Xercise4Less

Boosting conversion by 300% with a mobile-first experience for gym lovers

Speed and agility – in the gym and online

Xercise4less is a value gym chain located throughout the UK. They pride themselves on supporting their members, fitting in to their customer’s lifestyle with useful content and a flexible approach to gym membership.  

With 80% of members accessing their site on mobile, Xercise4Less needed a way to both serve these existing customers with fast-turnaround content such as class times, whilst encouraging new members to join. 

Accelerating business needs

Xercise4Less’s business needs are evolving at an accelerated pace whilst facing disruptive markets and technological threats from competitors. 

The sales and marketing team were  hamstrung by the lack of agility on the old platform. Competitors were delivering content in a more dynamic and agile way. The length of time it was taking the sales and marketing team to deliver fresh content to their customers was too long because they had no capacity to deliver these changes themselves, relying on IT to change content in the back-end.

In addition, the user experience on the Xercise4Less site was very disjointed, with the members needing to go to various systems during the member lifecycle. Not only did it lead to confusion from customers, but also severely impacted brand experience and perception as each system had different capabilities. There were also issues with page load speed.

On average, customers were only viewing 4 pages per site visit, and the site in its entirety had a bounce rate of 41.71%.

Pushing the boundaries for the fitness industry

We really pushed the boundaries on this project by building a headless / PWA solution with the addition of Page Builder functionality. This had never been done before with Magento Commerce for a site such as Xercise4Less! There were some major limitations with what could be achieved with Page Builder, out of the box, so we innovated here to create some heavy customisations in order to make the experience of using Page Builder easier and more pleasant for Xercise4Less! Some of the customisations included the following:

• Creating custom endpoints for the REST API to access certain data sets
• Implementing API caching at the edge on Fastly
• Leveraging the PWA theme code to expose more of the Page builder content via the APIs
• Speaking with the Magento team to get early releases on certain Page Builder enhancements to improve the speed of Page Builder
• Adding global stylesheets / logic to Page Builder for better usability
• Make further amends to Page Builder to expose more data via the Graph QL
• Creating some of the most complex page layouts and stretching Page Builder to the limits

A customer-first experience

The main reason that Xercise4Less decided to utilise Magento 2.3.3 Commerce Cloud, was that the purpose of this project was to leverage one platform that is leading in its headless / PWA functionality. 

Using the latest version of Magento commerce allowed us to take advantage of the page builder functionality, allowing everything to be handled from within one CMS. We also needed to connect the main Magento instance to other third-party systems, so we heavily leveraged the REST API to make sure that product data designed around product memberships was sent across to the different systems. 

The following are the key KPIs which Xercise4Less consistently monitor and report on:

• Tripled conversion rates through the key membership sign-up funnel
• Page stickiness improved from an average of 4 pages per session to 7 pages per session
• Bounce rate across the website drastically reduced from 41.71% to 7.77% and it halved in the purchase funnel from 8.99% to 4.39%
• Both our PageSpeed and YSlow grade is above 80% where direct competitors are between 50% and 70% on average
• We also reduced the page size to under 1Mb where our competitors are between 2Mb and 20Mb

All of the above meant that in the first 2 weeks after launch, Xercise4Less had twice sold more than 1,000 units on a single day, which was the first time in 18 months that this had been achieved.