4 Health & Fitness Startups Helping Their Users Make Wellness a Priority

Not every industry can be at the top of the heap when it comes to customer engagement. But the health and wellness space has some particular challenges when it comes to adopting cross-channel, lifecycle-centric customer engagement strategies. In fact, our 2022 Global Customer Engagement Review (CER), an annual world-wide analysis of the state of customer engagement for brands across industries, found that, on average, brands in the space lagged notably behind financial services brands, delivery and retail brands across measures of customer engagement maturity.

But this challenge can actually be an opportunity for forward-looking health and wellness brands, something that gives them the opportunity to lap their competition by doubling down on the customer engagement tools that other brands in the space aren’t yet effectively leveraging. To help out, we’re going to spotlight five health and fitness startups to watch—that is, companies in the space that are accelerating customer activation, boosting conversions, and driving purchases and retention. Here’s what they’re doing to deliver results, and how you can do the same.

1. Customized workout and meal plan app 8fit used Braze Predictive Purchases to drive conversions by 3.75X

With 40 million app downloads and counting, 8fit—a startup that offers workouts, customized meal plans, and meditations—knows a thing or two about customer engagement. One strategy that’s helped the company get to know their customers even better has been teaming up with Braze and leveraging our Braze Predictive Purchases tool. This feature, which is part of the Braze Predictive Suite, uses machine learning to assign customers a purchase likelihood score of 0 (least likely to purchase) to 100 (most likely). 8fit used these scores to tailor targeted subscription offers by customer segment, with those least likely to purchase receiving bigger discounts.

“Purchase Prediction not only helped us to understand our customers better but also enabled us to instantly act on these insights without further engineering efforts,” said Stefan Clausing, VP of Marketing at 8fit. “This way we were able to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our CRM campaigns."

Savvy testing revealed that, as a result of these efforts, users with a high likelihood to purchase were 3.75X more likely to convert compared to a random test cohort. Another test helped 8fit exclude low-scoring users, enabling the team to scale back weekly email send volume by 100K, without having an adverse effect on conversions.

Keep reading to see How 8fit Improves Conversions and Customer Engagement With Predictive Insights on Likely Buyers and How Fitness and Nutrition App 8fit Leverages Braze to Promote User Workout Streaks.

2. The #1 fitness app in Europe, Freeletics boosted their Black Friday conversion rates by an impressive 200% year over year by creating personalized, cross-channel campaigns with Braze

Offering personalized workout and nutrition regimens for 51 million customers, Freeletics paved the way toward blowout Black Friday marketing success well before the start of the winter holiday marketing season. To kick things off, Freeletics partnered up with Braze to tap our platform’s personalization, testing, and cross-channel customer engagement capabilities.

For starters, Freeletics stepped up their segmentation, engaging with their audience by free and premium subscription status as well as a spectrum of activity frequency and persistence indicators, while at the same time taking advantage of numerous channels: In-app messaging, push notifications, and email. They also used A/B testing to measure the success of variables like subject lines, taking action to optimize campaigns in the moment.

Come Black Friday, the customer engagement workouts and training the company focused on all year paid off, with conversion rates from free to paid subscribers jumping 200% year over year.

"Thanks to the local time sendouts through Braze, combined with a good cross-channel mix, we could ensure that our users received the big sales news at the right time through the right channel, so we were able to break through the clutter during this noisy sales season,” said Amalia Trivizadaki, Senior CRM Manager at Freeletics.

Keep reading to see How Freeletics Drives a 200% Increase in Conversion Rate With Braze.

3. Leading telehealth provider Sesame Care is boosting conversions by 15X by building out a cross-channel customer engagement strategy with Braze

A leading online marketplace for matching patients with healthcare professionals, Sesame Care relies on customer engagement to nurture website visitors into successful patient bookings. Previously, Sesame Care focused on search engine marketing to drive website traffic and email marketing to communicate with existing customers during the checkout flow. However, the team there has taken steps to branch out and embrace cross-channel marketing.

To better understand website visitors’ behavior and use these insights to create personalized, cross-channel campaigns, Sesame Care selected Braze due to our HIPAA-compliant technology. Since using the platform’s frequency testing and personalization features and capabilities for optimizing segmentation and messaging content in the moment, Sesame Care has achieved a 15X lift in last-click conversions and email is now the #3 driver of growth for the business (up from #10).

“Braze made it possible for us to reinvent our customer engagement strategy by embracing cross-channel messaging and driving more impact with the messages we send,” says Brett Doyle, Head of CRM at Sesame Care. “Finding a HIPAA-compliant platform capable of supporting our marketing vision has been a game changer for us.”

Keep reading to see How Sesame Care Drives 15X Increase in Conversions After Streamlining Their Data Collection and Messaging with Segment and Braze.

4. Elevate Labs, the maker of an Apple App of the Year and a Google Best App of 2021, partnered with Braze to drive retention

Elevate Labs is behind not one but two award-winning apps—Elevate, which won Apple's App of the Year award and helps over 50 million people improve their communication, math, and memory skills, and Balance, winner of Google’s Best App of 2021, a personalized meditation and sleep app that helps people reduce stress, improve sleep, enhance focus, and more.

The company has supported the success of these exceptional apps by investing in customer engagement. Braze is a trusted partner that Elevate relies on to support the company’s cross-channel campaigns, orchestrate user onboarding, carry out product experimentation, and to deploy special discounts.

“We are able to do everything so seamlessly within Braze,” says Alex Shuck, Director of Product Marketing at Elevate Labs. “We can go from concept to implementation as fast as we possibly can. You know, if I can grab push notification copy in the morning, it'll be live before the day's out.”

According to Shuck, the company’s long-standing partnership with Braze makes it possible for them to bring any marketing idea to life, drive incremental campaign lifts, and demonstrate the value of the company’s retention program.

Keep reading How Elevate Labs Drives Incremental Purchases and Retention With Braze.

Step Up Your Wellness Start-Up’s Customer Engagement

Looking for more strategy and use case inspiration? Watch this Grow with Braze webinar to discover how Ten Percent Happier creates powerful, personalized email campaigns to keep their consumers hooked across the entire lifecycle and help drive stronger business results.