Equinox’s Customer Engagement Strategy Moves Online
With a set of unique business challenges in 2020, Equinox wanted a customer engagement solution that would align with their ongoing and long-term needs. For instance, some of their long-term membership applications included automated reminders delivered via push notification. However, they had specific customer milestones they wanted to celebrate in their app and needed a creative yet scalable way of triggering comms to boost awareness of on-demand content.
While the Equinox app was a reliable point of engagement for booking or checking into a club, members were not accustomed to using it for browsing on-demand content. This finding meant they’d need to rely on the homepage to deliver relevant content to alert members to the vast options available. While this sounds simple in theory, when you have hundreds of online classes, articles, and club items to promote, democratizing the homepage is a delicate tightrope act to balance out.
Driving Awareness Using Braze Content Cards
Equinox takes a customer-first approach to customer engagement that’s intensely iterative. With their goal of empowering members to realize their maximum potential, they knew that to match their clubs' premium feel, they needed to deliver an equally top-shelf digital experience.
But how should teams go about putting premium customer engagement into practice? According to Equinox’s team, personalization is critical to get right. To serve customers with the most relevant and meaningful content predicated on what they engage with or what the brand thinks will resonate with them requires careful implementation.
Looking to increase awareness for on-demand content in members who joined Equinox for the in-club experience, the team wanted an eye-catching way to speak to users individually.
First, the team observed their members’ behavior to diagnose where the disconnect was. Users log into the app to complete quick actions, like booking a class or checking into a club location. This didn’t give them much runway to grab users’ attention the way an app designed around browsing activity might. It would be easy for particular messages in this context to get lost or come across as overly persistent and sales-y—the opposite of the premium experience they were looking to build.
They soon realized they needed a channel to cut through the noise and chose the Equinox homepage. To do that, they would need to use strategic personalization to democratize the content on the page—without cannibalizing other business goals around visibility from informing and converting members to paid services like personal training.