How TrainingPeaks Strengthened Upsells and Retention with Iterable

In the late ‘90s, elite triathlon and cycling coach Joe Friel started to recognize the limitations of traditional coach-to-athlete communication—handwritten training logs, email and fax machines weren’t efficient enough to keep up with the needs of elite athletes and coaches. 

In partnering with his son Dirk, and family friend Gear Fisher, Joe and team built TrainingPeaks, the world’s first online training log that enables coaches to connect with their athletes over the web. 

Today, TrainingPeaks creates endurance training apps and solutions that help athletes and coaches prepare the right way to reach their goals.

As TrainingPeaks grew, so did the diversity of its audience and the channels they used to engage each member. For example, coaches typically engage with TrainingPeaks on desktop, while roughly 90% of athletes prefer to engage on the mobile app. 

Michelle Hiland, CRM Marketing Manager, knew that interacting with their audience in the right channel with the right content at the right time was key to increasing upsells and maximizing retention, but she was limited by the functionality of their legacy tech stack. 

“We couldn’t use our data the way we wanted to, and the API was a lot harder for our engineers to use. We were basically limited to profile data only,” said Hiland.

In addition, TrainingPeaks was leveraging two separate tools to manage its email and in-app experience. The disconnect between tools created a disjointed customer experience and crippled TrainingPeaks’ retention and upsell efforts. 

In order to continue growing their international network of coaches and athletes, and optimize their mobile app experience, TrainingPeaks knew it was time to reassess their tech stack.

After evaluating a handful of automation platforms, TrainingPeaks chose to unify their inbox and in-app experiences with Iterable’s growth marketing platform. 

“Choosing a platform our engineers approved of was a big sticking point for us,” said Hiland. “The fact that everything is in JSON makes Iterable really easy for them to work with.” 

The ability to easily get data into (and out of) Iterable enabled TrainingPeaks to build journeys that support their multi-channel customer experience, and deliver personalized content based on the events and training programs athletes are interested in. Across their lifecycle campaigns, TrainingPeaks is now able to trigger channel-specific messages based on web, desktop and mobile app engagement. 

In planning for 2020, TrainingPeaks recognized that many athletes were adding events to their calendar, but not purchasing a training plan to help them prepare. Because they had access to all relevant customer behavior, TrainingPeaks was able to create a journey that triggers when someone adds an event, but does not purchase a training plan. Without Iterable’s flexible data integration, TrainingPeaks wouldn’t have been able to capitalize on this key upsell opportunity.

Unifying their inbox and in-app experiences with Iterable has enabled TrainingPeaks to engage with its users at critical moments in the customer journey. In-app click rates have increased to nearly 70% with an average conversion rate of 6%, and email clicks-to-open rate averages nearly 12%.

TrainingPeaks has also seen a drastic decrease in time spent building their weekly newsletters—what previously took 10 hours a week to create now takes less than 20 minutes, leaving the TrainingPeaks team more time to continually optimize and find incremental gains in their behavior-based automations. 

Having access to the data and the channels to deliver a cohesive customer experience has been critical for TrainingPeaks to effectively support their elite athletes and coaches. Bringing disparate data and channels into a single platform enables personalized touchpoints that consistently increase conversion rates, and drive the long-term retention TrainingPeaks depends on for growth.