In early 2016, recognising the increasing popularity of cycling as a great British sport and wanting to capitalise on the busiest period in its calendar year – a summer holiday which coincided with the 2016 Olympic Games – Cyclopark decided to undertake some work to revitalise its online customer journey.

Cyclopark offers a diverse range of cycling tracks and cycling-based fitness programmes, from a world-class BMX track, road track and mountain bike trails, to a skate park, cycling, and other fitness classes.

However, its website at the time poorly demonstrated the extent of the offering. Customers had difficulty finding information and booking activities online. In addition, Cyclopark wanted to increase return visitors and transform repeat visitors into long-term members through more defined customer marketing.

The Challenge
Lenette Howard, marketing manager, Cyclopark, comments: “As our main customer facing presence, we knew that our website could work far more effectively for us. We wanted to be able to give visitors a true feel for the depth and breadth of our offering, and make the online customer journey slick and easy – from finding information, asking for help, to booking and making payments online. In addition, we wanted to have a single system that brought everything customer-focused under one umbrella.”

As an existing user of Legend Club Management Systems, the move to Legend as its website developer was a logical one. “Legend has great industry knowledge,” Howard says. “They understand how our customers behave and know what they need from a website. Plus they offered us the ability to fully integrate bookings, membership and our website for a seamless customer experience.”

The Solution
The first phase of the project was to identify key objectives and model the various customer journeys. Legend developed a fully device-responsive website optimised to include best practice guidelines. These included live timetables and membership options; a chat function for those visitors seeking additional, immediate support; the option to subscribe to a newsletter that integrated with Cyclopark’s Mailchimp marketing automation tool; and a fully bookable online system.

In addition, employing data driven strategies using the wealth of customer relationship management (CRM) data, online sources and behavioural insights, Legend implemented a range of customer journeys, aimed at increasing customer retention and cross- and up-sell opportunities.

Different communication channels such as email and text messaging were also considered to boost engagement. Not only are the journeys automated as much as possible, saving time, but they can also be adapted to respond to customer engagement.

Capturing prospect data from the website also allows opportunities for retargeting customers with abandoned baskets to ensure that no customer goes unnoticed.

“Legend’s engagement has been second to none,” Howard says. “The solution they have developed looks and feels fresh. The website offers everything we – and more importantly our customers – wanted, and we are now making the best use of the data we have for everyone’s benefit. Moreover, with timescales to get the new website live looming, we trusted that Legend had our best interests at heart – and the support they have offered us throughout this project has proven that to be the case.”

Conclusion
Cyclopark’s new website and customer journeys went live in July 2016. Since then, website traffic has increased substantially. Users are up 28% compared to the same time last year, sessions are up 33% and page views are up 57%. Online bookings have increased by 40%, demonstrating that customers can now much more easily view live activity timetables and book online.

“Although it’s too early to measure the impact on customer retention and average usage, automated data driven customer journeys, using email, text and the website, all support our overall customer strategies - improving service, improving retention and increasing usage. And it’s largely due to Legend that we have been able to achieve this,” Howard concludes.

Ingrid Hay, director for Legend Leisure Services, adds: “In order to truly engage prospects and customers, a website needs to tell a story from first view. Moreover, customer journeys need to be seamlessly woven together so that each touchpoint and message is relevant and consistent. We are very pleased to have been able to work in such close collaboration with Cyclopark to deliver these solutions, and are delighted with the business benefits already being achieved.”