Researching Vitality members to maximise engagement

Vitality has a well-established and successful membership programme, which encourages behavioural change amongst its members, by rewarding them for maintaining healthier lifestyles. They are continually looking for ways to improve the programme and felt it was the right time to reach out to members with a research programme to gain new insights.

From previous research our team were knowledgeable about the Vitality membership programme, making it easy for us to get researching quickly.

The research aimed to provide broad recommendations for strategic and tactical opportunities to further increase membership engagement.

The outputs from the project provided recommendations for marketing and communications activity, plus product development, R&D and customer experience.

We see huge value in working directly with our members to improve their experience. The Fresh Egg team did a fantastic job gaining insight from our members and made excellent practical recommendations from the research that we’ve been able to action. 

Tom Ford, Customer Marketing Director, Vitality

To achieve the project objectives, we identified that the best approach was to conduct in-depth interviews with a selection of Vitality members.

By using hour-long video interviews, we had the time to properly ask members for their experiences, views, and ideas. We could walk them through each stage of their customer journey and then drill down into what was important to them, uncovering key moments of truth and gaining valuable context.

We split the project into several key phases:

1. Interviewee recruitment – identifying key audience segments and sourcing representatives to be interviewed
2. In-depth interviews – video interviews with 26 Vitality members
3. Analysis and write-up – analysing the interviews to pull out key insights and learnings, summarising these into the research report
4. Research delivery – presentation of the research report to key Vitality stakeholders and discussions on prioritising recommendations.

The way the results were presented, including extracts from the interviews themselves, brought things to life in a way that helped ensure we had full business support to make changes. 

Tom Ford, Customer Marketing Director, Vitality

Despite numerous viewpoints and opinions from members, we were able to identify the patterns and shared attitudes that they had. The research led to the production of a list of ‘member needs’ - an important deliverable that clearly stated what the programme needed to do.

Due to the timing of the research, there were also some valuable learnings from members in relation to how the Covid Pandemic had impacted their behaviours and attitudes towards their own health.

The recommendations provided Vitality with tactical ideas related to key areas of marketing engagement, features and functionality and rewards and benefits.

Another outcome of this project was the validation members gave to specific parts of the programme, both existing and planned, which allowed product development teams to get inspiration on things such as future features.

Critically, the results allowed Vitality to prioritise and focus on the key things that would increase member engagement, satisfaction, and retention.

We’ve seen really strong growth in member engagement in the past 12 months and much of that success is due to addressing the member feedback we received through this research. Thanks to the Fresh Egg team for their part in creating even better experiences for Vitality members.

Tom Ford, Customer Marketing Director, Vitality

This project was really interesting to work on, as we were able to dig deep into how people’s attitudes and behaviours in relation to health and wellbeing had changed over the past few years. We could then recommend what Vitality needed to do now, in order to increase their engagement as members even more.

David Somerville, Strategy Director