuously strives to achieve. With an incredibly varied and diverse customer base from working mums to university students, it’s important that they cater to the needs of all their members.
The launch of their Transformation Camps has helped them do just that due to the number of different options it offers to members, including a wide range of times/days members can attend plus the option to pay upfront or split costs.
Redesigning and optimising their Shopify store has helped to improve user experience and subsequently conversions, and Shopify’s ease of use has also made it easier for their customers to make and manage purchases on an ongoing basis. This conversion optimisation strategy has been a significant key in increasing the gym chain’s 4FiiT sales and is always a recommendation we provide to clients - don’t just launch your site and leave it, always optimise.
What's been the biggest challenge so far?
Despite their prevalent success, Xercise4Less have had to overcome challenges over pricing and costs as personal training, whilst still affordable at Xercise4Less, can be more expensive than a gym membership. We asked Joe what the biggest challenge so far had been:
4FiiT was always going to be a challenge, as Xercise4Less have always been more well known for our very low cost offering with memberships from £9.99pm.
The price for 4FiiT personal training is significantly higher than our monthly gym subscription, so it was naturally going to remain a challenge to instigate a shift in our members and prospective members mindsets about why fitness is not just low cost but also valuable.
We are still incidentally offering our personal training services at a lesser cost than the rest of the industry so we are essentially replicating what we did initially when we disrupted the gym industry, but now experiencing the same success with disrupting the personal training industry.
Although the pricing of their products has been a challenge, Xercise4Less continue to emphasise the benefits of their service through the use of influencer marketing, focusing on sharing the successes of their brand ambassadors to try and encourage more members to get involved.
What are the ambitions and plans for the future?
Moving forward we expect to see a much more integrated approach to gym membership and 4FiiT personal training whereby new members will be able to book personal training as part of a monthly package, as a result we expect our referral based marketing to be a lot more prominent, thus driving greater levels of traffic to our 4FiiT website.
Joe is looking forward to see 4FiiT becoming ever more successful, aiming to achieve this by combining gym membership and personal training sessions. This integration is key to improving user experience as members will be able to book personal training sessions as part of a monthly package, making it easier for them to manage their training sessions.
The scalability of Shopify also means that as 4FiiT grows, they’ll have no problem adjusting their store to meet the demands of their customers.
How are you using marketing to grow and drive awareness of 4FiiT?
Right now 4FiiT is only available for current members of Xercise4Less so our marketing is on all the channels in which our members are engaged with. This includes but is not limited to social media, email marketing, our loyalty reward programme, in club marketing through collateral, and push notifications via our member exclusive app.
We’ve been working with Joe and his team on a targeted social advertising strategy, developing flexible Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns to help boost sales and increase brand awareness.
We also helped to redesign their website to better fit their brand and make managing purchases an easier and more simple process to help boost more sales. We’ve also worked with them on a behavioural remarketing campaign to continue pushing Transformation Camps in an effort to increase average customer value and total sales.
Furthermore, the launch of their new influencer outreach campaign, a 4FiiT Ambassadors programme, is also helping to increase sales. We’ve been working together with carefully selected Xercise4Less members to help communicate their successes with 4FiiT with the strategy of encouraging more members to sign up for this service.
Any top tips for other brands wanting to launch a new service offering?
Launching new service offerings can seem like a daunting prospect for many brands - here’s Joe’s advice and tips for successfully launching new services.
Understand the competition and the price elasticity of your current audience. There are three ways a business can shift when offering a new service - service/product development (different product/service to the same market), market development (same product/service but to a different market) or diversification (different product to a different market). It's important to understand the risks of all three types of activity when bringing out a new service.
Finally - how did you hear about Statement?
We were looking for some tweaks to be made via our Shopify website, Statement being a partner of Shopify, and based locally seemed a perfect fit. Since working with Statement we have been impressed with their marketing activity via social media, their conversion rate optimisation work and their efforts in engaging our brand ambassadors and influencers.
What’s next for Xercise4Less?
Our main objective right now is to continue pushing the Transformation Camps and 4FiiT personal training sessions, and also encouraging referrals to drive more traffic to our website - and with the help from the guys at Statement we hope to achieve this soon!
Working with the Xercise4Less team is a pleasure, and we’re excited to carry on working with them and see them continue to take the fitness industry by storm!
You can read our case study on our projects with the team here or visit their website to find out more about their services here.
If you’re interested in finding out how Statement can help your eCommerce store thrive, or you feel you are experiencing similar challenges in your own business and want to find out more about how we can help – simply get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to help.
