Most health and wellness businesses struggle with member or client turnover. For the latest Payments as a Service Tracker™, PYMNTS caught up with Chet Brandenburg, chief product officer at MindBody Online, to discuss how he’s trying to acquire and retain customers with a full-service scheduling and payments app for health and wellness businesses. Find that, along with the latest headlines from around the space and a directory with profiles of 89 players, inside this latest Tracker.
Acquiring new clients is hard, but keeping them can be even more challenging.
Just ask health and wellness businesses. These companies often have a difficult time both winning over new clients and then retaining them. With more than 50 percent client turnover each year, paired with a rash of missed appointments that can cost companies as much as $1,000 per appointment, businesses are eager for a solution that can help bring in loyal, long-term customers, while also offering scheduling, data, marketing and other tools.
PYMNTS recently caught up with Chet Brandenburg, chief product officer at MindBody Online, to discuss how full-service payments can impact the health and wellness industry by attracting new customers and turning them into loyal shoppers and cutting down on missed appointments, and what he sees on the road ahead for his company and the space as a whole.
Companies can employ rewards-style programs, in which customers rack up points by spending at a certain business and can use those points to pay for other classes or products, a program that is popular with many businesses currently.
But, Brandenburg said, wellness centers can also use tools like the one offered by him and his team to make customers even more loyal. MindBody clients can enable their customers to sign up for multi-packs of classes, which include admission to five or 10 individual sessions for one price, as well as recurring monthly or yearly subscription services.
By using these different pricing options, along with traditional rewards programs, Brandenburg said, companies attract more new customers and can help ensure they stay loyal.
“These are very popular with our clients right now,” he said. “With the markets we operate in seeing 50 percent annual churn, retention and acquisition are big concerns, and those are both great ways to solve those problems.”
Around the full-service payments world
With lots of questions still swirling around the implantation of EMV cards even a year after the liability shift took effect, merchants from around the full-service payments space looked to partner with other service providers to strengthen their EMV offerings.
For one, Shift4 and RICS have partnered to debut a new EMV-certified solution, while Stripe announced that it would join Control, Miura Systems and payworks in launching the first EMV-compliant POS for Stripe.
Similarly, Paysafe and Handpoint have also collaborated to offer new EMV-ready solutions globally.
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About The Tracker
The PYMNTS.com Payments as a Service Tracker™, in collaboration with Cayan, is designed to give an overview of the trends and activities of merchant platforms that not only enable payment processing of new and old technologies but also integrate with other features to improve the merchant’s experience, including customer engagement, security, omnichannel retail, analytics, inventory management, software and hardware management and more.
Apple reportedly closed out 2024 suffering a double-digit drop in iPhone sales in China.
Sales of the company’s flagship product were down 18.2% in China during the last quarter of the year, Bloomberg News reported late Monday (Jan. 20), citing Counterpoint Research data. It was the latest example of Apple’s struggle in China, its biggest market outside the U.S.
According to the report, iPhones — which had been the number one phone in China this time last year — fell to third place, with China’s Huawei taking the number one spot.
“This is the first time since the U.S. ban that Huawei regained the leading position,” Counterpoint analyst Mengmeng Zhang said. “Huawei’s sales increased 15.5% YoY driven by the launch of the mid-end Nova 13 series and high-end Mate 70 series.”
This follows similar Counterpoint research from last week showing that iPhone sales had fallen 5% last year amid stronger competition, and a lack of Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) features on phones sold in China.
Apple has been slower to roll out its AI offerings compared to its competitors, introducing its Apple Intelligence suite following the debut of the iPhone 16 in September.
The company has not been able to add AI features to iPhone 16s sold in China due to local restrictions. China’s government requires generative AI operators to secure permission before they can roll out a product. That’s left Apple trying to land partnerships with Chinese companies to introduce its AI feature.
Apple is also facing pressure in another major smartphone market, with Indonesia banning the iPhone due to that country’s content restrictions. The company had proposed making a $1 billion investment in local manufacturing, but Indonesia’s government said that wasn’t enough to meet a regulation that requires 40% of all content in devices to be sourced in-country.
As noted here last year, experts argue the company’s embrace of AI technology could transform how people shop, while also pushing back against the idea that Apple is lagging in Big Tech’s AI race.
“Apple may be late to the AI surge compared to Google and Amazon, which have been adding AI to products for years,” The Big Phone Store CEO Steven Athwal said in an interview with PYMNTS. “But Apple has always been about timing and refinement. While others rushed to put out the latest in AI tech, Apple focused on privacy, security and user experience.”