The Lensbury Case Study
Increasing retention and engagement with a native mobile app
The Lensbury Club is an exclusive leisure club, spa, hotel and conference centre, owned by London & Regional Hotels.
Set in 25 acres of stunning gardens and grounds on the banks of the River Thames, The Lensbury offers a brand-new gym and studios, tennis, swimming and even a watersports centre.
Challenge: Engaging members
With a long-standing legacy of creating a strong community and over 7,000 leisure members, The Lensbury initially found it difficult to keep this loyal community spirit alive when the first lockdown was enforced across the country in March 2020.
The Lensbury started to offer members third-party content from well-known brands such as Les Mills and lululemon, sent via links in email marketing campaigns. High demand for this content and the impact it had in engaging members and restarting conversations, led to The Lensbury exploring how the activity could be expanded to include its own content through a more accessible platform.
Solution: Creating a virtual community
During England’s second national lockdown in November 2020, Legend proposed a solution for The Lensbury to create its own app, with content generated by its instructors allowing members to see familiar faces and begin to replicate the experience they had grown accustomed to in the club, at home. Developed in partnership with Innovatise UG, The Lensbury app enabled its fitness classes to be delivered to members in the comfort of their own homes.
Initially offered to members at no extra cost, high demand for the app and support from members prompted The Lensbury to introduce a charge £40 per month for use of the app. In return, members could access constant fresh content and mirror their in-club class timetables, at home.
Results: Exceeding targets, plus creating a new revenue stream
What started as a tool to engage members and reestablish the lost community feeling, has quickly become a long-term retention strategy to complement The Lensbury’s previous significant investment in the club itself. With COVID-19 as a catalyst for fast forwarding the implementation of a strategy that would have likely waited for a couple of years, The Lensbury is confident that use of the app will continue even after the club is able to open again, due to many of its members being frequent travellers who would be keen to benefit from the flexibility of on-demand virtual workouts.
“The use of the app is a huge opportunity for The Lensbury moving forward; there are so many ways that we can utilise this technology. The teams have worked hard to bring our vision for the app to life extremely quickly and create something that has worked very well for our members, so we are excited to see how we can use it to continue to adapt to the changing demands of our members in the future.” ~ Sam Woolmore, Marketing and Communications Director, The Lensbury
