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Series: Xponential Fitness

World’s largest pilates brand partners with Digital Stack


SPACE


Meet the Client


Club Pilates is not only the largest Pilates brand in the world, it is one of the world's largest franchised fitness brands with almost 700 locations open worldwide. Club Pilates' fast growing franchise is part of Xponential Fitness, a curator of leading brands across every vertical in the boutique fitness industry – including Pilates, cycle, stretch, dance and rowing.



The Challenges


As experts in franchise marketing, the Digital Stack team was able to recognize the difficulties that come along with managing a multi-location brand, especially one that was expanding globally. "Club Pilates is the world's largest pilates brand which means there is lot of smart business people and a lot of passionate teams trying to do their best creating greater community connections and amplifying the Club Pilates brand at a local level," says Peter Harris, CEO of Digital Stack.


"When large franchise brands try and accomodate everyone in a network of this size, they tend to use too many specialist products to please each channel but ultimately, this gets too complicated to manage and impossible measure franchise value," Harris goes on to say. "With almost 700 locations and growing, we knew Digital Stack would be able to assist Club Pilates by consolidating their product mix, providing a more enjoyable and efficient experience for franchisees and increasing their engagement across all locations whilst remaining on brand."


"No other tool is the world has the ability to do this and our assumption was proven which engagement was taken up quickly and results started speaking for themselves."

-Peter Harris, CEO of Digital Stack

The challenges of consolidating marketing materials, increasing engagement and maintaining branding remained on the forefront. As did the sheer size of this fast growing network and the difficulties that come along when onboarding a team of this magnitude to a new system.


The Solutions


In early 2021, Club Pilates partnered with Digital Stack to become its primary brand and local area marketing platform. The solutions to the previously mentioned challenges were to provide the Club Pilates network with a tool that is extremely easy to use and would streamline internal systems. The ultimate goal was to create a high level of engagement with Franchise Partners and in turn, members.


6 Platforms Replaced by 1


Digital Stack replaced four other marketing management platforms previously used by the Club Pilates team. This removed the need for multiple platforms and also provided a way to be fully integrated with Club Pilates’s membership management tool, Club Ready. This instantly became the most cost effective model and also guaranteed a single membership database is maintained. 


In March 2021, Digital Stack was rolled out across 660 open studios, many in pre-opening and also Australia. This rollout utilised Digital Stack’s proven onboarding program which saw record adoption rates from studios, reinforced by many satisfaction emails sent to the head office, from multi-studio franchise partners. Digital Stacks business model allowed for the high level of support needed to bring on a brand of this size. Within 6 weeks, 98% of studios had connected and began scheduling out content using Digital Stack.




The Results


As of December 2021, Digital Stack has successfully partnered with Club Pilates meaning:


  • Over 800 users have been added
  • 99% of all content is localised by studios before scheduling, not just static campaigns
  • Over 300 emails sent to over 350,000 people

Additionally, engagement metrics continued to impress showing an:


  • Increase in audiences on each social platform by a minimum of 10,000 people
  • 15,819,013 unique impressions on all Facebook posts YTD (2021)

Now that all locations are live, Digital Stack now supports Club Pilates in the United States, Canada and Australia with the support of its brand experience team.


“Digital Stack is hands down the most impactful change implemented to the global Club Pilates marketing ecosystem. Not only has overall marketing activity increased across all of our locations and brand cohesion improved, but our studios and owners have expressed highly positive sentiment regarding the platform! It's a true win all around for the franchise and the brand!”

-Caitlin Tvrdik, CMO of Club Pilates


Going Forward


After successful rollout to its largest brands, Club Pilates in 2020, Digital Stack is chosen as the official marketing platform of Xponential Fitness, replacing some of the world’s largest brand, social, asset and print platforms. Digital Stack will be releasing a series of case studies following the journey of onboarding some of the best brands in the fitness industry.