Getting Your Data in Shape: 3 Ways Equinox Took Control of Their Data in Marketing Cloud

Equinox is an American-based luxury fitness brand, offering a wide range of services— including world-class personal trainers, group fitness classes, spa treatments, luxury amenities—tailored to help their members be their best selves either in the club or digitally.

 

Equinox has been a long-time customer of Lev’s, and an even longer-time user of Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC)—which they primarily use to power their member experience through personalized communications and content. 

 

Prior to partnering with Lev, their process of getting data into SFMC was highly manual and also created challenges pertaining to data hygiene.  They came to Lev looking for opportunities to better manage and leverage their data, and to maximize their use of Marketing Cloud. 

 

Below, they share 3 ways they took control of their data, and how it ultimately led to an even better experience for their members.

 

Prior to working with Lev, the Equinox marketing team was manually importing data from disparate systems into their SFMC instance, using Salesforce reports and a FTP file drop. 

 

The type of data imported includes various audiences such as employees (or users) and members, and data points such as location, opt in status, membership status, and more. 

 

With the manual process, the Equinox team found that the data recently imported into Marketing Cloud was often outdated, creating challenges as it pertains to certain data points.

 

To help simplify the process and ensure accurate data, the Lev team aggregated data from various sources—including Synchronized Data Extensions with CRM data, back end tables with Open and Click history, and preference data—into a single source, also known as a master Data Extension. This master Data Extension (DE) contains all the fields necessary to support marketing initiatives and can be filtered by Equinox marketers to quickly segment their members and send more personalized communications.

 

This improved process reduces Equinox’s time spent building audiences from 1 day, from the data team,  to 15 minutes by filtering off of the Master DE, gives the marketing team control of their data—rather than asking the data team and CRM administrators for new data sets, and has helped maximize their email engagement by ensuring that the customers receiving emails want to be receiving them.

 

The best way to communicate with customers is how they want to be communicated with, and preference centers are a critical tool for giving customers the chance to share that information with you.

 

The Equinox team partnered with Lev to help implement a new preference center, replacing their old one, which only offered the option to “unsubscribe from all.” Previously, the Equinox team was concerned about mismatched data and their preference data being out-of-date by the time it made it into Marketing Cloud—but now, their preference center data is one of the several data extensions that make up their Master DE to ensure timeliness and accuracy of their audience when it’s time for them to hit “send.”

 

Having a preference center helps Equinox ensure they’re communicating with their members when and how they want to be communicated with.

 

Once the Equinox team felt they had mastered their data management and were communicating with members when and how they wanted to be communicated with, they got creative; leveraging their data in new ways and layering in new customer attributes to support their efforts.

 

First, they partnered with Lev to incorporate dynamic content into their emails based on previous click engagement. Having a full understanding of what data they have and a solid approach to managing their data was critical to being able to implement this, as having a disciplined approach to naming conventions and asset organization is key to executing this strategy. This strategy enables the Equinox team to take an even more personalized approach to communicating with their members by serving them content that’s most relevant to them and interests them most.

 

The Equinox team also added in a new audience segment to their SFMC instance: leads. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Equinox team wanted to expand their reach and pilot their services to people who were looking to pursue their health and fitness goals at home. The Equinox team spun up a new site, where interested customers could sign up to receive emails with premier home workout content. The lead data from this email sign-up is fed into Equinox’s CRM as a separate data set than their member data and is managed separately from members. 

 

Having these audiences segmented into different data sets helps the Equinox team ensure that they’re communicating differently with the people who only signed up to access the content on their site, versus loyal Equinox members. In addition to building this list, Lev supported efforts to ensure opt-out compliance for these web sign-ups and leveraged a SQL query to exclude users from the web sign-up communications if they had converted to members and were receiving member communications. 

 

 

While there are many more exciting projects ahead on Equinox's roadmap, they’ve already taken leaps and bounds in leveling up their data management as they strive to provide a premier experience for their members. Mastering your data is a key part to any personalization strategy, and the Equinox team is looking forward to being able to provide an even more personalized experience to their members to help them achieve their fitness goals.