Smart in everyday life

When signing up for a gym membership, its duration can be an issue: everybody experienced at least once to pay for a membership and end up not going to the gym. A strategy adopted by gym chains to attract people to longer contracts is to sell a one-month membership at 70% of a three-month plan’s cost, for example. In fact, until now the pay-per-session model wasn’t sustainable for most of the gyms. But now some start-ups are making pay-per-session affordable, thanks to WeChat mini-programs combining online and offline services.

One successful example is the fitness firm Keep, which provides workout plans through the app and opened its gym Keepland in 2018, thus merging physical studios together with the app or the WeChat mini-program. Subscribers can both work out with the app’s 20-minute sessions or join lead group workouts lead by screens in studio, with personal trainers on-hand for guidance. Thanks to WeChat, Keep enhance the advertising and motivates users, as well: through a smart bracelet provided at the beginning of the session, users can broadcast their heart rates and calories-burned on screens, synchronized with the app, or post them on their WeChat Moments through the mini-program.

Keep is just one example: many other fitness start-ups are combining the app and the WeChat mini-programs with the training sessions in person: thanks to this integration of online and offline, this firms resisted the impact of the Coronavirus outbreak on their business the best, by promptly launching their live streaming training sessions on their mini-programs.
And now that the epidemic is over, they provide a new model for fitness membership, allowing the pay-per-session gym model, which is very popular among consumers. The studio per-session cost is generally cheaper than regular gyms: the WeChat mini-programs are the only viable solution to make it works for gyms.