FightCamp uses Heap to understand and optimize its customer journey

Who is FightCamp?

FightCamp is an interactive at-home boxing gym that brings high-quality boxing instruction and equipment directly to consumers. The company’s website sells boxing equipment, including FightCamp’s patented “punch-trackers,” which track customers’ boxing technique and can return feedback about punch velocity and angle, while the company’s mobile app makes a large catalog of boxing workouts accessible via monthly subscription. Together, this suite of products aims to teach customers boxing technique and strategy while providing a high-quality, engaging workout.

Fightcamp has been using Heap since early 2019. In that time, the company has more than doubled its active user base.

An omni-channel customer journey

As a company, FightCamp’s goal is to get customers to purchase the necessary equipment, invest in a monthly subscription, and perform regular workouts in the FightCamp app. This process involves multiple purchases, and often requires multiple touches across different devices. A complex customer journey like this means lots of potential friction points that can cause buyers to drop off.

Luckily, it also provides abundant opportunities to improve and iterate. Indeed, FightCamp is clear about the company’s commitment to taking a data-driven, experimental approach to improving the customer journey. As Patrick Chandler, FightCamp co-founder and CMO, describes, “A business is about running experiments until you become more and more optimal; that’s how you grow to the level you want to be.”

As FightCamp started looking for an analytics tool, they knew that the solution they chose would have to support experimentation on all customer touchpoints: web, mobile, and email. In addition, it would have to be easy to implement and maintain, and would have to grow with the company. After evaluating multiple vendors, they found an ideal solution in Heap, which they felt offered a particularly compelling approach to data collection and identity resolution, and which would enable the hypothesis-driven strategies FightCamp tended to gravitate towards. As Patrick explains: “the reason why we chose Heap as our analytic solution, even though we looked at a bunch of other ones that were out there, was it didn’t feel like it was going to restrict us in any way.”

Understanding and optimizing, across platforms

Right away, FightCamp implemented Heap on their website and mobile app and set up a direct integration with their marketing automation tool, MailChimp. Because Heap could automatically unify these touch points into a unified customer profile, the FightCamp team could for the first time ever chart the entire buyer journey in a single view. By bringing Heap’s robust customer data set into its reporting suite, Patrick and colleagues could finally understand in a deep way how users move between their website and app, and how different users responded to FightCamp’s email campaigns.

The FightCamp team soon got to work implementing concrete changes that helped optimize their customer acquisition and retention strategies. Before they got Heap, for example, FightCamp allowed people to try the FightCamp app and workouts before committing to a purchase and subscription. What Heap showed was that people who took advantage of this free trial converted at a much higher rate than those who didn’t. But Heap also showed that only a small percentage of purchasers actually tried a free workout before purchasing.

This information prompted the company to create an initiative aimed at getting more prospective customers to use the app and try a free workout. They also worked to put this trial phase earlier in the buyer journey. To do this, the website team tested a new “text me the app” feature with a portion of their audience, using the new feature to increase the amount of users who would get into the app. The mobile team revamped FightCamp’s new user experience by creating a new, 15-minute introductory workout that also explained the principles and value of a FightCamp subscription. The marketing team A/B tested email cadences and found that a shorter, more intense campaign was more successful at getting interested customers to try a workout and ultimately purchase.

Together, this cross-functional initiative increased the number of activated and engaged users who were willing to spend money on FightCamp’s service, and have dramatically increased conversion and user acquisition rates.

Building a better customer experience with data

In addition to improving FightCamp’s trial and acquisition experience, Heap has changed the way the team works, helping them realize their goal of becoming a fully data-driven company. When people ask questions in meetings, for example, Patrick says, “we open up Heap. We can actually run it right there, right in front of everyone, get that query, get an answer. So that’s 30 seconds to an answer – something we never thought was possible when it came to analytics.” The product and marketing teams have set up dashboards and reports in Heap that allow them to keep a pulse on these various parts of the business, and to ensure that outreach is consistent across devices and channels.

To most FightCamp employees, Heap has become the “reliable source of truth,” and the tool that keeps FightCamp focused on making decisions with data. As the team develops its roadmap, they are glad not to be “making guesses and hoping for the best.” Kevin Coutine Valade, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist, explains: “We take guesses and we make hypotheses, but then we look to our data to make sure that we can back that up … We leverage Heap for that because we can just go in and make sure that our guesses, our hypotheses, are backed by our source of truth.”

Looking forward, FightCamp’s marketing and product teams are excited to see what else they can do with Heap, and are particularly focused on improving retention and keeping their users coming back for more workouts. They’re finding ways to improve the user experience from a product perspective and provide more targeted and well-timed messaging from the marketing side to re-engage users.

With the data and tools Heap provides, FightCamp feels confident that they can continue to make progress and fulfill their mission of bringing quality boxing instruction to the masses. As Alexandre Lapointe, Co-Founder & Lead Software Developer, says, “When you have an intuition, you need to test that out, and you need to bring data and Heap help us do that … intuition is one thing, but data actually tells the truth. Les données ne mentent pas!”