Long-Distance Runs With Customers

Solution

Increased Customer Addressing Through Automation

The fitness sector is highly competitive. Customer addressing which has been well planned sets Fitness First apart from the many discount providers on the market. For Dr. Sönke Iwersen, head of business development & business intelligence at Fitness First, customer loyalty is one of the company's declared unique selling points. Each of the internal projects which he launches with his team has continuous optimization of customer relations as its objective.

Although Fitness First maintains direct contact with its customers at all of its locations, Iwersen wanted to further expand the possibilities of a personalized approach – with greater sentiment and better information about offers. In addition to e-mail marketing, SMS and direct mail, Fitness First also intends to deploy its own app for addressing people in future. Orchestration and automation of customer addressing was an important component in strategic expansion of customer management and finer definition of target groups. Because manual options no longer met requirements, Iwersen decided to reinforce his area professionally in different directions, with b.telligent supporting evaluation already during the first step.

First the Data Warehouse, Then the KMS

Jointly with b.telligent, Fitness First consolidated different data sources at the beginning of the project and set up a data warehouse (DWH). All data systems were structured, existent processes revised, and a business intelligence department established at the company. The second step involved automation and standardization of marketing activities using a campaign management system. b.telligent's approach during the project included a workshop at the beginning to improve familiarity with the fitness giant's data and campaign landscape.

In an analysis of actual and target parameters, a suitable customer contact strategy was also defined together with Fitness First. Definition of relevant fields in the data mart was particularly important during implementation of the campaign solution. Determined here were the information and variables required for selection. Another essential step was integration of Optivo's e-mail solution.

More Campaigns Through High Intelligence

As a b.telligent partner, the owner-managed company Apteco specializes in analyzing marketing data and automating campaigns. The Apteco software FastStats also served as a reliable tool in this project to gain additional knowledge from the Fitness-First data. The interface to the Optivo email marketing software, one of Apteco's more than 27 existing standard interfaces, had to be extended so that the recipient lists could reach Optivo via Fitness First's existing infrastructure.

Laurentius Malter, sub-project manager of the Fitness-First project and head of the Competence Center for Customer Intelligence at b.telligent, explains: “The FastStats PeopleStage campaign solution from Apteco automates all campaign-related processes, creates the campaign history and provides the logics for the campaign routes. The email mailings are processed by email service specialist Optivo. Thanks to the system's intelligence, you will be able to automate further campaign routes in the future that were previously manual, cumbersome or even impossible. ”

Better Support for Customers via Campaign Routes

By establishing a DWH, Fitness First now has access to more data which can be used more efficiently with BI solutions for processing and analysis. Previously manual activities such as campaign controlling and blacklist editing can now be quickly and easily implemented in the campaign solution. Fitness First uses FastStats to control other event-triggered campaigns such as ex-member mailing, a multi-stage campaign triggered according to the time elapsed between termination date and the present.

The channels comprising e-mail, SMS, direct mail and letter shop are connected via the e-mail provider Optivo. In this way, other contractual areas can also be specifically automated using information from the DWH, which also relieves the company's customer care service.

More Flexibility

Campaign routes furthermore make it possible to encourage customer loyalty at certain points during the first two to three months of membership via various mailings, and accompany customers in their individual life cycles. "For Fitness First, flexibility in connecting Optivo's existent e-mail solution, as well as its speed and user-friendliness were decisive factors for selection of the FastStats marketing solution," says Laurentius Malter.