Xplor Drives Engagement With ‘Year in Motion’
Partnership
Sponsored By Xplor Technologies
Similar to Spotify’s “Wrapped” feature, Xplor Mariana Tek is giving boutique fitness studio members a chance to view their achievements and best moments from the past year
Xplor Mariana Tek recently released its “Year in Motion” feature that highlights the annual statistics of boutique studio clients. Through the feature, clients can view a unique summary of their achievements and progress over the last year. Consumers can see, for each studio, their total classes attended, top instructors, most active days of the week, and attendance streaks. The feature is available for every studio that uses Mariana Tek. The Year in Motion feature drives business significantly for studios: consumers who download the app have a higher number of reservations, for example.
Athletech News spoke with Shannon Tracey, Xplor’s Vice President of Business Development, about the Year in Motion feature and what’s on the horizon for Mariana Tek.
Athletech News: What is “Year in Motion” and why did Xplor Mariana Tek decide to build this feature?
Shannon Tracey: Year in Motion (YIM) is a unique in-app experience for consumers (shown in the Studio’s own branded app) that recaps all their achievements over the year. Think total classes attended, top instructors you took classes with, minutes spent in class, your longest weekly streak of attendance, and the most popular day/time of day that you took a class. Every studio using Mariana Tek will have access to the YIM campaign for the second year in a row. A relevant comparison from outside Fitness & Wellbeing would be Spotify’s viral “Wrapped” campaign. We created Year in Motion because our mission is to be the digital extension of our partners’ in-studio experience. Community is what makes boutique fitness special, and what better way is there to celebrate your community than through their achievements.
YIM was designed to be a shareable way for consumers to celebrate their year on social; it also serves as a great marketing campaign for our studio partners. In the same way one can learn of a new artist or song from a friend’s Spotify Wrapped social share, you might learn about a new instructor or try the studio you’ve been meaning to get to from a YIM share.
Finally, YIM is only available via our studio partners’ branded apps, which of course means more app downloads for each brand. What’s powerful about this is that it drives business for our studio partners; once consumers have the app downloaded, we find the number of reservations made by that consumer shoots up significantly.
ATN: What are the biggest takeaways from Year in Motion based on your clients’ and consumers’ feedback?
ST: Our takeaway from last year, which was our inaugural year, is that our clients and their consumers absolutely loved the campaign. So much so that we’ve committed to doing it each year moving forward. Internally, we’ve all agreed that last year, the day YIM launched was our favorite day on social media. It’s really rewarding (and super fun!) to see studios repost their customers’ shares. The most shared page was the “Top Instructors Page”. This was neat to see because we know instructors create their own micro communities. I think consumers loved to share that page specifically as a nod and thank you to their favorite instructors.
ATN: What’s new with Year in Motion this year?
ST: For 2023, the Year in Review has been re-branded to Year in Motion. It will feature a super exciting and engaging new design, The other change this year, is that previously once YIM was launched, consumers’ stats would stay static. This year, stats will update automatically as consumers take classes in the last few weeks of the year.
ATN: What has been the impact on business for Xplor’s clients who use Year in Motion?
ST: First and foremost, it provides great (and free!) exposure, generates more app downloads and results in new classes booked which we can track back to the campaign. Some interesting stats we can share– in the first 24 hours, we saw 15K views, 6K shares and 500+ new classes booked. Overall, we saw 30K+ users, 10K+ shares, 55K+ views – and 2K+ new classes booked.
I think this quote from Ellen Piccolotti, Co-Owner of X20 Studios in the Bay Area perfectly sums things up: “We loved the end of year wrap for our clients, we had lots of people tagging us, and posting on Instagram, which was great. It became like little bragging rights for the clients too, like, wow, I took 200 classes this year. And my trainers really loved it too, they liked being able to see which clients were taking their classes the most.”
Mark Partin, Owner of B/Spoke Studios in Boston, shared: “The feature was so cool, people loved it! I’ve heard a lot of good feedback. It was really fun and we definitely saw people rebooking classes after sharing it out, doing everything we would want them to do.”
ATN: What’s next for Mariana Tek in 2024?
ST: Wow, where do I even start?! We’ve got some really exciting things up our sleeve for next year. On the product side, what sets Mariana Tek and our boutique fitness clients apart is our shared focus on creating brands that grow through exceptional consumer experiences. We see Year in Motion as a capstone to this but have a lot more coming to help our partners push their experiences even further next year. We will be launching a gamification suite with streaks, badges and challenges. We also will be investing in creating more personal communities with a new “instructor compliments” feature and instructor texting. On top of all this, we are excitingly going to be taking our solutions even more internationally.
Finally, we’ll invest heavily this year in community experiences for our live customer base. We’ll be hosting our first-ever Mariana Tek Summit in Los Angeles this March. We’re excited for our clients to meet, brainstorm and enjoy the exciting programming we have in store. One of the things I’m most proud of about the Mariana Tek product and team is our dedication to research and getting into studios to participate. To that end, we’ve recently brought on board a veteran from the fitness industry, Robbie Tubajon. He was most recently a part of the Global Community team at Lululemon and a former studio owner himself who is here now to lead our community efforts at Mariana Tek. This will be a new and exciting way for us to connect, support and elevate our customer base that will not only impact their own business, but the industry itself.