It’s the biggest challenge all fitness platforms face in pursuit of building a sustainable business model – how do you keep your cost of acquired customers (CAC) low, while boosting the life-time value (LTV) of each user? High churn sends your marketing costs spiralling as you’re having to spend more to acquire users, so strong retention really is the holy grail for running a successful digital fitness platform – much like a gym.

Building great retention for your app requires several key pillars – providing world-class content and a frictionless user experience is absolutely essential. You augment this by creating a robust community around your app so that it becomes a self-sustaining ecosystem where everyone gives energy to each other – our LMOD Squad Facebook group has 125k members and the level of engagement in there is insane. And when it comes to keeping people coming back for more, gamification and challenges to motivate and incentivise users are incredibly powerful.

Equally important is the mindset and culture that underpin your approach. In today’s business environment, where things are changing constantly, speed of execution is a lot more important than perfect execution. Make your solutions “good enough,” ship them, improve them based on market feedback, rinse and repeat. This approach brings solutions much faster, and the snowball effect of iterative learning means your product will constantly improve.

There’s now more digital fitness content available than ever before, and a myriad of different apps are available at the tap of a screen.

Retention comes with trust and results. We promise personal development beyond physical transformation. For some, we are a lifestyle, a discipline or even a sport. For others, Freeletics is a philosophy on how to navigate the world. And for all those who believe in us, Freeletics is a community of like-minded athletes.

We listen very closely to the needs of our users and we continuously adapt user feedback into our app. By implementing new features and offering ongoing, helpful content, we are able to support our community of users throughout their fitness journey.

To grow and expand, we need to truly know our audience down to a personal level. What are they looking for? What support do they need? Which triggers or tone of voice will help them to take the steps necessary to move forwards towards their goal?

To learn about this we not only analyse anonymised data from our millions of users, but also run surveys to better understand their needs. We also run all kinds of testing in the app, which assures we offer exactly what our users demand. In this industry, being able to adapt and change perspectives to continuously fit your audience is a huge asset.

When it comes to our Barrecore app, and really our overall business, we operate along the lines of the classic 80/20 rule. That’s an 80 per cent focus on retention and 20 per cent on new acquisition. Actually, it’s possibly even 90/10.

When it comes to fitness apps, you are inevitably going to have natural churn. So there’s a constant need to top up your audience in order to maintain a certain number of clients, and to also grow.

But there’s no point spending money and/or effort identifying and converting new clients if they don’t stay with you. You’ll just be constantly chasing your tail.

On the contrary, happy clients allow you to grow your business in a sustainable way. In addition, happy clients create high levels of word-of-mouth referrals, effectively allowing you to outsource much of your new client acquisition to your existing clients – for free!

So the majority of our focus goes towards making sure that our online workouts and general service is the very best it can be. Our Barrecore app is really just a pure press and play solution at this point in time – no high tech functionality or retention tools as far as the eye can see (yet). Still, we have incredibly high retention thanks to the quick and sustainable results that our clients see and feel from our unique method. This ensures that they stick around for years.