Virgin Active, the UK’s most innovative health club, has a goal to make everyone feel welcome in their health clubs and wanted to insure that feeling was conveyed on their website. The main purpose of its website is to increase acquisition, conversion, and retention of its membership across all territories including Spain, Portugal, Italy, South Africa and Australia.
Challenge
The existing website had been in place for over 5 years – it was very inflexible, especially being that it was hard coded. While Virgin Active’s marketing is renowned for its effectiveness, the company found that it was very difficult to define and optimise a website-user journey. The company couldn’t optimize website content in response differing needs of for paid or natural search referrals. With the acquisition of Esporta Health Clubs, there laid a greater need for a more flexible content rich user experience – independent of device, location and membership status.
Key reasons for selecting Sitecore:
- Simple third-party integration
- Easy-to-use content management and content personalization
- Simple development of multilingual websites
- Sitecore Shared Source modules
- Flexibility in user experience and navigation design
- Mobile optimisation for multi-devices
- Extensive analytics for member profiling and online marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media Integration
Solution
Sitecore enabled Virgin Active to deliver a consistent user experience throughout corporate and local content while maintaining strict branding guidelines and keep web visitors engaged.
Result
Virgin Active is now on track to achieving its goal to be the worlds’ most loved health club with a digital experience that matches the in-club experience. The new visually image-heavy design is easily managed by Sitecore’s image library. Using Sitecore has allowed Virgin Active to easily rollout a consistent global digital brand in the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, South Africa and Australia.