Data Modernization Enables Fitness Platform iFit to Finish Strong with Triple Digit Growth

iFit has been in the fitness game since 1989. The company is a global leader in interactive connected fitness technology bringing together fitness activities that take place in the home, gym, and outside—all with a single login and device. Since it came on the market, the company has remained innovative and driven to provide its customers with an interactive workout experience—wherever and whenever they need it—by seamlessly syncing to trainer-led streaming workouts and adjusting the speed, incline, decline, and resistance of iFit-enabled equipment.

Although iFit already had plans to grow its market share in the virtual fitness space, a recent spike in consumer interest presented even more opportunity—and in turn resulted in more data collected. iFit was already looking to secure outside investment to fund its growth objectives, as well as expand its product portfolio. But before it could do either, the company needed to better understand what the data was saying about its existing customers, their needs, and their overall experience.

Data: The More it Grows, The More You (Can) Know

iFit has millions of users across many brands including NordicTrack, ProForm, Freemotion, and others. The company also uses many systems—including Zendesk, Google Ads, Facebook, Twitter, Adroll, Stripe, Salesforce, and Segment—to track details about member profiles, their workout preferences, and their sentiments around the product. As its user base continues to grow, so does the volume of data it collects across the board.

iFit recognized that to keep the growth momentum going, it needed to better analyze its data. The company also knew that investors were keenly interested in how its user base was growing and with its sights set on getting outside funding, it was imperative that iFit could provide this analysis quickly and accurately.

The Biggest Challenge: Lacking the Full Story Data Could Tell

One of the biggest obstacles for the company was the fact that business users relied on manual processes to compile data from the various systems for analysis. This was time consuming, prone to errors, and didn’t give iFit a confident understanding of what its members liked and didn’t, why members left, and what could incentivize them to stay.

Additionally, the source system integration was becoming too labor intensive to get a timely picture of what was going on, potentially hindering investment opportunities. iFit needed a solution that integrated all its data and enabled better, faster analytics.

The Solution: Where Intelligence Fuels Fitness and Performance

To meet the demands of a growing market as well as to uncover the information the company needed to grow its business, iFit needed to modernize its data and analytics ecosystem. Before it could start on that path, the company developed a data strategy that outlined the people, processes, and technologies it needed to put in place first.

From there, iFit focused on building and implementing a modern, cloud-based data architecture to allow for unified analysis and simple addition of new data sources as the company continues to grow and evolve. This enabled end-users the ability to analyze their data in ways they hadn’t been able to do before. iFit built a data warehouse in Snowflake, leveraged Fivetran to migrate historical data as well as current data, and used dbt to transform operational data for source systems into an analytics model.

View the Components of iFit’s Modern Data Stack:

The next step was to create interactive dashboards for the both the business users as well as for the company to present to investors and respond to their inquiries. The dashboards—which analyze churn, workouts, membership, renewals, and retention were—built using Looker, which allows users to perform analysis on the fly and get immediate insight into their customer data. The dashboards also tap directly into the data warehouse, ensuring the data is always accurate and up to date.

The Results: Strong Finish Leads to Triple Digit Growth

The modern data and analytics solution in place allows iFit to understand its customers, reduce customer churn, grow its member base, and take advantage of the virtual fitness market, especially as it continues to expand.

View iFit’s CTO discuss the impact and results of iFit’s data modernization efforts:

The company moved from disjointed analysis to drawing insights from a rich, unified dataset about its membership. Business users are better equipped to answer questions about when customers are considering upgrading, or potentially downgrading. They can segment customers and improve marketing efforts. iFit can also identify specific workouts and trainers that lead to higher satisfaction—making the customer experience that much more enjoyable for its members.

More importantly, iFit executives now have an interactive tool they can use to present to investors and respond to their inquiries with more detailed analysis—quickly and confidently. Now that iFit has a modernized data and analytics solution, it is better prepared for any opportunities or challenges that lay ahead.

Hear the full story from iFit’s CTO, Chase Brammer, on how the company “Enabled Triple-Digit Growth by Modernizing its Data And Analytics Ecosystem.”

An overview of iFit’s success with data and analytics