Case Study - Weight Loss organisation

Written on the 7 June 2010

This small business, a weight loss organisation wanted to establish a wide base of clients that they could build strong relationships with. To do this they needed a website that would compliment all their marketing activities and demonstrate clearly their uniqueness over their competitors. Their online presence also needed to help them interact with their clients and to build a sense community around their brand.

Challenges:

Branding this weight-loss organisation was well-known but in order to compete with other big weight loss organisations, they really needed to build their brand, promote their success stories and highlight their point of difference.

Interactivity the weight loss organisation wanted to make their website interactive and entertaining so that they could engage with their clients and for it become their clients first point of call for weight loss tips, low-fat recipes, expert advice, success stories as well as keeping their clients informed on any new information.

Relationship building they wanted to implement a VIP system for rewarding their valued clients to further build their relationship with them, but it needed to be something simple, because none of them were marketing or computer experts.

Solution:

Establish a Membership management program
The weight loss organisation implemented a simple membership management system on their website in order to manage all the details of their growing number of members, as well as the payment of their membership fees. Within this system, they could easily add and edit member's details, as well send them payment reminders and actually collect payment from them. This system significantly lowered their administration costs and made it possible for them to accept more new members.

They also created a simple VIP membership which as soon as someone joined they were sent a personalised login to view additional tips, guides, goal sheets, competitions, events etc on the website. This was something that other weight loss businesses weren't doing and soon became a popular feature.

Products:Membership Manager, D atabase marketing Platform

Improve their instant attraction:

They wanted to showcase their business and what they had to offer to visitors as soon as they arrived on their website. In order to attract attention and tell their story quickly and effectively, they produced a video to run on their website to show their difference, hear comments from clients, see their before and afters. This video not only made them stand out it also made people feel comfortable as it was shot in their businesses unique warm environment.

Created a blog

Since they wanted to communicate with their clients in an open and friendly way, they started to write a blog on their website. The blog was very funny and personal, and covered everything from healthy recipes, to exercise programs and client success stories. The blog became instantly popular with their clients because it was light-hearted, entertaining and helped to create a sense of community within the organisation. The blog also helped to attract traffic to their website and strengthened their relationships with their customers.

Their most popular blogs were the ones written by clients, who regularly kept their followers up to date with their successes - this provided inspiration, but also gained a following of the clients friends and family (which bought in new clients through their viral marketing through mouth, emails and their own presences on social media)

Product:Blog Manager

Build an online collection of recipes

The weight loss organisation wanted to share creative and healthy ways for their clients to cook meals. So they collected various recipes and archived them on their website. They could easily input the recipes into their website, feature several on the main page and even have them search-able by ingredients. These were a huge hit with their customers and got them coming back to the website more often. even after they left the program. With the send to a friend feature, these popular recipes got sent around which facilitate more new clients into the business again.

Products: Catalogue

Send out regular announcements and updates

To keep their clients up to date and drive them back to their website, the weight-loss organisation began sending out weekly email bulletin (shorter version of a newsletter). This helped them to engage their clients in regular communication with them, keep them informed of special events or company news via email and posted them on their website for future reference. The weekly bulletin also helped to build the relationship between the retailer and her clients. They had several of their campaigns automated, such as new clients messages (a series of 5 messages that went out to new clients over the first month), keep going messages (their biggest drop of of clients happened in their 3rd month - so prior to then, they were sent success stories and pictures of others who felt like giving up but kept going and were extremely happy for it), birthday messages, monthly goal sheets, invitations for them and their friends to education evenings, graduation nights and more

Products: Email marketing

Installed a Online Forum

The weight-loss organisation wanted to create a sense of community amongst all their clients. To do this they installed a online forum. The online forum was used to talk to their clients, for clients to talk to one another, share stories, inspiration and funny moments.

Product: Online Forum

Created a photo gallery for networking events

The weight-loss organisation put together a photo gallery of their clients latest success stories and their progression as to how they got to that point. They also placed testimonials from their clients about their weight loss program and how it helped them lose weight. The weight loss organisation also took photos at all of the networking functions and social events, and then made all these photos available for viewing on their website. All this helped to create a sense of community and build their brand.

Products:Photo Gallery, Testimonials Manager

The weight loss organisation used the following tools