Iron Tribe Fitness earned the Best Customer Experience & Engagement, Silver Winner award at the inaugural Loyalty360 Awards held last month at the 7th Annual Loyalty Expo, presented by Loyalty360 – The Loyalty Marketer’s Association.
Iron Tribe Fitness COO and Partner Jim Cavale participated in a riveting Q&A with Loyalty360 to discuss several aspects of his company’s unique culture and promise to its loyal customers.
In your opinion, what specific things are being done well at Iron Tribe that led to the Loyalty360 Award?
I think that we are committed to building community through relationships. Without those two things, Iron Tribe is merely a fitness program in a world with hundreds of options. But when you commit to relationships that tie together a true community, you have something that is irreplaceable amongst your competition. This is what we've done at our corporate gyms and why we have built a franchise model for the brand to expand through our franchise partners doing the same thing in their communities and markets. As far as how this ties to the Loyalty 360 award, I would say that our commitment to building these relationships and thus, communities, is why we have so many raving fans as clients. It’s the reason that 90% of our franchise partners have ascended from clients of an Iron Tribe gym to become actual owners in the brand. It’s also the reason for record low attrition rates (< 3% chain-wide) and record high referral rates (> 80% of our new members comes from referrers).
Can you explain a bit about how Iron Tribe is able to execute these things that have led to your ongoing success along with customer acquisition and customer retention?
Executing these things is a mix of “the manual” with “the automatic.” While we have used technology to automate processes that educate and interact with our clients, we also count heavily on the proactivity of our staff to establish and further cultivate this exchange of information that educates and coaches the client, while also constantly interacting and caring for each client. It’s created a personalized experience for each client, within a true group atmosphere.
How important is the culture at Iron Tribe as an omnipresent backdrop that serves as a guiding light for customer loyalty?
It’s essential. From the beginning, our clients are trained to know that our brand grows through them referring only the very best people our way, so that we can over deliver to these people the same way we do so with them. Our 300-member limit guarantees that you won’t become another number to us, but we will truly have a relationship with you. Things like this establish a culture that we are then held accountable to for the months and hopefully years to come!
What is the company doing now in terms of the loyalty program, commitment to its customers, and commitment to a strategy?
While our brand currently has a partnership with Whole Foods, to provide a $100 gift card to each referrer, we are also giving that referrer a free month gift card to gift a friend with. Also, I am currently working on a referral generation technology system that rewards our athletes for the referral behavior rather than just the people they refer that actually sign an agreement to become a new athlete at Iron Tribe. This system will have two user interfaces (UI’s). One is on our staff UI, which is also known as the Bay Door - the proprietary software system that our operators and coaches use to run their Iron Tribe business. This UI tracks the amount of referral names that an athlete provides and puts these prospect names in a segment of the CRM list that then automates a great deal of inbox and mailbox marketing to these prospects, positioned to come from the actual friend who gave us their name. The front end UI is on the athlete’s MyTribe account (via logging into their iPhone app or my.irontribefitness.com mobile web site accounts), where they actually enter these names and info for their friends, receiving points to utilize for product, supplement or food purchasing in their Iron Tribe gym. If their friend signs up, we are adding a special Iron Tribe Lululemon shirt for these referrers to wear as an advertisement to the other athletes, which encourages referrals.
How has the measurement of your program changed today versus three to five years ago and how does the challenge of new technologies and ROIs play into this?
We’ve learned that it’s all about building our prospect lists and really our overall list altogether (customers and non-renewals too). The bigger our list, the more messages we can send out to the segments within our CRM system, which allow for people to become Iron Tribe athletes at all different points of receiving information. Some need months of info to make a decision, while others need weeks or days. Our responsibility is to build the list in each community where an Iron Tribe gym is present, and then let the message do its job to get prospects in the door so that each tribe leader (gym operator) can perform the consultation process and sign up new athletes.
The challenge with many loyalty programs today is the complexity and multichannel integration can be significantly more expensive and more difficult to implement than traditional programs. How challenging was that to sell internally or has the investment in your program increased in line with return?
It’s a huge challenge. For us, it’s been the impetus of creating this new technology piece on both the staff UI (our proprietary Bay Door software system) and the athlete UI (iPhone app or my.irontribefitness.com mobile web site accounts). We want to train our athletes to refer, but ask them less and provide the tools to do so more.
How much of the evolution, design or redesign of the program driven is by competitive pressure, voice of the customer, or internal interests? Which of the three has had the most “impact” on your program (based on your internal metrics)?
Not much by competitive pressure at all. However, our athletes demand excellence because it’s a core value of ours that they know we stand for. Thus, our internal pieces are much more “pretty” and branded than our external pieces, which we make “uglier” to stand out and focus more on the message (direct response marketing).
If you had to narrow it down to one thing, what do you think has led to your program’s success?
Feedback. Creating a culture of feedback allows you to see your business from multiple perspectives−the athlete, the coach, the operator, the franchise partner, etc. I depend on that feedback to triage innovations that my team is working on this very day you are reading this.
What role does personalization play in your strategy? How important do you think it is to nail personalization for a successful loyalty program?
It plays a solid role that we don’t play up enough. Recently, we started tracking the amount of referrals that each athlete has performed, so that we can talk to athletes differently, based on the recency, frequency and success of the referrals they’ve sent us. It’s ironic because our prospect marketing is completely customized, and we are always trying to make it that much more of an individualized feel for the prospect. But we’ve missed the ball on this strategy internally and I’m gasping trying to catch up!
As a marketer, what things/challenges keep you up at night?
How can I generate more leads for each gym community? The bigger the list, the faster we can ramp up each gym to its 300-member athlete capacity.