Founded by personal trainer Joe Wicks ten years ago, The Body Coach aims to get people moving and help them fall in love with fitness. Joe Wicks has one of the largest YouTube fitness channels in Europe, an award-winning podcast, a social media following of over nine million people, sold millions of cookbooks, and helped 100 million people of all ages, by offering free, live daily workouts during and following the pandemic.

While connecting with people and transforming their lives through these different avenues, The Body Coach underwent a digital transformation of its own. Once a personalized food and fitness PDF, it’s now one of the fastest growing mobile fitness apps and was selected as Apple’s Editor’s choice and Google’s 2022 Best App of the Year. Looking ahead, the team is increasingly focused on combining marketing technologies, like Iterable, with their decade of learnings to enhance mobile app experiences and strengthen customer connections to fully support their health and fitness journeys.

Differentiation in a Crowded Market Requires Unique, Timely Communications

As one of several mobile-based, subscription fitness apps available today, The Body Coach recognized it must move fast and use clever, personalized communications to attract and retain customers. “We need to engage effectively and then get users to do something—whether it’s smashing a workout, cooking a balanced meal, drinking more water, better planning for the week ahead, or all of the above,” said Alicia Gillard, Product Marketing Manager at The Body Coach. 

Previously, they relied on two customer communication platforms: one for email and one for push notifications. These different platforms, used by different stakeholder groups, including the product, product marketing, and brand marketing teams, created a variety of challenges that prevented The Body Coach from creating and sending timely, targeted, cross-channel messages tied to each customer’s fitness and health goals, choices and behaviors, how and when they like to be reached. These challenges also made it increasingly difficult to foster strong, lasting connections with new as well as existing members. The challenges included:

• A siloed customer view: With two communication solutions, if product marketing wanted to know how customers engaged with a particular push notification or campaign, they couldn’t see that in the same place they saw email reporting, for example. “It was simple stuff that slowed us down and created uncertainty around how engaged our audience were in our communications,” explained Saagar Bains, Head of Product at The Body Coach.
  
• Reliance on engineering to create and update communications: If marketing created a new push notification, they could send a one-off campaign, but automating distribution or creating an event-based push required engineering support. Depending on the engineering team’s workload, this could take several weeks or more. That lag prevented the marketing and product teams from quickly reacting, creating, and automating their campaign messages—especially any event-based communications.
• Inability to operate at the speed of business, customers, and social media: Born on social media, The Body Coach could easily gauge customer interactions and sentiment, and quickly react using the best channel and message for the situation. To replicate that same social strategy with their mobile app wasn’t feasible—the different platforms made it impossible to see that 360-degree customer view and delayed the production process for marketing communications, with their dependency on engineering.

They needed one, consolidated communications solution that uses customer data to personalize engagement and supports timely, cross-channel messaging through an intuitive interface with easy-to-use features that foster stronger customer connections. Embracing Iterable, the Body Coach is now delivering individualized, automated, cr0ss-channel customer communications that attract new members, keep them in the renewal cycle to reduce acquisition costs, and help all members meet or exceed their near- and long-term health and fitness goals.

Iterable’s Cross-Channel Capabilities Helps New Customers HIIT the Ground Running

Easy Start, an activation feature launched in September 2022, helps new Body Coach subscribers—and especially fitness beginners—start their first workout. Having observed a common, but unfavorable behavior with beginners, the product team wanted to address it. “We saw them sign up, give us their details, go through the paywall, pay for the first month, but not complete a workout in the product,” said Saagar Bains during a recent Iterable webinar. This lack of engagement led to decreased activation and ultimately less success with the product. Additionally it made it more challenging for The Body Coach to grow its membership base.

Their plan was to soften the onboarding ramp with Easy Start and make it less intimidating for someone going from no-to-low activity to several weekly hiit workouts. “Our brand resonates with people new to fitness, new to their health journey, or trying to get back on the bandwagon, so it was important for us to target them using Easy Start,” stated Bains. A cross-discipline team including product, design and product marketing implemented the Easy Start in-app feature and used Iterable Studio to develop the complementary communication series—in-app, push notifications, and email messages—with a goal to reduce the % of beginners who are inactive during their first 30 days using the app.

All communications in this Easy Start journey begin when someone new signs up. Then, subsequent communications are conditional upon their behavior or certain events, and automatically sent using a cross-channel approach to maximize exposure of the Easy Start messages. For example, if someone joins Easy Start, they immediately receive a motivational message in an email and push notification that prompts their physical movement. If they join the program, but don’t complete a workout soon after, an email and push message will encourage them to take that first step and congratulate them when they do. It’s all based on where, when, and how beginners choose to engage with Easy Start, and the steps they take—or don’t take—after receiving the first message.  

After launching the Easy Start campaign and communication series in Q3 2022, Body Coach reduced the number of inactive beginners by 10% in one quarter. “This is a big step forward for us because that number is a proxy to our 30-day retention as members go into renewal, and we can increase the chance of retaining them at renewal,” explained Saagar. Now, more beginners better understand the value of exercise, the positive impact it has on their overall health, and how Body Coach supports their journey, start to finish.

Personalized Voice Messages from Joe

Seeing how effectively Iterable supported the Easy Start feature, The Body Coach also used Iterable in an in-app feature called Voice Notes from Joe. It taps into the brand’s success on social media, bringing more of Joe’s personality into the app through inspirational messages to prompt moments of surprise and delight for users.

The Body Coach records personal voice messages from Joe and can launch an Iterable campaign for each recording in less than an hour using an in-app template. The audio file is hosted on their Content Management System (CMS), added to the in-app template, and is sent via a push notification to create member excitement and suspense. “It feels like you just received a DM from Joe, it’s quick and easy to use, there’s no engineering input needed, and gives us the flexibility to be proactive and reactive,” said Gillard.

As a newly-implemented feature, metrics and learnings are still in-progress. However, a recent Voice Note with a motivational Monday message created positive engagement—60% of users who interacted with the message completed a workout within three days. The Body Coach is excited to use Voice Notes and Iterable to influence an upward trend of members feeling inspired, excited, and choosing to get fit and healthy. Plus, by leveraging other Iterable features to enhance the success of this campaign and others—specifically Iterable’s experiment builder and Send Time Optimization—The Body Coach is confident they’ll produce more high-touch, gratifying experiences for members in the future.

Driving Brand Outcomes With Iterable

Considering how other fitness brands share similar goals—they want to move fast, deliver clever, engaging customer experiences, and drive impact without certain key dependencies—The Body Coach has the following recommendations.

• Plan marketing and communications events and iterate: It’s helpful during the implementation phase to spend time as a collective team mapping out the user lifecycle, brainstorm at what moments communications should be triggered, and concurrently implement analytics. This produces a clear plan and by completing testing with Iterable’s experiment builder, a brand can feel confident about delivering the right messages, at the right time, through optimal channels. For The Body Coach, early and thoughtful brainstorming of the user lifecycle, and which moments will initiate customer communication, meant faster, smoother execution post-implementation. Now, as they build communications or a journey in Iterable, almost all events are there, ready to go.
• Leverage multi-channel messages: It’s key to take advantage of different channels, bearing in mind a user’s journey to create stronger connections. The mix of Iterable’s sophisticated segmentation, advanced journey capabilities, integrated data, and message template library means brands can easily adapt to any communication variables, customer needs and preferences, and external, timely events that arise. 
• Use and build brand authenticity: Make sure how you communicate with customers, inside and outside of your product, uses consistent tone, copy, and imagery. As Saagar Bains shared, “This was key, and led us to build the Voice Notes feature.” Seeing the effective engagement between Joe and customers on social media, The Body Coach wanted to bring the same engagement into the platform with every push, email, voice note, and in-app message delivered.
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