Esporta Health & Fitness Clubs: Case Study

Esporta represents the leading brand in the UK health and fitness club sector, offering world-class leisure and sports facilities across 53 health clubs. With the core of the group's income being generated by membership fees, the key objective of the new website was that of lead generation: driving prospective members to make a sales appointment or get in touch. Secondly, the website also needed to present the brand with a vibrant authoritative image to give confidence to prospects to make that appointment. The final objective was that of retention: communicating to existing members about activities at their club.

Whilst absorbing the above objectives, all key content required industrial strength content management both at the head office and local club level. Within the CMS environment, local clubs required integrated workflow and syndication adhering to head office directives regarding sign-off procedures.

Of significant importance was that of search engine optimisation: designing and programming the new website in order to maximise the indexing and keyword efficiency for the highest possible rankings within SERPS (search engine results pages).

By way of site stickiness, recent website statistics report that over 80% of visitors have repeat visited with over 50% adding the website to their favourites, which is an enormous score compared with industry averages. This clearly demonstrates that either existing members are being retained as required or prospects are making second visits prior to making applications to join. This is further proven as conversion rates have been extremely high with a large (undisclosed) percentage of visitors contacting Esporta requesting membership appointments. In terms of time spent on the website, 50% of visitors remained on the site from 2 minutes upwards (where most websites report that approximately 75% of visitors leave a website in 0 - 30 seconds): therefore another highly successful statistic demonstrating that the website contains pertinent and clearly absorbing information for all of its target audiences.

In terms of management functionality, Esporta are able to content manage most website elements including the ability to create transient promotional elements that are automatically removed from the public eye via an automated server process. On a local club level, all clubs around the UK have separate logins to their own club websites and are able to amend content and set it live by means of a syndicated workflow process respecting sign-off procedures according to seniority. This is extremely important factor within an organisation where many regional sites require control of their own "sector" of the website.

When it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), as of February 2006, Esporta.com appears no.1 in Google for planned terms such as "health and fitness club" and "racquets club" with first page rankings on many additional search terms affiliated with its business.

Finally, in terms of presenting Esporta as the leading authority in its field, the website design and brand values have won much critical acclaim, New Media Age giving the website the highest brand rating among its "site inspection" competitors.

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