How ClassPass Uses Braze Audience Sync to Improve Paid Ad ROI and Save Time

ClassPass is a fitness and wellness subscription service that provides users with credits every month to book reservations with ClassPass partners (e.g. gyms, yoga studios, etc.). Since its inception in 2013, ClassPass has revolutionized the fitness and wellness industry by bringing together the world’s best classes and experiences into one app, allowing users to customize a health and wellness routine that fits best for their unique preferences and lifestyle.

Their mission is simple: Motivate people to live inspired lives every day by introducing and connecting them to soul-nurturing experiences. Whether users want to sweat it out with a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) class, unwind with a massage, or stream a yoga class from home, ClassPass makes it easy to prioritize health and wellness.

ClassPass hopes to inspire consumers to use their product because they believe it's a great way for them to achieve their fitness, wellness, and health goals. Through personalized messaging and recommendations, the company encourages users to explore the various activities and amazing partners within the ClassPass network, to keep booking their favorites, and to experience new ones they'll love.

Maximizing the Value of Customer Data Across the Lifecycle

ClassPass's marketing team has always prioritized strategic customer acquisition, reactivation, and retention and they use Braze to achieve their goals. Braze provides them the platform to build highly-targeted, personalized, cross-channel campaigns and user journey flows and to send the most relevant message to the right user at the most appropriate time via the most suitable channel or channels. To understand which campaigns and content drive the most impact, the team continually runs a variety of A/B and multivariate tests and then iterates and expands upon what works. Personalization has proven to be key in their success—the messages and recommendations that have been most impactful are the ones that are the most relevant to each user. As a result, ClassPass is able to grow their relationship with consumers and improve their product experience.

To support marketing initiatives, ClassPass's developers set up the robust architecture that feeds data into Braze, which powers audience segmentation and customized content population in emails, push notifications, SMS, and in-app messages managed by the Lifecycle team within Marketing. With Braze Audience Sync, the Acquisition team, which is also under Marketing, is now also able to leverage this data and the Braze platform's sophisticated tooling to optimize performance and automate processes for the paid social channels they oversee.

Before they began using Braze Audience Sync, the Acquisition team would have to create and import static lists into each social media platform every week for ad audience targeting, which was an imperfect process that involved tasks that were manual, tedious, and highly subject to human error. Not only has automation via Braze alleviated the team's workload and improved operational efficiency, it also improves the accuracy of paid social ad targeting, which is now fueled by the latest data that syncs in real time. The increase in conversion rate is evidence of that improvement.

Additionally, Braze Audience Sync projects have been a major cross-functional effort within ClassPass, uniting the Lifecycle and Acquisition sub-teams under Marketing. Working in partnership, the groups brainstorm new use cases and strategize, plan, and execute campaigns, monitor performance, and adjust their marketing programs based on their findings.

For this campaign, ClassPass employed Braze Audience Sync to create dynamic suppression lists for paid social ads on Facebook, Google, and TikTok that target leads. ClassPass set up an action-based customer journey via Braze Canvas Flow that users enter when they perform an action that makes these paid social ads no longer relevant to them. For example, because the goal of the ad was to acquire new customers, when a user signs up for a membership, that event would trigger entry into the flow and then the user would be suppressed from paid social ads automatically moving forward. This practice prevents wasted ad spend and allows room for the team to target active members with messaging that's more catered to them.

ClassPass Results: Time Saved, Revenue Made

By leveraging data to create more effective paid ads and better messaging throughout the customer lifecycle, ClassPass’ marketing team has freed up six hours of time each month and seen a 2% rise in conversion rates on TikTok.

Key Takeaways

1. Owned messaging channels like email and push and paid channels like social ads shouldn’t exist in silos. ClassPass uses data to power robust segmentation and personalization in Braze for emails, push notifications, SMS, in-app messages, and webhooks—but with Braze Audience Sync, they were able to easily leverage that data for social ads as well, which optimized performance and ad spend.
2. Efficient processes are successful processes. When ClassPass needed an automatic way to leverage internal data for targeting paid ads in real time and improve operational efficiency, Audience Sync made it possible for them to reduce friction and keep their campaigns updated more seamlessly, leading to positive results.

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