Fitness tracking apps and gadgets are everywhere these days. In the commercial fitness industry, it’s difficult to go to a trade show without hearing a lot about “Networked Fitness.” This trend towards “connected” equipment and clubs is billed as a way for your members to sign in on exercise equipment, track their workouts and interact with their workout data using tools such as goal setting, fitness challenges and social sharing.
At a major health technology conference this summer, Susannah Fox from the Pew Internet Group shared why data tracking matters, along with the results of Pew’s most recent study on the topic: 60 percent of American adults claimed they track their diet, exercise routine or weight, and 21 percent currently use technology to track their health data. MyFitnessPal, a popular nutrition and activity tracking mobile app, surpassed 30 million users last year. This single tracking app, only eight years old, has a global user base equivalent to the total U.S. health club membership in the year 2000!
Those big and quickly growing numbers tell a story about the changing behavior of members, but it’s up to the fitness industry to write the next chapter. How do club operators get access to fitness data and make it useful?
Other industries have successfully leveraged big data already, and retail commerce was one of the first. If you think about really successful retail businesses, names like Amazon or Walmart might come to mind. These companies have at least one thing in common — an extremely deep understanding of how their customers behave, based on customer shopping data.
Armed with data about how long customers stay on each webpage or if they search for a certain type of product in an aisle before giving up, for example, retailers can change the positioning or marketing around a product to drive higher sales. A successful purchase is a win for both the business and customer, so the effective use of this data benefits everyone.
In the fitness industry, the most important aspects of a customer’s behavior are how they exercise and eat. But clubs have shockingly spotty data about the exercise that goes on inside and outside their walls, and how that relates to the success or failures of customers. In the new age of members using technology to willingly track and share their fitness data, this has to change.
First, members need to be able to easily track their activity.
Fortunately, the technology world has taken care of this one. There are a variety of great options for connected fitness equipment in the market today that allow for workout tracking. Your biggest consideration in this purchase decision is that all of the connected equipment you buy needs to be able to talk to the same network. No one is going to track their workouts if the two brands of equipment you put on your fitness floor require two different IDs and send data to two different places. Cross-brand data compatibility is absolutely key. For off-cardio tracking, free apps available on the Apple and Android stores can run in the background on a user’s mobile phone, tracking every minute of running, walking, or cycling automatically, without the user even pulling out the app to start it up each time. The key here is that you must have a solution that allows members to connect those apps to you, so that you receive the data.
Next, you need to give them a reason to share the data.
Millions of health club members are already using technology to track their health and fitness, but they aren’t sharing that data with their health club. To change that, clubs need to offer compelling incentives. Tying tracked workout activity to points or rewards, for example, can generate both data-sharing incentives, as well as good old-fashioned loyalty. Think about what might happen if the industry had loyalty programs that rewarded exercise activity, rather than just card swipes at the front door. Fitness challenges or other digital fitness events can allow members to compete on leaderboards for recognition or prizes, all based on their tracked workouts.
Once they’re sharing, you need to have the tools to use the data.
What if you could identify a “category” of members not based on how often they visit, but on the type, frequency, intensity and duration of their exercise, and then tailor all your marketing, communications and personal training sales efforts based on that member type?
What if you could identify the categories of members that typically have shorter membership lifespans and had proven tactics for helping draw these specific members out of those categories and into your loyal member base?
These are the sorts of tools that will allow the fitness industry to join the data revolution and help their businesses and members succeed. The technology has arrived. Are you ready?
John Ford is the founder of Virtual Active and the Senior VP of Product at Netpulse Inc. He may be contacted at 909-913-1725, or by email at jford@netpulse.com.
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Rachel Zabonick-Chonko is the editor-in-chief of Club Solutions Magazine. She can be reached at rachel@peakemedia.com.
