About the brand

Flexnest is a D2C personal fitness equipment brand making At-Home workouts truly engaging and irresistibly convenient for everyone, by bringing to you a holistic workout experience.

Flexnest provides premium, German-designed fitness gear such as smart treadmills, cardio machines, smart dumbbells, benches, massage guns, fitness accessories and unisex activewear to 70,000+ customers across several major Indian cities.

Problem Statement

The fitness industry has experienced significant growth in the digital space in recent years, with the rise of personal fitness consciousness – fueled by the rapid adoption of stay-at-home workouts due to the pandemic. As a result, many businesses offering online workout classes and personal training equipment have seen a surge in demand. The convenience and flexibility of at-home workouts have made them increasingly popular among fitness enthusiasts, leading to a boom in the digital fitness industry.

Due to the high purchase cost and inherent quality concerns, customers require a live demo before making such a crucial purchase, especially online. These personal training equipment tend to last for a long time resulting in longer purchase cycles, brands often struggle to convert one-time website visitors/buyers into repeat loyal customers.

The D2C personal fitness brand faced an identical problem. In order to build rapport and establish confidence with their potential buyers, the brand was looking for a solution to offer virtual demos that closely resembled the feel of in-person demos in combination with a powerful automation engine and a communication platform to nudge customers who were dropping out without completing their purchase journey.

Success Criteria

Brands in similar businesses with such high-value products must continuously engage and nudge their customers with multiple personalized communications across various channels to encourage purchase completion, albeit without spamming them excessively. Traditional marketing tools only allow merchants to send communications on limited channels or require complex integrations to mimic an omnichannel experience for their customers. At the same time, the brand also had to deliver an exceptional shopping experience to meet customer expectations. The brand was also missing out on various marketing opportunities such as re-marketing, cross-sell and upsell capabilities since there were only a few active communication flows restricted to WhatsApp.

The brand was looking for a solution that could help them convert a higher percentage of their website visitors into loyal customers. This required the brand to establish one-on-one connections and trust with potential customers by providing live demos and engaging their existing as well as potential customers through omnichannel marketing.

Contlo’s Solution and Approach

Since Flexnest was heavily reliant on WhatsApp to engage with its customers, the very first essential step was to migrate all its historic data and replicate the marketing stack onto Contlo – including automation flows, segments and forms. By offering personalized support and attention to the brand, Contlo was able to provide a frictionless transition, ensuring that all data was migrated accurately and efficiently.

As the brand’s primary goal was to convert more visitors into customers to drive sales, they integrated their Shopify store with Popin’ – A video shopping enabler. This allowed their customers to schedule live demos for the products they were interested in. However, the story didn’t end there. There was an immediate need for a solution to notify and engage these high-intent visitors based on actions related to scheduling a video demo.

Contlo helped the brand act on this need by building a deep custom integration with Popin’ to ensure the effective usage of Flexnest’s video shopping experience – setting up multiple custom events to act as automation triggers for personalized messaging based on user actions about the scheduling of a live product demo.

As part of their strategy to nudge high-intent users, FlexNest set up multiple automation flows with triggers ranging from user actions such as an abandoned cart, scheduling of a live demo, product purchase, etc.

This allowed the brand to send out hyper-personalized communications across different channels, nudging the customers to complete the purchase cycle. In the first 6 months after migrating to Contlo, the brand has sent out over 2 million targeted emails and 1 million personalized WhatsApp messages – with a healthy open rate of 30% and 45% respectively.

For a brand like Flexnest, it’s essential to provide seamless customer support as users tend to require help in using and selecting personal fitness equipment quite often. Apart from this, the importance of post-checkout support cannot be undermined either. Using Contlo, Flexnest is able to provide comprehensive support to their users via WhatsApp – solving over 150 customer queries per day through the platform.

Before migrating to Contlo, the brand’s marketing and outreach was focused on a single channel – WhatsApp. Hence, the brand was missing out on several other channels to supercharge its marketing activities.

However, ever since migrating to Contlo and setting up multiple nuanced omnichannel automation flows the brand has made massive strides in generating a sizeable chunk of its revenue from Email – a channel that was not even a part of Flexnest’s marketing strategy.

Currently, Email is constantly matching or even overtaking WhatsApp in terms of revenue generated – proving the importance of adopting omnichannel strategies for effective marketing.

Flexnest has seen a 100% increase in revenue and 2.5X growth in sales from repeat customers since migrating to Contlo – establishing proof that customers are much more inclined to transact when they receive hyper-personalized attention and nudges specific to a product.