Equinox Builds Dynamic App Experiences at Scale With Braze Content Cards

As a luxury fitness brand, Equinox serves up a top-tier experience to its members in over 100 beautifully designed clubs across the US, Canada, and the UK. Increasingly, they’ve also taken their curated workout programs online, bringing the same high-quality service to customers with classes from Equinox, SoulCycle, and Solidcore. From pilates to expert personal training, the brand offers something sure to scratch any fitness experience its members crave, whether at home or in person.

At Equinox, members are the heartbeat of the business. Historically, membership relied on in-person interactions to drive growth. But when COVID-19 put the world on lockdown and closed Equinox clubs overnight, the team was challenged to reimagine what it means to belong to the Equinox community. Quickly, they developed a customer engagement strategy to deliver the same premium experience their members had come to love online.

Equinox Personalizes the Online Customer Experience to Match Their Premium Brand

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 Engagement 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.

Here’s how they did it:

1. Using Braze Canvas Flow, an intuitive customer journey orchestration tool, the team created the first iteration of the campaign.

2. The Canvas incorporated Content Cards, a persistent and dynamic in-app messaging channel, and determined what segment each user would fall into to pick the order of the content they received.

3. They thoughtfully constructed segmentation and content creation to allow for maximum personalization. Each Content Card consisted of a content block that made a call to their content delivery network. This looped in with their recommendation APIs, so the team could frequently rotate content without changing campaigns or segmentation.

4. Additionally, the CRM team relied on tags within their CDN and Liquid logic within Braze to ensure each content block returned different content based on the custom attributes of the user.

5. Additionally, the team had a set of recommendation engines they built in-house they could leverage. With Braze Connected Content, Equinox team could use the specific class for each member and message them with a recommendation. For example, a member who signed up for Metcon3, an Equinox signature class, would see content for on-demand versions of athletic training classes.

6. Post-launch, the team has added a few additional features to enhance performance. These include pinning relevant Content Cards to the top of the app homepage and setting conditional logic within the Content Card itself.

With Braze, the Possibilities (of Content Variations) are Endless

Democratizing the high-value real estate of the homepage using advanced personalization was a big unlock for the Equinox team. Marketing content now lives side by side with on-demand classes and articles, and the homepage scroll length has decreased by half. Using Braze, the team can launch campaigns in parallel rather than sequentially, increasing impressions and the lifespan of each campaign they deploy.

Equally impressive is how the team leveraged Canvas Flow and Connected Content to create hundreds of personalized experiences their members crave. In just a few months, they went from delivering one static homepage experience with one dynamic card in 3 possible states to 21 homepage experiences, with 42 pieces of dynamic content at up to 6 possible conditions. Each member went from having three potential experiences to hundreds tailored to their unique fitness interests and goals. By helping the team take a more data-driven approach to serving their customers, they’ve been able to trigger campaigns in real-time via API-triggered campaigns and leverage aggregated data sent from Redshift to make every experience feel more personally relevant.

Equinox is still going strong, with plans to continue bringing in content from other services to make their messaging as cohesive as possible. It shows no signs of slowing down their experimentation. From elevated in-club experiences to tailor-made on-demand interactivity, they exemplify why putting the customer first is an excellent strategy for driving engagement and sustainable growth.

Equinox’s Results: Campaigns That Drive In-Person and Online Engagement

With the power of Braze, Equinox was able to achieve a 150% uplift in members who engaged both in club and online—a key goal—for the month of September 2022. They were also able to increase visibility into what their members were engaging with and how.

Additionally, they were able to run two “Check-in Challenge” test campaigns in July and September, ultimately seeing a 21% increase in engagement over the control group from August to September.

Key Takeaways

1. Personalization is what makes an online experience feel premium. A world-class business offering deserves world-class customer engagement. Weaving in messaging that speaks to the individual effectively conveys that your brand is worth investing in for the long haul.
2. Achieve more variations using purpose-built tools. Pulling together a personalized experience with hundreds of variations doesn’t have to be a headache. Look for a solution that enables you to segment and compose campaigns all in one dashboard to ensure smooth delivery, end to end.
3. In-person experiences can fuel online engagement and vice versa. There’s no reason for a brick-and-mortar experience to feel disconnected from its digital counterpart with the right customer engagement strategy in your pocket. Look for opportunities to make them feel cohesive and supportive of one another, from using your app to drive awareness of special in-person deals to making the booking process more frictionless with auto-reminders.

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