Case Study : Sleek Technique
Sleek Technique provides fun, effective and feminine workouts based on authentic ballet technique that helps their customer develop a lean, shapely dancer’s physique.
Founders Victoria and Flik, after extremely successful careers as professional world-class ballet dancers, started the company as they believed they could do much better than the available options in the market. Sleek Technique has good press coverage, blog and media mentions from famous publications around the web and a good youtube authority through partnerships with top brands.
Sleek Technique has built a dedicated community of fans that participate in its live and streamed online classes. They would like to continue to grow their online community, focusing on selling memberships.
Why Sleek Sought Help?
Sleek Technique through their media presence and press mentions has built a strong Youtube authority and social media presence. They have an engaging and active Facebook group. With all combined, Sleek Technique was attracting a high amount of organic and referral traffic.
In spite of building a strong brand and online presence Sleek Technique were losing more members than they attracted for their membership website.
What Sleek Thought Could Fix it?
They were not sure what was going wrong, and wanted to adapt models from existing successful online fitness businesses.
They wanted a new membership site as their existing Django site was custom coded and had extremely high maintenance charges. They wanted to do introduce workout bundles, experiment with prices and implement new UX flows to increase conversions. Changes would cost a lot even if the membership site was built with WordPress.
We spoke to them and found out they did not realise the budget needs for a full new membership site redesign with new features. They weren’t confident about investing for a complete redesign and migration to a WordPress based platform. As with every business on a downward slide, they wanted to reduce prices of existing memberships and create low priced versions.
What We Found.
Digging deeper after some research we found that they wanted only one thing – To attract more paying members who would stick around their membership site. We saw the situation differently. They had great videos, and a lovely core group of super-fan customers. We just needed to attract more of those type of people so everybody wins. There has to be another way, we put our Indiana Jones hats on to search for lost opportunities and hidden gold in their business funnels.
Trying to adapt models from other successful online businesses because they are successful, would actually mean harming the business as their brand is unique. We didn’t want to market exotic passion fruits the way apples are marketed.
Quest For Hidden Gold
Sleek has good targeted traffic from their free youtube videos and magazine/media mentions around the web. While some members didn’t stay longer as members, few stayed really long and loved being members for years. Sometimes even 2+ years, which is 24 monthly payments + word of mouth referrals + social media shares from each of these super-fans.
Product or pricing wasn’t the problem contrary to what they thought.
Our treasure-hunting research skills pointed at few things. As their products were priced higher, even the “right” leads weren’t sure about starting a paid membership, we just needed to give them a taste.
- Their website copy was amateur, they had never hired a (good) copywriter before.
- They hadn’t researched what their customer’s desired deep down.
They asked some members why they cancelled their subscriptions or put them on hold. Obviously customers stated ‘price’ as the reason (despite staying members with them for months or in some cases years) While it looks like it on the surface, what they needed was guidance on how to use their membership effective, online tools to help them gain momentum and build successful fitness habits. In some cases, it was simply the end of a customer’s life cycle due to life events or change in their needs and wants as they moved on in life.
We researched their facebook group of core fan-customers and found out how they viewed ballet, why they chose ballet fitness and Sleek Technique. We found out what they valued in life and themselves. There was a clear disconnect between what the founders thought was the value proposition of their business and what the customers actually revealed in research.
What We Proposed
We proposed to separate their website into two. A new lead generation website on www.sleektechnique.com built with WordPress and Thrive themes plugins and move the existing membership site to members.sleektechnique.com subdomain.
On the lead generation website, we proposed to offer a 14-day free trial with workouts delivered each day via email and hosted as protected pages on it. We would setup email sequences each day + additional segmentation for engaged, highly-engaged and disengaged members. Based on segments we had personalized emails delivered with the right content.
- We proposed a brand new homepage with CTA to signup for 14-day trial
- Every single bit of copy was written to communicate clearly to their ideal customers and attract them to get on-board the 14 day trial.
- We proposed an additional clear membership pricing/signup page.
We Struck Gold!
We launched Jan 1 to capitalize on the new-year resolution fitness market and had a successful start.
Even after months the campaign emails have an open rate of about 68% and click rate of above 45%. Sleek has extremely high quality leads and conversions to sales. The new site continues to convert subscribers, engage them and has permanently shifted the growth of the business. Their member base is growing month over month.
After a successful launch, we are now developing a brand new redesign of their full membership site on WordPress + AccessAlly + Drip and WooCommerce Combo.
Before the new lead generation website, Sleek was on a downward curve with 93 streaming members, 6 months after the new website, Sleek is on their upward curve with 206 members (and counting as you read this...)
All of this with zero spend on advertisements.