How The Gym Group’s website transformation boosted membership

Digital has been central to the The Gym Group’s strategy since in entered the market a decade ago, looking to shake up the sector by providing contract-free fitness facilities that are open 24/7 at affordable prices with a seamless customer journey to match.

After floating onto the London Stock Exchange in 2015 and a period of growth, The Gym Group began working with Rufus Leonard to design, build and implement a website upgrade that would not only scale to match its long-term expansion plans but also provide a foundation for future enhancements – an innovation that helped the company secure the Digital Transformation award at the Marketing Week Masters last year.

Given the company’s digital-first approach the upgrade had to happen without causing the site to go offline. To keep operations running, the Gym Group had to ensure more than 115 sites, 350 staff and 500,000 customers switched onto the new system at the same exact time, as well as onboarding 300 frontline operational team members, who were spread across the country.

The roll-out started with a series of infrastructure changes, upgrading the network of kiosks that are used to deliver in-gym digital services, as well as aligning third party software products and versions.

The project team then hit the road to deliver onsite training events across the country.

The new membership management system, website and full eCRM integration launched in July 2017, after two years of development work.

In the six months following launch, the Gym Group increased membership by 35.5% to 607,000, and its revenue grew 24.3% for the year versus 2016. Meanwhile, its gym estate grew by 44% year on year to 128 sites and its estimated share for the low-cost gym market increased to 22.4%, from 17.7% in 2016.

The new platform, particularly the bespoke software layer, means the Gym Group is now designing a native app which is designed to offer the same experience as the web platform.