How Keepme Helped Club4 Increase Sales Without Expanding its Team

After leveraging the Nova sales agent on Keepme’s Antares platform, Club4 Fitness transformed overnight inquiries into booked tours, stronger conversion rates and fuel for growth

Club4 Fitness, a series of health clubs primarily based in the southern United States, had too much consumer interest to handle. Membership inquiries were arriving faster than the staff could respond. Unnurtured leads quickly turned into missed opportunities as potential new members slipped away overnight.

The brand needed an extra set of hands on its sales team, a pair that never tired or logged off. 

Acknowledging this, Club4 partnered with Keepme, the brand behind Antares, the AI agent platform built for multisite fitness operators. Keepme deployed Nova, Antares’ sales agent, within Club4’s operating system, where it began responding to leads instantly, converting consistently and generating revenue outside staffed hours.

One month after the installation, Club4 booked over 270 tours after hours. It also now boasts a lead conversion rate of over 30%, and a 36% one during unstaffed hours. The brand knows, however, the benefits are only beginning to take shape. 

The Big Picture

Able to pick up on Club4’s voice, tone and tendencies, Nova only needed a few training sessions before it could speak to prospective members with the same approach a seasoned staff member would. 

“Every location delivers the same answer in the same brand voice, and you strip out the human-error variability you get when 44 clubs are each doing their own version of ‘how we talk to a prospect,’” said Stephanie Strachan, COO at Club4 Fitness. 

For ambitious groups like Club4 that are intent on expanding, that’s a significant operational advantage.

“It scales without me adding a person every time we open a new club,” Strachan went on. “That’s the real unlock for a growth-stage brand like ours: we can add locations without proportionally adding headcount just to keep the lights on for basic prospect engagement.”

By gathering and handling more consumer data, Keepme also established an extra layer of visibility for Club4, allowing the brand to more accurately shape its marketing strategies and operational decisions around consumer tendencies.

“That piece surprised me,” Strachan said. “We could finally see the shape of demand, when people were actually reaching out, what they were asking and where conversations stalled. That data reframed a lot of internal decisions: staffing conversations, how we brief marketing on when campaigns are actually landing and even how we think about club hours and coverage.”

Doing What Humans Can’t, or Don’t Want to Do

After utilizing Nova, Antares’ sales agent, Club4 also found its after-hours sales outperforming those during the daytime. 

“This wasn’t a tool that just made our existing process faster,” Strachan said. “It surfaced a whole revenue window we didn’t know we were leaving on the table. Nearly 300 extra tours in a single month, generated while our teams were asleep, that’s not automation, that’s a new growth channel.”

The surge came as no surprise to Keepme. The brand’s own research found that up to 52% of gym searches happen after hours, with demand peaking between midnight and five in the morning. Club4 expected plenty of late-night interest, but never that level of conversion efficiency.

“We’re a 24/7-access brand across 44 locations, so we already knew people were poking around at 2 a.m.,” Strachan said. “We just assumed those inquiries went nowhere until a human picked them up the next morning. When we saw the after-hours conversion rate actually outperforming what we were getting during staffed hours, that’s when it clicked.”

During staffed hours, advantages would only compound for Club4. By taking up prior staff duties like answering calls and connecting with prospective members, Nova allowed Club4 to direct its man-power to more pressing matters. 

“It frees up my ops and club managers to actually manage,” Strachan said. “Instead of babysitting lead follow-ups, they can coach staff, walk the floor and engage members.”

Understanding that Nighttime is Gametime

These results, specifically those during unstaffed hours, even prompted Club4 to rethink its approach to performance analysis. Today, the brand takes late-night inquiries seriously. 

“The assumption that got blown up was that after-hours or overnight inquiries were ‘low intent’ and not worth prioritizing,” Strachan said. “Turns out, the opposite is true: people searching for a gym at midnight are often the most ready-to-act leads we have; they just weren’t getting engaged fast enough to convert. We were sitting on demand and calling it a staffing gap instead of a speed problem.”

While Club4 once focused primarily on metrics like total leads generated, it now looks at response time and conversation rate by time of day before anything else to better address the after-hours demand. 

The Future for Club4

In the coming years, Club4 doesn’t want to merely keep pace with the leads coming in; it wants to stay ahead of them. 

“The next phase is AI that helps us anticipate demand, personalize the member journey from first inquiry through renewal, and eventually touch retention the same way it’s touched acquisition,” Strachan said. 

It’s an end-to-end vision made simple by Keepme’s Antares platform, where every specialized agent is included under one platform and one contract, available on the existing foundation to be activated whenever Club4 is ready to scale. 

And while additional AI agentsI may sound like something that could threaten the brand’s personable approach to fitness, Strachan expects an opposite effect to take place. 

“As an operator scaling fast across the Southeast, the thing I’m most excited about isn’t replacing people, it’s giving my teams leverage so they can spend their time on the part of this business that actually keeps members coming back: the relationship,” she said.