The Gym Group

Increasing Site Speed by 40%

Driving Digital Efficiency

The Gym Group, founded in 2007, has made its mark on the health & fitness industry. The UK-based gym chain has transformed its digital platform to enhance user experience and deliver fast content updates to its rapidly expanding membership of over 890,000.

Members are offered a seamless experience through The Gym Group’s dedicated app or website, where they can select from a range of membership packages, make reservations for their local gym and track their fitness progress. These digital touchpoints are an integral part of The Gym Group’s member experience.

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Challenge:For years, The Gym Group had been using a heavily tailored and outdated content management system and ecommerce solution. It took a long time to launch new campaigns, make content updates and introduce new products to market, not allowing internal teams to be agile or flexible.It became apparent that in order to achieve its ambitious growth targets, The Gym Group needed a new digital platform to facilitate scale and business growth.

Key Challenges:

  • Like much of the health and fitness industry, The Gym Group was behind in its adoption of technology that would enable agile content management, improve site speed and deliver a seamless ecommerce experience to members. 
  • However, The Gym Group is not strictly an ecommerce business, so a new platform would need to be flexible enough to allow for unique business use cases like giving members access to exercise content and advice.
  • Following a complete digital transformation project and relaunch of the brand, the content and new visual identity was critical. The Gym Group was reliant on Amplience to power this rebrand, enabling it to execute its planned campaigns and boost engagement with members.
  • The new CMS would need to be not only compatible with existing solutions being used by The Gym Group, but complementary too. The MACH approach has allowed The Gym Group  to compose a best in class ecommerce platform.  

The Solution

The Gym Group seamlessly adopted Amplience’s headless CMS approach addressing each integration challenge that arose. The platform’s modular structure helped to minimize any potential disruptions, while allowing the team to quickly orchestrate content and launch campaigns. The success of this implementation instilled confidence in the team, enabling them to move forward to the next steps.

Results: 

  • New products can be conceived, planned and executed in just 4-6 weeks, rather than months

  • Average pre-opening promotion time for new gyms using the digital tools has expanded from 4 weeks to 12 weeks

  • Getting one new gym site online with Amplience can take as little as 1 week, by comparison with a minimum of 4 weeks using the old platform

  • The targeted conversion rate increase of at least 50 basis-points has been exceeded with 100 to 150 bps increases seen in some of The Gym Group’s basket value price bandings

  • Site speed has increased by 40% whilst rank performance has improved with 100% brand search rank pos #1 coverage and 95% category location search rank pos #1 coverage

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How Amplience Made the Difference

The Gym Group has undergone a significant transformation by incorporating the Amplience platform, shifting from a physical gym business to an ecommerce enterprise with 200 physical sites and a different mindset. With all members acquired and managed via digital touchpoints, the Amplience CMS and DAM has played a crucial role in enabling the company to operate at scale as a fast-moving, digital first business.
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Going headless and re-platforming with MACH principles was the right way for us to go, and Amplience had the ability to implement a headless solution that would be slick enough for our needs. Amplience’s CMS is instrumental in our campaign planning and the orchestration and creation of our content.”

Jim Hingston

Digital Product Director, The Gym Group