Hapana taps Twilio’s Programmable Messaging and email platforms to enhance their fitness and wellness business solutions

Hapana is an end-to-end online enterprise platform that empowers gyms, health & wellness centers and fitness studios, to help fuel engagement among its members and ultimately grow their business. Founded by Jarron Aizen nine years ago in Sydney Australia, Hapana was originally focused on serving personal trainers. The company has since evolved to deliver a b2b software platform catered to today’s fitness experience and increasingly connected online communities within this space. While the majority of Hapana’s customers, ranging from small boutique fitness centers to larger health clubs such as BFT and GFX are based in Australia, many have also expanded their facilities and opened multiple locations within Australia and other regions.

Today, Hapana’s enterprise platform is available in more than ten countries. Its success in expanding its solutions to the health & fitness space in Asia Pacific (currently in Korea, Singapore, Japan and India), North America and the UK, among others, meant it needed to ensure that the look, feel and functionality of its enterprise platform performed exactly like it does in Australia. It was therefore critical for Hapana to choose a technology provider and partner that had the ability to scale globally, who’s solutions had the widest range of coverage and could also provide localised support and guidance.

“There are unique business use cases in the fitness industry which means we have to build the logic layer on our side, but in order for us to successfully expand outside of Australia, we needed a global support network, especially from a compliance and security perspective,” said Jarron Aizen, CEO and Founder, Hapana.

Twilio's simple solutions enabled Hapana to focus on international expansion and product innovation

Hapana’s enterprise platform leverages Twilio’s Programmable Messaging and Email APIs to fuel member engagement. But the company also utilises Twilio’s Lookup API to enable fitness businesses to verify and authenticate phone numbers into their system. This API ensures that businesses are collecting legitimate phone information, hence making a significant impact in terms of SMS deliverability at over 98% with a notable increase in customer engagement through 2-way SMS that has seen a 9x increase in customer inbound SMS.

Twilio’s easy-to-integrate APIs has essentially freed Hapana up to be more innovative and focus on creating value-add features and tools within their enterprise platform. For example, leveraging Twilio’s Messaging API, Hapana was able to build out a tool that helped improve fitness and health centers’ waitlist management systems. Members can now confirm attendance to a class they’ve waitlisted for with a single click vs simply being alerted to the opening and then it possibly resulting in no-shows. Operationally, this has helped our customers increase class utilisation by an average of 7%.

Twilio’s Programmable Messaging and Email APIs have also enabled Hapana to level up their customer sales and marketing communications. Integrating these APIs into Hapana’s CRM and marketing automation suite allows fitness centers to engage with current and past active members to either offer them a special deal, promote a new program at their club or alert them to an opening of a new location. As a result Hapana has seen an uptake in how Twilio’s APIs are being leveraged across its fitness business solutions. In the last two years, Hapana’s customers have increased outbound SMS usage by over 500% and the corresponding inbound SMS response has almost doubled that with over 900% increase of inbound SMS responses via their CRM and Marketing Automation Systems.

Moving forward, Hapana looks to expand to other regions

All this translates to success for Hapana. Since early 2020, Hapana’s business has tripled in size, having gone from servicing 250 locations to more than 650 locations today. As well, the company has seen through its network, 300,000 bookings (ie, class attendance) made per month at the beginning of the same year to over one million per month made today.

Moving forward, Hapana wants to go beyond expanding their business to other regions, and building value-add services and features. The company is also focused on facilitating relationships between the fitness brands and their members, to create a more extensive online community. For example video on demand and live streaming, all built into a single app experience, were popular during the pandemic. Members were able to book their attendance and attend virtually. Two years later, these are still popular given some continue to work remotely or some may be traveling, but they would like to stay connected with their friends within the fitness community. Hapana therefore built a new immersive feature called Book a Buddy, where members can create their own little groups with their fitness center’s branded app, and book or cancel classes on behalf of their friends.

Looking out a little further, Hapana plans to evolve and extend the fitness experience to other devices, such as wearables, body composition scanners or other IoT devices. So it’s not just booking and attending classes or working out, but rather members could aggregate their own content and view stats on the progress of their fitness. The company will monitor how health clubs and fitness centers embrace additional IoT devices with the goal of bringing these devices on board in the future. Hapana is also looking at integrating two other solutions; 2-factor authentication and verification to help increase the security of its fitness members accounts and Twilio’s WhatsApp Business API in order to augment its customers’ engagement channels further. When the need arises, Hapana will look at partnering with Twilio to integrate the appropriate solutions in an effort to continue enhancing its successful enterprise end-to-end platform.