Mobile Media

Charlie Hunter-Schyff, mediaweek.co.uk, 06 October 2009, 07:30am

Mobile does the trick for Fitness First

Challenge - Fitness First is the largest privately owned health club group in the world, with more than 164 clubs in the UK alone. The economic climate has created challenging times for gyms, and Fitness First wanted to run a highly targeted campaign that would boost customer acquisition numbers. Fitness First asked O2 Media to deliver a mobile marketing campaign to promote its one-off deal offering five free days' use of a Fitness First gym and a personal training session.

Text offer: special fitness deal

Client
Fitness First
Agency
Planned in-house by O2 Media
Planner
Charlie Hunter-Schyff

Strategy
Relevance is crucial to the success of any mobile campaign. In particular, we needed to use the customer data held by O2 for consumers' benefit, connecting them to their interests. We were able to target opted-in O2 customers by location - such as those living near a gym - as well as those we knew were interested in health, wellbeing and sport.

Activity
We started by identifying the opted-in O2 customers for whom the offer would be most relevant and then narrowed the list further according to various categories, including interests, age and location. We only targeted customers living within three miles of a Fitness First gym. Target customers received a text message asking them to respond with their postcode, and those that replied received a personalised text message giving the address and phone number of their local gym and a five-day voucher to use in that branch. In addition, O2 gave Fitness First a daily e-mail with leads of customers' postcodes and mobile numbers so they could call customers and book an appointment.

Results
Fitness First described the marketing campaign as "one of its most successful acquisition tools to date". The campaign generated a positive response rate of 8.6%, resulting in more than 700 new members for Fitness First. The high
response rate means that mobile will continue to form a key element of the client's future customer acquisition campaigns.

Charlie Hunter-Schyff, Head of planning, O2 Media