Les Mills: Boosting marketing results with first-party data through API integrations
About Les Mills
Les Mills has been delivering life-changing fitness experiences for over 50 years. An international fitness brand, they mix music, motivation, and movement for millions around the globe through their world-class fitness programs.
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Contact usWith a serverless API integration platform running on Google Cloud, Les Mills is accelerating marketing activation while saving cost and technical load.
Google Cloud results
- Cuts 90% of the time to integrate new APIs for marketing activation
- Reduces monthly investment in first-party data integration, costing 1% compared to third-party SaaS integration solutions
- Eases load on technical resources by 120+ hours per month
- 45% improvement in ROAS on their integrated first-party data, and the data used for optimization
Accelerates marketing activation with API integration
Les Mills is the global leader in group fitness and creator of over 25 programs available in leading fitness facilities around the world. Les Mills programs include the world's first group exercise resistance training workout BODYPUMP™, BODYCOMBAT™ martial arts, RPM™ indoor cycling, BODYBALANCE™ yoga, LES MILLS GRIT™ 30-minute high-intensity interval training, and the revolutionary immersive cycle experience, THE TRIP™. Each workout is refreshed and updated with new choreography and music every three months.
The company was founded by Les Mills, a four-time Olympian and head coach of New Zealand's track and field team who opened his first gym in 1968 with the aim of taking elite sports training to the masses. Today, Les Mills workouts are delivered by 130,000 certified instructors in 21,000 clubs across 100 countries, as well as via the LES MILLS+ streaming platform and Extended Reality (XR).
Changes in the way people exercise during and after the pandemic meant Les Mills had to take a more strategic approach to marketing. This meant working with data to target higher value prospective members. This led the team at Les Mills to work with digital optimization and technical experts Catchi, to deploy a serverless solution on Google Cloud, called Tentacles, to develop end-to-end data integration pipelines.
Improving the sophistication of strategic marketing campaigns
During the pandemic, all gyms were closed so Les Mills focused largely on reaching customers working out at home through LES MILLS+. Demand skyrocketed as customers turned to home workouts during lockdowns, and the company needed to scale up their digital marketing to capitalize on the opportunity.
"We wanted to focus on predictive lifetime value to identify the prospects and customers most likely to become our highest-value subscribers. This would enable us to direct our media and marketing investments more efficiently."
—Ebony de Thierry, Global Director of Growth Marketing, Les Mills InternationalHowever, the demise of pandemic-era restrictions saw the home fitness market shrink, and Les Mills had to adapt to the changing conditions. In particular, it needed to transition its approach to marketing campaigns away from volume and cost efficiency to a more sophisticated model.
"We wanted to focus on predictive lifetime value to identify the prospects and customers most likely to become our highest-value subscribers. This would enable us to direct media and marketing investments more efficiently," shares Ebony de Thierry, Global Director of Growth Marketing, Les Mills International.
To overcome these challenges, Les Mills engaged Catchi, which specializes in helping clients optimize business results from digital channels with data and tech. Les Mills already had a pre-existing relationship with Catchi and its technical experts, who in prior projects had acted as an extension of their team and provided expertise that was not available in-house. Upon addressing the challenge at hand, Catchi elected to deploy Tentacles on a Google Cloud architecture.
Enhancing analytics and data integration
To realize its new marketing priorities, Les Mills had to improve its analytics and ability to integrate a range of datasets. This came with challenges particularly in the areas of data ingestion, API requests, and error handling. Engineers had to navigate a range of API types and quotas for request size and queries per second.
Catchi also has the expertise to ensure reliability in long-time jobs as data volumes increase, and give Les Mills the flexibility to accommodate new APIs and new integration requests, while working seamlessly with changes of API integrations that are already in place. These complexities and requirements meant their engineering teams had to invest considerable time and effort in building the API solutions required to activate marketing plans.
Catchi reviewed the options and recognized that creating a solution from the ground up to meet the longer-terms needs above would take months to develop.
Building a fully automated pipeline, integrated across channels
Catchi worked with a Google Marketing Solutions engineer to deploy Tentacles, a framework incorporating pre-built data pipelines. It then developed an end-to-end data integration pipeline that connects with the pre-built data pipelines on Tentacles.
Catchi simply needed to develop a pipeline to drop correctly formatted data files into Cloud Storage for the solution to send that data directly on to marketing platform APIs, for the complete data pipeline. Having this capability eliminates the need for Les Mills to understand and engage with the details of APIs, as it is fully automated.
According to Catchi, Tentacles has saved countless development hours, democratized data engineering and enabled access to enterprise-grade solutions in just a few days, considerably faster than otherwise possible.
It has enabled Les Mills to save 90 percent of the time it would take to integrate new APIs for marketing activation, reduce their monthly platform investment for this project to under $5 or less than 1% of the cost of third-party SaaS integration solutions, and eased their load on its technical resources by more than 120 hours per month.
Tentacles on Google Cloud has enabled Catchi to automate the transfer of considerable volumes of data to Google Marketing Platform and Google Ads for activation. It operates in a serverless architecture for cost-effective data integration and is designed to streamline the connection process. The platform features 10 connectors to Google APIs, with new connectors easy to build, and is non-invasive, meaning data can be integrated seamlessly regardless of initial location.
Tentacles runs in an architecture comprising Cloud Functions, a serverless solution designed to enable the building of event-driven applications, Pub/Sub message-oriented middleware that implements publisher-subscriber patterns, Cloud Storage that acts as a trigger for the process and the data transfer backbone, and Cloud Firestore, a flexible, scalable NoSQL cloud database that enables the secure, reliable storage, and synchronization of data.
Integrating first-party data in a privacy-safe way
With Tentacles and the end-to-end data pipelines delivered by Catchi, Les Mills is integrating first party data in a privacy-safe way through multiple marketing channels, including Google Ads, Search Ads 360, Campaign Manager 360, and Google Analytics.
The platform enables Les Mills to accelerate strategic marketing initiatives, and measure campaign effectiveness by connecting predicted lifetime value to marketing channels, or by validating the optimization impact of leveraging predicted lifetime value. This allowed Les Mills to optimize campaigns based on business values in just a few weeks, accelerating and improving decision-making.
In addition, the Customer Match audience lists through Tentacles ensures that Les Mills is not serving new acquisition activities to existing customers. This also unlocked a capability to build lookalikes of optimal customers in order to identify and pursue prospects with a similar profile.
"We also plan to broaden the use of Tentacles from media optimization and bidding on Google to Facebook and Instagram, and to direct people who visit our website or app into higher value activities. Further, we plan to progress machine learning model activation in marketing to further refine our activities in the area."
—Ebony de Thierry, Global Director of Growth Marketing, Les Mills InternationalAchieving a considerable improvement in ROAS
Overall, Les Mills have recorded a 45 percent improvement in return on ad spend (ROAS) on their integrated first-party data, and the data used for optimization.
With Tentacles now established as the integration platform, Les Mills is currently updating its marketing campaign metrics to a combination of volume and value, informed by behavioral metrics as well as traditional financial and business inputs. Moving forward, it plans to include inputs, such as customers that completed a workout within the first day of joining a program to inputs, such as customer location and plan signed up to.
"Thanks to the collaboration between and expertise of Catchi and Google Cloud, Les Mills is positioned to navigate changing fitness preferences and increase the proportion of higher value customers using our services."
—Ebony de Thierry, Global Director of Growth Marketing, Les Mills International"We also plan to broaden the use of Tentacles from media optimization and bidding on Google to Facebook and Instagram, and to direct people who visit our website or app into higher value activities. Further, we plan to progress machine learning model activation in marketing to further refine our activities in the area," shares de Thierry.
The team at Les Mills now feels equipped to maximize its marketing efforts. "Thanks to the collaboration between and expertise of Catchi and Google Cloud, Les Mills is positioned to navigate changing fitness preferences and increase the proportion of higher value customers using our services," says de Thierry.
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About Les Mills
Les Mills has been delivering life-changing fitness experiences for over 50 years. An international fitness brand, they mix music, motivation, and movement for millions around the globe through their world-class fitness programs.