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Yoav Susz, Chief Revenue Officer at Vi, and Daron Allen, Co-Founder of VFPnext, share how to harness AI for nonprofits. Discover how data-driven personalization and optimized communication can attract new members and enhance the loyalty of existing ones.
Guests
· Yoav Susz is the Chief Revenue Officer at Vi,the leading AI-as-a-Service provider for the health and wellness industry.
· Daron Allen is the Co-Founder of VFPnext, thenext generation CRM, giving you the power to improve sales, retention, andaccountability.
Key Takeaways
6:15 – Personalize Member Engagement for Higher Lifetime Value
I want to start off with a quote that I really, really love, which is “half my advertising spend is wasted, this trouble is, I don't know which half”, and I think that this saying is particularly true in the world of acquisition and in retention marketing. We're very often kind of flying blind and we don't actually know what's working or not working for our customers and members.
We also know, and this is kind of the fact that I think many people understand intuitively, that personalized engagement works. Meaning, that when you talk to people in the way that they want to be talked to, the result you're going to get are going to be much, much higher.
What we've seen in the research that we've done in the health industry is that when you are able to engage with people in a personalized manner, you're actually able to drive up their lifetime value by over 20%.
12:47 – Focus on Creativity and Let AI Do the Rest
So where do we actually need to get to?
Well, this is where AI comes in. I think that where we need to get to is we need to focus on what the humans do best and let AI do the rest. And I personally believe that the thing that humans do better than anybody else is creativity, right? It’s that ability to think about ideas, it’s that ability to come up with, you know, different notions for campaigns and segmentations and all of these kinds of great things.
But then, being able to really do a small mix and match, really being able to get down to what should I match specifically for Daron? How do I know if I'm working at the front desk and if I haven't seen Daron in seven days? How do I know if that's a little or a lot? How do I know if Daron wants to get a text message at 10:00 PM on a Wednesday, get an e-mail and be left alone, or you want someone to call him?
It's very, very difficult for us as individuals to really cater to the preferences of every single person. What we can do is we can come up with ideas and we can let the AI basically match between the different people that we have and what is the best thing that's going to drive their behavior.
28:42 – Launch New Members Within 30 Days for Higher Lifetime Spend
What we have actually found when we did a massive study on it, I think it was 400,000 members, and what we found is that if you could engage with them and get them properly launched within the first 30 days of their membership, you could get a 231% increase in overall lifetime spend for that member.
And just think about that in terms of retention. You know, an extra month's worth of lifetime value on a membership, additional spent, those are really significant dollars. And I always want to point out to everyone, those are dollars that almost exclusively drop to the bottom line because they've already been acquired.
And so, in terms of importance and making this 360° approach is so crucial. And then to your point Yoav, allowing the AI to really ingest the data so that you know exactly when to communicate the type of communication is absolutely crucial.
Full Transcript
Khyra: (2:59)
A few friends with us today, so we will go ahead and kick us off. So, welcome everybody. Thank you so much for joining us for Supercharger Member Acquisition and Retention with AI. My name is Khyra MacMillan I'm one of the marketing managers here and I'm going to be your host for today. I'm actually really excited for today's session as we’ve been working with Vi for quite a while now.
I've seen a few of their presentations before and every time that I see this presentation, I'm just absolutely mind blown, so I can't wait to share it with you all. And yes, this presentation will be recorded. So, if you have any other coworkers or other people that you want to share this with that weren't able to be with us here today, don't worry, we will send it out as a follow up and feel free to ask questions in the chat.
We really want this to be an interactive session. You can use just the chat or the Q&A feature throughout the presentation as well, but we'll have a dedicated Q&A at the end of this session too, so feel free to just throw those questions at any point.
But with that, I'd like to introduce our host for today's webinar. So first up, we've got Yoav Susz, who is the chief revenue officer at Vi, which is the leader in AI for the health and Wellness space.
Khyra: (4:07)
Yoav leads these go to market in the health and Wellness space after starting his career as an attorney, Yoav spent the last 10 years in the AI space across industries, helping businesses utilize their data to predict and optimize how they interact with every member.
Khyra: (4:23)
And with him, we have Daron Allen. Daron is the co-founder of VFP Next and the VP of Sales Engagement at Daxko. Daron began his career in the fitness industry as the general manager of a club, providing him with an invaluable foundation and deep insight into the specific needs of clubs.
Drawing on his experience, he ventured into entrepreneurship and established VFP next in 2000. Since then, he's consistently demonstrated leadership in the realm of sales engagement within the fitness industry. You Yoav and Daron, take it away!
Yoav: (4:55)
Before we start, Daron, I have to ask you something that's been on my mind for a long time. What does VFP stand for?
Daron: (5:01)
It's a great question, because if someone often gets it confused or if they forget, then they often just resort to “very fine people,” but that's not actually what actually it stands for (laughs). In our early days, It's actually “Visual Fitness Planner”. We had technology that helped people make health and fitness tangible. That's where it came from.
Yoav: (5:33)
Hi everyone, [I'm] really excited to be here and to chat with people from all over the country. We're going to try and bring this concept of AI which everybody seems to be talking about and make it as practical as possible. Our goal over the next 30 minutes is to talk a little bit about how you can use AI in any health organization that you work for.
We want to make maybe demystify a little bit. Make it a little bit more understandable and tangible so you can come away from here with an idea of what you can do to start leveraging AI because it's very much becoming a question of when we're going to be leveraging AI and the health. The health industry is no different.
Yoav: (6:15)
I want to start off with a quote that I really, really love, which is “half my advertising spend is wasted, this trouble is, I don't know which half”, and I think that this saying is particularly true in the world of acquisition and in retention marketing. We're very often kind of flying blind and we don't actually know what's working or not working for our customers and members.
Yoav: (6:38)
We also know, and this is kind of the fact that I think many people understand intuitively, that personalized engagement works. Meaning, that when you talk to people in the way that they want to be talked to, the result you're going to get is going to be much, much higher.
What we've seen in the research that we've done in the health industry is that when you are able to engage with people in a personalized manner, you're actually able to drive up their lifetime value by over 20%.
Yoav: (7:02)
With all of that being said, health and wellness organizations are still losing about 40% of their members every year. Which is, you know, a high number. And yes, it is true that there are some people who are always going to tread or leave or churn, but that number is very, very high. If we know that personalized engagement works and that the health and wellness industry is still losing about 40% of its members every year, where's the problem and how can we try and solve it?
Yoav: (7:31)
To answer that question, I wanted to go a little bit further back in time and I wanted to start off by saying that the idea of past life member communication is, you know, a premise as old as commerce itself.
I remember when I was growing up, we had like a small corner shop or like, a small bodega. If you're in New York where everybody knew me, right, and I would walk in and they would walk in and go “hey, yeah, you know, we just got that chocolate milk you love, it's there in the back, go grab it. “
Yoav: (7:59)
And that idea of everybody wants to go somewhere where they know your name, where they know who you are and what you care about, it's really important. It's really important and it’s really very primordial, right?
This is how commerce was built on these personal relationships between people. I think that as you know, technology has evolved, and as we've gotten to live in cities and scale and all that kind of good stuff, we've lost a little bit of that personal touch.
Yoav: (8:27)
How can we try and recapture that? Or put differently, why is it still so hard for organizations to get personalized communications right? When we moved beyond the bodegas, we started off that it was just very difficult to collect any data, right? If you think 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, we didn't really know a lot about our consumers.
Yoav: (8:47)
We used to advertise and follow our best intentions and hunches. Maybe there were, some focus groups and some Don Draper type characters sitting in rooms deciding what people should be buying and what we should be advertising, but it’s very difficult for us as organizations to collect data, to collect real data about our members.
Yoav: (9:09)
Then what happened is we learned. We learned to cater for the average member. We started off by collecting a lot of information and we started saying “hey, you know well, you know, if I've seen that.”
For example, if we think about the world of member engagement, if I've seen that people that don't show up once every 30 days, have a much like higher likelihood of attrition. That's true on average, but it may be that Daron comes in every day and if we don't see him for 30 days, we should be worried. Whereas Yoav only comes in every three weeks. So maybe, a month isn't that long.
We started collecting data and trying to cater for the average consumer that we have. The problem is that there typically isn't a person who's average. We're just looking at all this data that we have about people, and we essentially get into the situation where we are catering for no one, right? We're trying to cater for everyone in one go and we're not managing to cater for anyone at all.
Yoav: (10:05)
That is called the floor of averages. I really love this small illustration here because basically, what it says is a statistician drowned while crossing a river that is only three feet deep on average. So, that's the idea here, is that when we look at averages, we lose fidelity. We lose the ability that different people, different customers, different members behave differently.
And if what we're doing is trying to understand everybody as a whole, that's going to work; but there are more efficient ways of doing that, of being able to communicate to more people in the way that they actually want to be communicated to.
Yoav: (10:48)
We did averages, which was great, and then we came up with personas. And before I say anything bad about personas, personas are great. I think it's important to target personas and it's important for you to understand, for your health and wellness organization, what types of people are coming to your locations.
That's going to influence a lot of what you do, whether it's scheduling or advertising, communicating with your members, or deciding what to set up, but there’s still something which is missing about persona marketing.
Yoav: (11:19)
For those of you not familiar, on the left-hand side is King Charles. I think it's the second, as you can hear, I grew up there. On the right-hand side, you have Ozzy Osbourne, and these guys have a lot in common, right? They're both male, born in 1948. They were raised in the UK, they were married twice. They live in a cast and they're wealthy and famous.
Yoav: (11:43)
I would, though, still suspect that the right way of communicating with each of them is going to be very, very different. So, Persona marketing is better than catering to the averages. Don't get me wrong, but it's also not enough. You can get deeper and you can get better. We need to understand [the] kind of our customers and members in as granular as a grouping as we can.
We want to really create homogeneous groups of people which behave in similar ways and have similar characteristics so that we can communicate with them in the best way possible. Also, as a complete aside, the last season of the Crown is debuting today on Netflix and I for one, am very, very excited about that.
Yoav: (12:27)
We started, we had no data, so we did what we thought we went from there to averages and with those averages, we had people drown in that river. We had the problem of a statistician drowning in the river, which was on average, three feet deep. We got to persona marketing.
Persona marketing is great. But we can see here that there's a problem with persona marketing. So where do we actually need to get to?
Yoav: (12:53)
Well, this is where AI comes in. I think that where we need to get to is we need to focus on what the humans do best and let AI do the rest. And I personally believe that the thing that humans do better than anybody else is creativity. It’s that ability to think about ideas, come up with different notions for campaigns, segmentations and all these kinds of great things.
Yoav: (13:17)
Being able to do a small mix and match and get down to what should I match specifically for Daron? How do I know if I'm working at the front desk and if I haven't seen Daron in seven days? How do I know if that's a little or a lot? How do I know if Daron wants to get a text message at 10:00 PM on a Wednesday, get an e-mail and be left alone, or want someone to call him?
It's very, very difficult for us as individuals to really cater to the preferences of every single person. What we can do is we can come up with ideas and we can let the AI basically match between the different people that we have and what is the best thing that's going to drive their behavior.
Yoav: (13:57)
Okay, this was all very theoretical. We talked about segmentation, we talked about the idea of understanding people going from personas, getting very, very deep into one-to-one level. What I want to do is really dive into the specifics and we're going to start off by talking about member acquisition.
Let’s start with the definition. Member acquisition is basically the process of taking somebody from potentially being unaware of you or your health organization and really making them aware, giving them an offer and ultimately converting them into being a paying member. That's the goal of member acquisition.
And to show you where AI can be particularly effective there,
Yoav: (14:38)
These are two real examples of two of our customers at Vi. On the left hand side and on the right hand side. These are two separate maps. On the left side, you can see this green dot here. This represents a health organization that we're working with and here you can see on the right side, that same green dot.
What we're doing here is we are mapping out what are these specific households and individuals that you should be targeting for your specific health club.
Your health club and organization. So, the idea here is that it's as important to know who to target as it is who not to target. So, if you think about it here, the way that we typically do marketing today is we'll look at ZIP codes, trade areas, or personas we're going to put our marketing out there.
But ultimately, you can see that about 25% of the people that live in the vicinity of this organization are actually not even a good fit and any money that we put towards trying to acquire them as new members is going to be completely wasted.
Being able to get to a high degree of resolution and understand that in the vicinity of your organization, there are going to be people which are a really good fit for what you offer and there are people that aren't. We work with a bunch of fantastic Daxko customers, some in the nonprofit space where you have certain characteristics of the members of your organization.
If you want to bring in more of those people, you need to know where they are because the type of messaging that's going to bring a 65-year-old in is going to be very different to [the] type of messaging that's going to bring in a 35-year-old. Different channels, different offers, and different people that you should be going after.
There are some people that no matter what you do, you're never going to be able to convince them to join your organization. Being able to pinpoint who those people are will surprise you.
Yoav: (16:31)
Because if you look at these maps here and I know that things are a tiny bit small and we're happy to share the deck afterwards. All of these red dots represent what we call primary targets and you can see that, yeah, most of the red dots are around this location. There are some red dots which are much further away.
So, it's not always completely intuitive to understand the people that are actually going to be the best targets for you to go after. That's a really great area for AI, because AI can ingest massive amounts of customer data. Massive amounts of customer data, both your data and third party data and create a really small map of the specific people that you should be targeting to try and drive member behavior.
If anyone has questions, feel free to ask in the chat, but that is the first important message. Here it says make sure that you're not wasting your marketing dollars by targeting people in a blanketed way?
The closer you can get to the specific household, individual, and people you're going to be able to convert to your organization, the better for you.
Yoav: (17:36)
Secondly, what we pulled up here is just basically a map of what are the channel preferences of Members at one of the organizations that we work with.
It's very difficult for any marketer, no matter how smart they are, to be able to define what is the best channel for me to engage Daron on, or what is the best channel for me to engage anybody else. You can see here that there's an interesting breakdown of people that prefer direct mail to social media, to streaming TV, to digital video.
Yoav: (18:09)
And then, when you kind of look into social media, you can see that in social media, some prefer Twitter, some prefer our Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Facebook.
Yoav: (18:17)
It's very, very difficult. Even if you've managed to identify that exact member that you want to engage with, matching the right perspective member with the right channel is something that's very difficult for us as human beings to imagine.
So again, we pay this cost of averages, load up into Meta, display segment, create personas, and we hope for the best.
But ultimately, if you want to reduce your waste, the most efficient thing that you can do is create a smart mix and match. Identify the prospects that are going to benefit from getting some sort of outreach from you and then make sure that you're using the right channel with the right message at the right time. Daron?
Daron: (19:02)
So that's just great. Yoav. Thanks so much. I love listening to you talk through how someone can take that very laser-targeted approach and give it some real-world action.
How do you take immediate action on a targeted individual is where VFP and your CRM actually comes into play because what you can do is plan when the human element will be interjected into the AI that is guiding the overall process. I actually think that one of the magical points or moments is human intervention because we're getting back to that point you mentioned earlier.
Hey, everybody wants to know your net. You want everybody know your name, who you are, and some things about you. That's when that human touch comes into play. One of the things that VFP actually has in working with AI is the ability to instantly make the phone ring. And so, we did an in-depth study with a company that’s called Velocify.
What Velocify found, and this screen is a great representation of the findings, is that the immediacy of having that human-phone connection to that laser targeted individual, the conversion rate just massively spikes.
You can get as much as a 46% overall increase in conversion rate. But as you notice here, your conversion rate improvement, I want to make sure I explain the slide, the improvement on conversion rate can be almost 400% if you get connected within 60 seconds.
Daron: (21:13)
Let's just say that AI has done its job. It has allowed you to really know where you're spending your marketing money. It's laser focused. Now you get someone, whether it's social media, a web lead, wherever that person decides. I'm finally going to take action. I'm going to get connected.
This system would actually make the phone ring for your facility and then allow you to get connected and cause the prospect’s phone to ring within 60 seconds and then look at the massive drop off of conversion rate improvement by the phone call. A lot of people still think, “oh yeah, if I could get connected to them and get my staff to make that phone call within the first day. That would be great.”
Daron: (22:03)
Well, not really.
To be honest with you, because you can see that when someone finally takes action.
Because we know through AI that they're actually very, very interested. It's so targeted now, they actually appreciate that instant human connection because they're greatly interested. It causes that to plummet in terms of that conversion rate. So amazing study from Velocify.
Daron: (22:34)
As we move on into how you can have additional power from AI, we've also found that 78% of the customers are going to buy from the company that responds first. A lot of times, people are interested in shopping around if you think about it maybe you're going to get two or three bids on something.
I don't know how many of you have ever attempted to use something like Thumbtack or one of those services. We're like, “oh, I just need a handyman real quick.”
Daron: (23:09)
78% of people buy from the company that responds to the inquiry first. The way that a as a CRM like VFP and Vi can work together. Let's say that you have someone that's laser targeted. You know they're going to be interested. You know they're an ideal prospect to convert to them and they now want to hear from you with the right CRM. Y Causing that interaction, getting them on the phone, and giving that staff member the bullet points to know exactly where they came from, which of the Vi channels that drove this, then it makes it like this human connection.
Because now it's like, “oh, I see that we're interested, and you were browsing on Instagram and you decided to you know check it out, so we're so thankful whatever that is.” All of a sudden, those three simple bullets that pop up on the screen for the CRM make that human touch.
I like to call it sort of like magic. You create that moment of magic because the person feels “wow, they know me.” So that first response quickly is absolutely crucial.
Yoav: (24:33)
Daron, I think that this is the best example I've ever seen of ‘strike while the iron is hot.’ I think this statistic is just incredible to me. You said within the first day to look at the difference between reaching out within 60 seconds and a day. That's absolutely wild, especially when you think about how much money is being spent on known marketing and paid channels and then ultimately, you're really reducing your chances of success if you're not able to operate as quickly as you should.
Daron: (25:02)
Absolutely.
Yoav: (25:03)
But before we move over onto member engagement retention, we wanted to share that Vi is offering a no fee pilot of our acquisition platform. No strings attached for Daxko customers. We're doing a 90-day pilot. What we're asking is for you to dedicate some of all of the ads then through Vi. You pay nothing.
We prove that we can reduce [the] cost of acquisition by at least 12%. I'm not going to read through all of the bullets. I'm going to hang around at the end of the webinar to answer questions and talk in more detail, but if anybody's interested, please do feel free either to send me an e-mail at yoav@vi.vo, or feel free to put your name in the chat and we will make sure to reach out to you afterwards, but Daron, back to you in a custom member engaging your attention.
Daron: (25:52)
Absolutely. One of the things that I believe is crucial is not just acquisition, but also engagement and retention. You highlighted one of the significant challenges within our industry and I always talk about the fact that we are almost like “anti-FedEx”.
The reason why I say that is because FedEx actually makes billions of dollars on the human flaw of procrastination. Because no matter what, you can wait and send it. It'll still you. You don't send it by ground, now I'm going to do FedEx and then I can also do FedEx earliest next morning. And then if all else fails, you can make a sprint run to the airport and as long as you get it there by 7 o’clock, you’re going to pay big time well.
Daron: (26:52)
We're the opposite of that. You're going to have to work hard. There is no magic pill. You'll have to put in effort to improve your health and fitness. But what that does is it makes it challenging for us.
But that's why I believe that a 360° approach, not just acquisition but really knowing and gaining additional data points and insights for the person that has joined; why they are, why they have joined, what their goals are, what they're looking to accomplish. I do believe that getting connected with them and really creating that relationship within the 1st 30-60 days is crucial.
Yoav, you've got a great screen here. If the company understands them, then they are going to be significantly more loyal to that brand. And so, one of the things that is important in my opinion as we are getting these brand new members engaged and launched is taking the information that they've given us.
One of the huge fail points in our industry is we go through a process of tour and understanding them and gathering information. Maybe we have a more sophisticated sales process and we ask all these questions about their goals, and then it doesn't get used.
We have a gold mine of information that can be leveraged and used to make this person not only feel welcome and valued, but actually help them achieve their goal.
Daron: (28:42)
We need to leverage that. What we have found, on 400,000 members, is that if you could engage with them and get them properly launched within the first 30 days of their membership, you could get a 231% increase in overall lifetime spend for that member.
And you just think about that in terms of retention, an extra month's worth of lifetime value on a membership, additional spent, those are really significant dollars. I always want to point out to everyone; those are dollars that almost exclusively drop to the bottom line because they've already been acquired.
And so, in terms of importance and making this 360° approach is so crucial. To your point Yoav, allowing the AI to really ingest the data so that you know exactly when to communicate the type of communication is absolutely crucial.
Yoav: (30:07)
I think that when we look at existing member engagement, health and wellness is one of the industries that has the most amount of data about its members but utilizes the least.
I think that that's a really curious situation. What you end up seeing is that current number communication tends to follow kind of rigid paths. We have an onboarding campaign where during those first 30 days, we know we're so crucial, but we have people follow the exact same communications over 30 days, or we might say, “hey, if we haven't seen somebody in 45 days, we're going to reach out.”
We might say if somebody hits a milestone in our gym, we're gonna send them a piece of communication. But we create these rules and these rules are one-size-fits-all or a few sizes fits all. The reason that that happens is because we don't know who would benefit from the large. It's very, very difficult for us to be able to say, "there's something about Daron which has changed it means that he might actually be at a risk of attrition when he wasn’t before.”
So, it’s hard for us to kind of imagine all the different ways, and identify where the members are going to, who are going to benefit from getting some sort of intervention.
So, what ends up happening is one, we create rules-based segmentation. If I haven't seen you in 50 days or whatever it might be, I'm going to send you a piece of communication. And I'm also going to set up a certain flow. I'm going to say you're going to get an e-mail on day one, and if you don't respond to it, you're going to get a phone call and maybe another e-mail after that and maybe a text message. But how do we know that that's a good fit?
Maybe, you know Jessica would prefer to get just a phone call from the front desk because she really loves that personal touch and all she wants to hear about is the fact that you've launched a new diabetes prevention program in your life. Or maybe there's swim classes, or maybe there's a dance class or a summer camp for kids or whatever it might be.
Yoav: (32:06)
It's really challenging for us. We get our members to follow paths and blast things because it's hard for us to imagine and it's hard for us to connect what's the right thing for the right member at any moment in time.
So, and I think, lastly, we also have a real challenge in understanding what's working.
We send out emails, text messages, and phone calls. But how do we know if we've changed behavior? How do we know whether somebody has stayed and have we managed to prevent attrition or have we managed to get them to spend more with us through secondary ancillary spend?
It's tough for organizations to do all of these things, even when they have a really sophisticated CRMs like VFP because ultimately, you need to be able to apply some sort of data science which is going to help you understand that, there's something happening with a specific individual, and now we're going to put them on a specific track. We're on a specific type of communication.
To make this really tangible, things tend to be pretty time sequence. Day one, day five, day 10, and needs to be way more dynamic. Maybe, Daron should get a text message three times a day, every day for five days and you should never reach out to me ever.
Today, we see things as reactive. We're going to try and save a member after they haven't shown up for 30 days or if they tell us that they want to cancel. That's typically late, right? You want to be predictive. You want to make sure that you catch any change in behavior as early as possible.
Today, we see a lot of generic messaging. We might be sending out emails from people about summer camps even though they don't have children in the household. We get very inefficient. We kind of said and forget. I'm not going to shame anybody and ask them when was the last time they looked at their onboarding flows. I'm guessing that some people here haven't looked at them in quite a while.
And lastly, we don't know how to measure. So that creates open rates. They don't mean anything. They're vanity metrics. They tell us that the e-mail was good.
You know you need to be able to measure, understand what's working, and think that's where AI becomes important. So let me show you some examples, and I promise they won't be too long.
Yoav: (34:17)
We're saying you need to be able to use that member data you already have. The demographics, the gender, the age, the location of your members, their check-in data, how often are they coming in? What are they doing when they come in? If you have it right, are they taking group fitness classes? Are they taking part in any sort of medical offers that you might have?
Yoav: (34:38)
You want to have all that third party data. You can use third party data to enrich and to understand that person in the market right now.
For example, are they interested in buying at home workout gear? That could be an indication they're willing to spend, and maybe we should be talking them about other options that we have inside our locations.
You need to be able to use your communications data. If you have been sending emails, have you been open? Have they been opening them? When have they been doing so? Are they a night owl reading their emails at 10 pm on a Tuesday, or just on the weekend? Member data just gives you a ton of different ideas of the types of data that you can use.
You don't need to have all of it. I would venture a guess that all 200 people that are on this webinar now have way more data about their members than they even think.
There's so much inferred data that you can get. And then on the other hand, there's communication options. What are the different things you can tell your members about? Do you want to get them into a fitness assessment? Do you want to tell them about classes that you have? Do You have a specific promotion for personal training or otherwise that you want to offer them. If you want to tell them about your recovery.
Lots of different options, but basically on the one side, give us data. On the other hand, give us the options. What are the different things that you want to tell your members? What are the different channels that you can use? And then you let the AI do its thing. So, for example here, we might say, that I've identified that this 38-year-old man in Richmond, he increased his check-ins by 50% and he's a weekend warrior.
Meaning that 75% of his check-ins come on a Saturday and he opens his emails on the weekend, and he's never used a group fitness class.
Yoav: (36:21)
So out of the bank of options that you've given, the best thing to send to him is an offer to book a smart start, a fitness assessment session and you shouldn't send out on Saturday at 2:00 PM.
Yoav: (36:38)
Different kind of idea but same thing. Female, 52 years old, lives in Cockeysville, hasn't checked in in the last two weeks, 90% of her previous visits were only to group clinics. She's never opened an e-mail, so stop sending them. She's only checked in at one of your locations if you have more than one.
The right thing for her is going to be triggering out a message about Aqua classes. I saw somebody here that has a swim school, so it’s probably relevant. But Aqua classes? That's the right thing to send to this particular woman. That's what the AI is going to do for you. It's going to pick the message. It's going to pick the trap that you've created in VFP or in any other CRM and match between the two. Match this woman with the right thing for her.
Yoav: (37:19)
I don't want to go over these again and again and again and again. I think you guys get the get the idea. The last example here again we understand what are the data points that you have. We understand when people are checking in what kind of activities are they taking part in and we're able to use that to match them to the right messaging.
So, there’s a question here in the chat.
How does the system integrate with our data and Daxko Operations and Daxko Exchange?
Yoav: (37:43)
So seamlessly is the answer. We're a registered partner of Daxko. We're able to get all your data, with your consent, don't worry. But whether it's Club Automation, CSI, or Motionsoft, or of course VFP. Anything that you're using on the Daxko platform Vi Engage, which is that member engagement platform, plugs in seamlessly. Same thing for Vi Acquire.
Yoav: (38:11)
Those are just kind of some ideas of what's possible today, but I wanted also to give you a glimpse into the future and some of the things that we're seeing in the world of AI are coming down the pipeline for health and fitness organizations. So, Vi Engage, we've talked about today. But we want to start generating the content of the emails for you, or the text messages or scripts that your GMs in front desk.
Are we able to leverage all of that member data to now get a certain framework where you tell us your brand guidelines that can be AI generate a specific script, which is going to be the most relevant to Daron to Yoav to Khyra.
But so it's really about...
Yoav: (39:02)
That's fine, Jennifer. Tax corporations is perfect, but we'll come back to that moment.
So, Vi Engage, being able to tailor content, tailor messaging for each and every one of your members based on your data and guidelines. That's a really powerful thing which is coming down the pipe and we anticipate being able to release that to our customers within the first half of next year.
Same kind of idea on Vi Acquire. We want to be able to create ads which are going to convert you specifically. If we know who you are, and where you live, and we know your name, if we go back to what we were talking about earlier, we can create an ad that you are more likely to want to engage with. We can use that data to create that ad and put it out there for you.
Yoav: (39:50)
And lastly, dealing with coaching, being able to integrate into your communications with your members, building recommendations for what they should be saying, how you should be saying it and really being able to leverage chatbots and AI to better communicate with your members.
Yoav: (40:11)
I’m going to pause there just to give you the overview of Vi. What we do, we have three different products Vi Acquire, Vi Engage in Vi OS. Vi Acquire is focused on lowering the cost of acquisition. I'm going to talk about that more in one moment, but it's basically about how you can acquire new members cheaper. Vi Engage is that platform which fits in between your members on Daxko. So again, I mentioned all the different CRM's and member management and any CRM that you have on the other end,
Meaning, whether it's VFP, Daxko Engage, or anybody else. The difference is Vi Engage is not a CRM. We do not send any of the messages. We do not build any of the tracks. We are just an intelligence engine which is identifying which members are going to benefit from another, then funneling them into the right type of messaging, the right type of sequences in any type of CRM that you might have.
However, third product, which we've renamed Vi Transform, so please don't tell anybody that it still says Vi OS on my presentation for Vi transform, but that's basically a suite of generative AI powered tools which are meant to streamline a lot of your operations and the business around billing, content, staffing all of those kind of great things.
Yoav: (41:21)
That's a presentation that we have for you today. Before we hand it over to questions, I'm just going to give you one more overview of the pilot offer that we're providing to all Daxko customers on the Vi Acquire side. So, we're very excited about the leaps that we've made in Vi Acquire, this acquisition platform.
Yoav: (41:36)
We’re offering relevant and eligible Daxko customers a 90-day pilot. During that 90-day pilot, we would be taking your paid media spend across any channel, whether it's paid media, paid social or display or connected TV or OTT , and we would be deploying that media for you over the course of 90 days and we would commit to show you a reduction of at least 12% in your cost of acquisition, which will also translate to more new member revenue. You're going to get more members for the same amount of money that you are spending today and we're going to get you better members, ones that are going to spend more with you.
Yoav: (42:14)
And I'd say that the Vi Acquire difference here is
1. We're everywhere from being just the technology which you can, use us to identify prospects and optimize communications.
2. Also being a managed agency for strategy. Whatever you would need there. I think that the big differentiator that we have is the granularity and fidelity of our data; household level data, mobile data mobility data. Where are people going? What are they doing? Where are they traveling? Are they going to competitors? Are they not really getting a high resolution of understanding of every prospect in your area and then being able to deploy it autonomously.
Being able to really optimize the way that you're using the different channels, not just optimizing within meta. Who needs to go on meta? Who needs to go on connected TV? Who should we target on the Wall Street Journal, wallstreetjournal.com? Who do we put an ad for on Hulu?
Like different people, different things. And that's where AI is great. Identify who needs it. Identify what the options are and really optimize across them.
Khyra: (43:17)
Wow. Mic drop right there. Amazing. Thank you both so much. Yoav and Daron. Look what a wealth of information you just walked us, so I get goosebumps every single time. I just think about, I've had the privilege of working with and never the organizations that are even on this call today directly. And I just think about all the things that we could accomplish if we had both VFP and Vi, like backing up our campaigns.
I mean, just the difference that it makes like making sure that you're speaking to the right people and then talking to them at the right time like those are just two critical pieces. It's incredible to see what both tools can do together. I know we had a couple of questions that came into the chat here and I know we touched on a couple of them throughout the call too, but I want to make sure the last couple of minutes we answer some of these. And as you have mentioned, I know we had quite a lot of interest in the pilot program which is awesome, and we'll hang around for a couple of minutes at the end too if you have any questions specifically about that pilot program as well.
Khyra: (44:20)
Rosemary had asked a question in the chat.
I have done some investigation into other AI firms. How do you distinguish yourself from others and how is the person who takes that data and info and creates the plan?
Asking as we're understaffed and there's no money for market research.
Yoav: (44:42)
As an AI company, we're focused solely on the world of health, so we work across healthcare, fitness and wellness. We see the data of over 100 million Americans every single day. So, we are very much a mile deep, not an inch deep. We're very focused on this industry. We're focused on businesses where we can both impact health outcomes as well as financial returns. Those are the things that we're looking for, repeatable billable health activity.
Yoav: (45:09)
So that's where we're focused, and I think that we've made the decision. We're not a deployment platform neither on the retention side nor the acquisition side. We deploy media on the acquisition side, but ultimately, we're not a CRM, we're not a member management system.
We just want to be that intelligence, but we just want to be that smart brain which can look at data and be able to help you make better decisions about where you should be allocating your capital, your resources, and your time.
Yoav: (45:37)
To use Vi, you don't need any sort of market research. You need to be acquiring new members if you're interested in reducing your attrition and driving up your member lifetime value. But that's what we're laser focused on, on being that layer of AI, being that layer of intelligence, and we’re only in the world of health, fitness and wellness, so we don't touch anything else at all.
Daron: (46:03)
I would just add that if you have an automated system CRM that can take the output on who should be contacted and how with this message, then, you don't have to have a lot of staffing to do that. This can be set up in such a fashion that the AI tells what to communicate and you can do all of this with less staff.
Khyra: (46:45)
Awesome. Anyway, we had another question here which we kind of touched on, but I just wanted to make sure it didn't get lost as well.
So, Paula asked how is this different from Daxko Engage and I actually can take a stab at this one too. So, Daxko Engage is actually going to be your facilitator. So, as you mentioned, Vi isn't going to be the one to actually send those emails out or send those communications.
It's just going to be the intelligence that helps support those messages that you do send out. So, you'll still want both. They work hand in hand, but that's going to be your main one of your main differences.
Yoav: (47:17)
And I see that Becky had a question here around, we have Daxko Engage. She's saying that she could send directly into Daxko Engage. So, we had just to be honest and transparent. We haven't integrated with Daxko Engage yet. So, we have integrations with anywhere from VFP, GymSales, HubSpot, Salesforce, kind of, you name it. I don't know enough, so I wouldn't commit on a call that we can do it.
But to this day, we've never had an issue integrating with any CRM because our entire platform is API centric. But I would need to look into Daxko Engage more deeply to give you a smarter answer than that.
Khyra: (47:58)
And, and for those who do have [Daxko] Engage, I know somebody mentioned that they only have [Daxko] Operations and they don't have Engage. All of those platforms are good, whatever that tool is that you're using. This is going to be the intelligence that's going to help make that tool utilize even better.
So, if you already have Engage, the intelligence that you'll be able to gain from Vi will help everything that you're doing and Engage to be much more informed. You'll be making sure that the messages that you are sending through Engage are much more targeted. So they both work hand in hand. You're not at a disadvantage if you have both.
Yoav: (48:36)
Yes, So. Abraham, to your question,
I have VFP. Will Vi resend the messages automatically?
That's the way that it would work. So, VFP is, out of all the platforms we've looked at, probably one of the most advanced when it comes to APIs. So, we would be able to trigger messages out directly through VFP.
Daron: (48:55)
And just to clarify, it would not be Vi sending the message. It's going to be VFP and Vi using the API data to trigger communication.
Khyra: (49:13)
Any other questions? There's a lot of information. There’s a follow-up question.
Yoav: (49:22)
We can take it offline and get into more detail. Perhaps together with Daron as well, let's talk about it. Short answer, yes. Long answer, it depends.
Khyra: (49:32)
I love it. All right. Any last questions I went through a lot of information today? All right.
If you think of anything that comes up right after, I know as soon as I end the call, I always think of everything. But we've got some emails right on the screen here. Please don't hesitate to reach out to Yoav and Daron directly. We would love to connect. If you raise your hand for one of the pilots, and you have some more specific questions too, we can actually promote you, so you don't have to, stay in the chat and talk to us. If you want to come off camera and talk to us for a second for the pilot program. We'll hang on for a couple of minutes afterwards and yes, we can send the deck out afterwards and the follow up as well.
But thank you guys so much for joining today. We'll see you at the next one. Thank you.
Yoav: (50:28)
Thanks everyone.