How We Increased World Class Website Conversion by 116%
Hello everyone! This is Alexander Golenishchev, project manager at AGIMA. Not long ago we released World Class fitness club chain website. The main feature of the project is that we used the product approach to the fullest. This is when all tasks, ideas and solutions are based on research. And the second main feature is that the guys from World Class turned out to be very open and allowed us to talk about all stages of the work. So we have a unique opportunity to look at the project from the inside – to evaluate the processes and numbers.
Alexander Nazarov, ex Product Owner World Class, helped me put the material together. He co-authored the article, so all the data is relevant and useful. This material is for fellow project managers, product owners and analysts. We tried to focus on the work process itself. So, let's go, let's tell the case.
You've probably heard of World Class – their ads have been flashing on billboards and screens all over the country for many years. For those who missed it, let us remind you: World Class is the largest fitness corporation in Russia, their gyms are in 42 cities of the Russian Federation and the CIS. World Class is also included in the international rating of the 25 best fitness clubs in the world Global 25.
Where it all began
The key trigger for creating the new website was the start of online sales of World Class club cards. At that time, the company already had successful experience in online sales: new clients could buy cards on Ozon, and current clients had the option of renewing cards through a mobile application. The World Class website handled lead generation well, so the company decided to only slightly improve it.
To do this, the World Class team added several options for club cards so that the client had a choice: for one month, three months, six months and a year, added the ability to buy them online and disclosed the prices. But the launch failed: traditional sales funnels broke down, the number of applications and incoming calls dropped sharply.
The team blamed open prices. Previously, the main motivation for a client to contact the club and leave a lead was the need to know the cost of a club card. Now it has disappeared. There were online sales, of course, but there were few of them, and they did not compensate for the overall drop in sales volumes. Plus, the team was hit by the redistribution of the sales structure. Instead of the usual long club cards, clients began to give preference to short ones.
The World Class team analyzed this decline and came to the conclusion that the current website was selling the club shares rather than the club itself. It did not convey the value of the fitness product that a future club member received. Previously, this value could be revealed by the sales manager who processed the lead and spoke to the client on the phone.
The World Class team decided that the best option would be to create a new website.
But you can’t just start developing a new digital product. First, you need to figure out how to encourage customers to buy online. And that’s where research comes in.
Launched a target audience study
The study was conducted in two stages: in-depth interviews and questionnaires. The first stage involved 20 respondents, and in the second stage the World Class team interviewed another 600 people.
The study had three objectives:
Understand the decision-making process for purchasing a club card and build a Customer Journey Map.
To understand the overall attitude of the audience towards online card purchases.
Measure price sensitivity: understand what price is too high and will scare away buyers.
During the research, the team received many insights about the target audience, which determined further work on the project. We will share some of them:
Geofactor is the top 1 factor in decision makingThe location of the club became a key factor in making a decision when choosing a fitness club.
Respondents want to see prices. The vast majority of customers wanted to see club card prices on the site. At the same time, there was a certain acceptable price level – this is the maximum amount of money that people were willing to spend online. Anything higher than this was a turn-off and had the opposite effect.
30% are ready to buy onlineThese are respondents who are ready to buy a membership online, but only in the fitness chain where they or their friends have already trained.
For 70% of participants, online shopping is a pig in a pokeThese respondents said they were not prepared to buy online: to purchase a membership, they would have to visit the club and see everything with their own eyes.
Two types of factors emerged: the first ones help to lower the barrier to online purchases, the second ones help to increase the value of the club card and club contract.
Transforming knowledge into solutions
The World Class team then turned the knowledge they gained into elements of the site's product strategy. Here's what they came up with:
We divided all the clubs into price segments and revealed prices for only some of them.
We have reformulated the two main objectives of the site:
a) increase the share of online sales and stimulate the segment of users who are ready to buy without visiting the club;
b) pump up the online + offline attraction funnel.The factors that help lower the barrier to purchasing a club card formed the basis for filling the site and individual club pages. These factors also influenced the order of blocks, the filling of photo content in the club gallery, and the emphasis in communication.
Those factors that helped to increase the value of the contract formed the basis of the commercial block, that is, the block of club cards.
The geofactor has been transformed into a separate feature – a fitness club search module.
This is how the backlog that our development team took on came about. And the difficulty was that everything had to be done before the hot season. So the deadlines were extremely tight.
We are launching the site for the hot season
Our main goal was not just to make a landing page, but to prepare a platform for testing subsequent product hypotheses. This meant a lot of work under the hood. And the deadlines were already pressing – we had to make it in time for the hot season.
Therefore, we proposed to split the current volume of tasks from the backlog into two releases, based on two scenarios:
where users search for a club by its location – as this was the number 1 criterion based on the results of the study;
where users search for a club based on services.
We agreed on a schedule and started development. We started with a design concept and architectural planning.
It is important to remember that World Class is not a mono-product. The company has almost 50 clubs across the country with their own unique services, training and content. Therefore, it was important for us to solve two technical problems:
Integrate with the client's master system (1C) so that all data is constantly up-to-date.
Set up convenient content editing.
Both items are mainly about promotions, season tickets and information about clubs. This content is often updated and changed. That is why we created a system in which:
all content changes are made by the content manager, not the developer;
The content manager spends a minimum of time updating data and concentrates more on the timeliness and quality of the material.
We always keep in mind that when a site goes into production, it requires constant attention from the team. And the more tasks we can delegate to the content manager or automate, the more time the development team has for product development.
Tech stack
The site itself is developed on two frameworks – Vue.js and Node.js. But an interesting technological feature is the Strapi admin panel, a headless CMS.
We wrote about working with Strapi CMS on this project in a separate large article. There we also analyzed its advantages and shared interesting metrics of the new World Class website.
Headless CMSs provide the ability to configure a database, work with content, administrator access to this content, and other back-stories. And for the frontend, an API is generated that can be freely accessed.
In the short term, this did not help us in any way, but in the long term, it worked towards the strategic goal of making the admin panel a single source of content for all digital products of the World Class ecosystem.
The first fruits of this decision were already born during the development of the first release. We made stories within the website. The same task was in the backlog of the mobile app development team. We slightly tweaked the data model, gave the team an API, and voila — stories appeared in the mobile app, which can be edited and supplemented in the same interface as stories for the website. Very convenient.
Testing hypotheses
Here we are at the stage when the design concept is approved, the development is coordinated, the layouts are made. Now we need to check that the solution will work. Preferably before releasing it into production, so that minimize the cost of change.
To do this, we conducted a classic UX study. We gathered 14 respondents and divided them into two groups: people who are currently looking for a suitable fitness club, and people who go to competitors' fitness clubs. The researcher gave respondents clickable prototypes of the mobile version of the site and several scenarios. They had to go through them and voice all their thoughts and feelings along the way. As a result, we received about 40 problems and insights, which we prioritized based on their criticality and complexity of implementation.
Fortunately, there was nothing critical on the user’s path: all respondents easily found the information they needed and had no trouble purchasing subscriptions.
But here's an interesting example of one problem we uncovered during our research. The problem with the old site was that it put too much emphasis on promotions and memberships. On the new site, we focused a lot on clubs, photos, unique content, and hardly worked on memberships at all — they were taken for granted. Almost every respondent, having reached the membership section, asked themselves: “What exactly are you offering me? What will I get for paying this amount?” We fell into a typical trap called “You can ignore the content for now.”
But the thing is that users visit websites precisely for this content. So we added one content block – a section with a description – and the problem was solved.
Morality: While you are developing a website, your eyes are getting blurry. UX research will help you to dive into reality before the market does.
We have completed all tests, fixed the last bugs and released the site.
Results and plans
It has been proven that the new site is statistically more effective than the old one: it is visited by more than 40 thousand people monthly, and the conversion from visitors to buyers has increased by 116%.
Here are our plans for the near future:
1. Transfer 100% of traffic from the old site to the new one and set up redirects.
2. Release the second release.
Follow the development of World Class and don't switch 🙂
Test it new World Class websiteleave your feedback about it in the comments – the product team will take everything into account. If you have questions or suggestions, write too. We will be glad to receive feedback.
P.S. We also invite you to discuss the security of digital products at the meetup “Ecom and Wine“. There will be only Ecom experts, CMOs and directors of retail chains. The main topics of the meeting are data protection (their own and users'), real vulnerability cases and the best methods of combating them.
