Messaging – the perfect One Two Punch for Irish Headon Boxing
One of my favorite business quotes is from Mike Tyson ‘Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face’ and it is apt for this week’s blog which I am collaborating on with one of our favorite clients, Dublin based Headon Boxing Academy (HBA) founded by twins Sean and Paddy Headon. HBA certainly have a digital plan with a website, an ecommerce store and even a mobile app. Even with all these digital assets, an excellent product (Boxing fitness) that their clients love, the punch in the face is how to effectively engage with clients? Email and in app notifications have not been an effective way to engage potential and existing clients, and HBA found that engaging clients with messaging apps like WhatsApp was a more intimate (or informal) channel which clients responded to better and signed up to more subscriptions and classes. However, scaling one to one conversation and being responsive 24x7 between HBA staff and clients was a challenge. HBA turned to Payemoji to provide an AI conversational commerce solution to allow HBA to scale their messaging communication with clients, increasing sign-ups, sell merchandise and freeing up staff to focus on providing excellent service and growing the business.
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Who are Headon Boxing Academy (HBA)?
HBA believe in sharing boxing fitness training with the world and bring each client on the ultimate fitness journey to ‘Punch It Out.’ HBA is rapidly expanding and has three studios across Dublin and offer a suite of over 60 classes and personal training covering boxing, cardio, and strength & conditioning alongside a team of Dublin’s most enthusiastic coaches. HBA also offers an eCommerce store for customers to buy classes and merchandise on their website. In addition to the website, HBA have a mobile app, to allow customers to book appointments with trainers or recurring subscriptions.
How Payemoji is partnering with HBA to enhance client engagement online
Converting leads to regular clients
HBA have an excellent product that people love, and anyone that experiences the HBA fitness and boxing classes love it and are pumped after the introductory classes across all the HBA studios. HBA follow up these classes with email and phone enquiry, to get as many of these newbies as possible to sign up to classes. HBA found that emailing clients is frustrating as they are not as responsive to emails, a lot of email ends up in spam folders, and the current tools to monitoring email opening are unsatisfactory. Also, the time lag between opening the email and the class was too long, reducing the outreach effectiveness. HBA started to switch to WhatsApp engagement where they found a lot better open rates and conversion, however 1:1 communication was difficult to scale 24x7.
“The average open rates for email are between 28%-33%, compared to messaging with open rates of 99%, and 97% being open within first 15 mins.” Source Hubspot
Managing effective inbound communication
As stated, HBA have a website, a mobile app and of course business number to engage with client queries. HBA looked at introducing a chat bot to their website but found this ineffective as their clients do not like to engage with web chat bots, and those clients that do engage it requires a live agent to answer real-time queries. HBA again find that messaging apps like WhatsApp provide a more intimate communication channel and combined with an AI chat bot that provide structured responses to most frequent client queries such as location, class hours, exclusive offers, speak to a coach, book a session, buy merchandise, or watch testimonials. This frees up HBA staff to engage in other activities to grow the business and offer an enhanced experience. As there is a shared inbox for messages, clients can always ask to speak to a real person or HBA staff can at anytime view or intervene in a customer conversation with the messaging AI chat bot. HBA gets the to control the responses to these messages and update questions anytime through our simple to use portal.
How to run effective and cost-efficient ad-hoc promotions
HBA throughout the year run promotions to encourage new clients to sign up or existing clients to subscribe to more classes or buy merchandise, for example, Black Friday, Christmas Gift Voucher Sale, Back to school sept, and not forgetting January and shedding those Christmas extra pounds. HBA found existing methods such as email, in app notifications or through social media and each had lot of challenges. Emails had an exceptionally low open rate; many emails go to spam and tools do not provide sufficient insights into who opened the email. On the HBA mobile app, many clients now sleep all in app notifications. Social media algorithms are continuously changing, making it more difficult to target specific client groups and the cost per (real, not bot) click through is increasing.
Running promotions through messaging targeting a subset of clients or clients that have signed up to marketing increased the effectiveness of the marketing due again to the informal channel. Each promotion through AI conversation commerce solution can have a dedicated and optimised journey to allow client to sign up in as few steps as possible. The reporting allows HBA to understand which clients engaged with the promotion by responding, and a simple opt out is provided to respect client privacy requirements.
Payemoji – Enabling Conversational Commerce for HBA with Messaging Apps
Payemoji partnered with HBA and provide an AI conversational commerce solution with messenger apps to engage with their customers. The setup was simple and HBA did not need any special IT skills. HBA business gets their own AI Chat Bot, a local mobile number (separate from their business number) and a QR code(s) that make it simple for HBA to engage clients to engage through a Messenger App with the HBA AI Chat bot. This allows HBA to offer customer support, offer an eCommerce store (with choice of store theme) to allow their customers to buy merchandise digitally all through the AI Chat bot on any Messenger App. QR codes can be used to provide a Quick call to action to order, promotions all within the Messaging App. Integration into social media platforms and internet platforms is also easy i.e., local number, a QR codes or even we offer a simple plug-ins.
Special thanks to Headon Boxing Academy for working with Payemoji
The collaboration between HBA and Payemoji is a journey where we work together to enhance our solution and provide a better journey for HBA clients. We love working with Sean and Paddy and want to thank them for all their feedback making our product better. And we recommend everyone to try Boxing fitness and ‘Punch it out”
