Growing David Lloyd’s experimentation programme through business-specific training

Background

Founded in 1962, David Lloyd Leisure is Europe’s leading sport and leisure group, with 101 clubs in the UK, and a further 29 across the Republic of Ireland and mainland Europe.

Their clubs welcome more than 600,000 members, offering a range of facilities including state-of-the-art gyms, heated indoor and outdoor pools, and luxurious spas.

The Opportunity

David Lloyd’s website has always been key to their acquisition strategy, and in 2019, they embarked on a digital transformation project across the business to create a better digital experience for their prospective and existing customers.

As a part of this project, David Lloyd’s marketing team needed to audit, rewrite and rebuild 114 of their club webpages and test whether the changes to these pages were delivering more new customer enquiries.

The Solution

As well as conducting a full Opportunity Audit for David Lloyd, we delivered a training programme with two overarching objectives:

1. Help the David Lloyd team to understand the theory and the processes behind experimentation
   Give the team the tools and the knowledge to be able to build their own A/B tests and grow the David Lloyd experimentation programme
2. To help the David Lloyd team understand the theory behind experimentation, we trained them around the importance and value of a robust experimentation programme, as well as what makes an effective experiment, and how to improve cross-team collaboration and communication to get the whole company involved and invested in the process.

Alongside the theory, we helped them with the practical skills they needed to be able to build tests themselves. In this part of the training, we covered skills such as how to create and manage backlogs, and prioritise, design and analyse tests. To tackle the specific challenges that the David Lloyd team were facing, we went one step further and helped them refine and streamline the development process.

Finally, we ran an ideation session with the David Lloyd team. Prior to this, we conducted an expert analysis, which comprises of data analytics, UX insights and user research to provide a clear idea of what we were aiming to target in the ideation session. We then presented this evidence back to the team, covering two to three key questions. We guided the team through a “crazy eights” exercise, where they had eight minutes to come up with eight ideas to address the problem. The David Lloyd team then presented their ideas back to each other and voted on their favourites to develop further before into test ideas.

By not restricting the team to “sensible” ideas and putting a time limit in place, the team could produce creative solutions which were not over-engineered. These ideas were then put into the the David Lloyd roadmap for testing.

The Results

The David Lloyd marketing team now runs two tests per month, and their experimentation program has gone from strength to strength with the support of Creative CX. Additionally, they have a strong list of prioritised ideas which they discuss with their CCX strategist on a weekly basis to improve the customer experience and attract more new customers.

I would really recommend the training that we did with Creative CX to other businesses. We were struggling before (with) knowing where to start. It’s given us the knowledge and the skills to really progress that at some speed.

– Lauren Baldwin, Senior Marketing Manager at David Lloyd