Driving Conversions Through Persona Focused Fitness Marketing Strategies | Chanelle Leslie from The Class

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By adding Pathmonk to your website in seconds, letting the AI do all the work and increase conversions by 50% while you keep doing marketing as usual. Check us out on pathmonk.com. Hey everybody. Welcome back to today’s episode of Pathmonk Presents. Today we are joined by Chanelle Leslie. She’s the VP of marketing at The Class. Chanelle, welcome to the show.

Chanelle Leslie: Thanks so much for having me.

Rick: excited to have you Chanelle and, excited thanks to get things going so. Let us know. Maybe let’s start with the basics. What’s the big idea behind The Class? And if you were explaining this to a friend over coffee Chanelle, how would you describe what you do?

Chanelle Leslie: Yeah, so we like to call The Class your therapist’s favorite fitness app because it’s a fitness app. Yeah. But it also goes way beyond just the physical benefits of an at-home aerobics workout. So it’s, we talk a lot about moving energy through the body, regulating the nervous system, releasing tension, and it also helps a lot with self-awareness.

So it’s traditional aerobics, it’s, but it’s in conjunction with somatics. Free movement, tapping, breath work, meditation, all of this sort of woo stuff that impacts your life beyond just the physical benefits. So people use it to do things like help their anxiety or get other mental health benefits, and it’s so great to be able to provide people with something that benefits so many aspects of their life.

Rick: That’s awesome, man. It’s one of those things, connecting the mind and the body that, that, I think humanity has been trying to work on for the longest time. I’m somewhat familiar with the tapping and the somatic coaching there. That’s, that’s, it’s pretty big. but it’s good to see there’s actually a service, a business like yours that’s actually say making it, trying to make it, mainstream or at least provide a service that’s, that’s worth checking out. are there any, specific type of people that, that this is more, suited for, let’s say your, what’s like your ideal customer in a way?

Chanelle Leslie: Yeah, I think there are a lot of people that recognize that they’re looking for something that goes a bit deeper and just beyond that traditional style of fitness, and we’re really trying to speak to them. people who maybe feel a little bit stuck emotionally and they need some something to help them process and release that emotional tension, is typically who we’re speaking to.

And we have different types of personas within that. we also speak to a lot of people that are rural and don’t have access to a gym. And there’s all different kinds of people. but I really do think it applies to everybody.

Rick: Okay, you open up the door for me by talking about personas. so maybe we get a little bit more technical in terms of marketing. Obviously at the end of the day, this is a marketing podcast. how do these personas, how do these people discover you and are there any channels at the moment, marketing channels that become your go-to for bringing in more of them?

Chanelle Leslie: Yeah, so our acquisition engine is still really new. it has been around as a company for quite some time, but there was nobody really leading marketing for many years, and that’s been in part because it was such a celebrity driven and press driven business where so many people heard about it because Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston and Alicia Keys were all talking about how much they loved this workout and when that happened the company just started relying on that and then realized last year, oh, we actually need to go beyond just relying on celebrities talking about us, especially as they buy up and have interest in their own fitness apps now.

And so they brought me on, and when we really started working with ads in a serious way. but this year we’re planning to put a lot more effort into things like affiliate media influencer to make sure that we’re more diversified beyond just meta ads.

Rick: That makes sense. in all of this, how much role does your website playing in pulling in new, new business, if you will?

Chanelle Leslie: Yeah, the website’s absolutely essential. but we put as much of our resources as we can into building different kinds of landing pages for different kinds of users. and so thinking about ways that we can present the information that might be more listicle style or less, less traditional.

and one thing that we think a lot about is niching down to specific kinds of customers rather than having the same message for all the different kinds of people that we serve. And I’ll give you an example. When I was working at Ceremonial, which is a beauty company, we had a shampoo and conditioner and we had a landing page for that. But actually our breakthrough for conversion came when we started a landing page that was just for postpartum people because it can be so much more efficient to speak to people that are really engaged with the problem that they’re trying to solve.

and so that’s what we’re thinking about as we’re thinking about the role the website plays right now for The Class.

Rick: Okay. So it sounds obviously website is vital in a way. Yeah. from your experience—and you can draw from this experience obviously, or from a different brand like you just mentioned—what actually makes a website convert? Is there any kind of tool, any tactic or little tricks even? or maybe more solid, like a framework that have worked wonders for you in the past when it comes to conversion.

Chanelle Leslie: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of things. going back to this idea of personas, something really interesting actually was when I joined The Class last year, we were running ads that were so celebrity focused. Again, this broad message where we thought we can be all things to all people. Let’s just talk about us being a fitness app. And we had Emma Stone as our spokesperson and Naomi Watts, and it was not speaking to these high converting niche audiences.

And so what we did was we really defined our personas and diversified our messaging. So that instead of saying, Hey, we’re this all things to all people fitness app, we really said, no. We’re a fitness app if you wanna work with your mental health. We’re a fitness app for people that are working through trauma. We’re a fitness app for people that really love therapy and wanna focus on their mental health and niching down even further from that, we’re a fitness app that can help if you need to manage your anxiety and you have chronic health issues. Those people are so engaged and they’re really highly converting because they’re looking for a solution to their problem.

and so changing our messaging to really drive, drill down to personas has been such an unlock for us with conversion. We’re double the conversion rate that we were at this time last year.

and then the second trick that I think about a lot, and I do this at almost every company that I ever work with is implementing quizzes. So the idea of a quiz where you’re acquiring email is really thinking about up funnel conversion, right? Like maybe they’re not ready to make a purchase today. But we can convert them to email subscription. And while we’re doing that, let’s get that zero party data and use that to really influence their conversion down the line. So maybe next week we can use that data to provide the information that they’re looking for, specifically to solve whatever issue it is they’ve told us that they want to solve.

so that’s been a huge unlock for us at The Class. And, in general, when I’m working with CPG brands, it’s a huge unlock for AOV as well because we’re able to recommend products that are relevant to the user and they end up making a bigger purchase.

Rick: That makes a lot of sense. I really love the focus on the personas—fitness app for X, Y, Z. And you’re right: people might not even realize there’s a solution for what they’re struggling with until you frame it that way. Really smart.

Let’s switch gears and talk about you, Chanelle. What are the main things you do on a typical workday? What excites you about going to work every day?

Chanelle Leslie: Ooh, I love the sense of variety that I have in small teams, and we are an incredibly small team for the footprint that we have right now. So I’m really doing a little bit of everything from managing the budgets and setting the strategy to doing creative strategy, briefing ads, briefing emails, and really going wherever I’m needed. We do have a couple of other people on the digital marketing team, but we’re small, we’re tight, and that variety keeps me excited.

Rick: Totally—no two days are the same, and that’s what keeps it fun.

There’s a flood of content out there. How do you stay focused and keep learning? Any routines or go-to sources?

Chanelle Leslie: I am such a podcast junkie. It’s, there’s always something playing in the background. right now I’m really loving the D two C podcast. marketing operators is another great one and I’m always digging for new conversations that interesting people are having.

Rick: Love it. Let’s turn this into a rapid fire segment. You ready?

Chanelle Leslie: Let’s go.

Rick: When it comes to content, do you prefer watching, reading, or listening?

Chanelle Leslie: Listening.

Rick: What’s the latest piece of content you listened to—and what stuck with you?

Chanelle Leslie: I recently read a book called Super Communicators—well, I didn’t read it, I listened to it. But this man talked a lot about what makes really charismatic people so charismatic and how it’s basically just about asking questions. and that really stuck with me.

Rick: That’s a great one—especially for marketers.

If you had a magic wand and could fix one frustrating thing in your marketing life with tech, what would it be?

Chanelle Leslie: better attribution specifically for offline channels and influences a better flow of information coming. So we really get a clearer understanding of the value of each specific channel or each specific influencer. And there’s ways to work around that. Like we have attribution surveys set up, obviously, and there’s things like affiliate links and codes, but none of them is perfect. So it would be nice to not guess.

Rick: 100% attribution—dream scenario.

What’s one repetitive task you’d love to put on autopilot forever?

Chanelle Leslie: I actually like repetitive tasks. Maybe it’s because my, I don’t do them very often, but when I do, I’m in a spreadsheet and it’s really digging into the data and that can be quite productive time for me because I’m actually spending time with the numbers and sometimes that’s where my greatest ideas come from. okay. I’m not sure I would change it.

Rick: Fair. If it fuels insights, keep it.

If you could go back and give your past self a quick pep talk at the start of your marketing journey, what advice would you give?

Chanelle Leslie: Your job is not marketing. Your job is psychology. Your job is people. Your job is leadership. Your job is communication and marketing is at the heart of it all, but it’s not good enough to just be good at marketing, especially when you’re leading a team, and I think that probably applies across any job function. Being good is the basis, but it’s not gonna get you all the way there. You have to be a great communicator.

Rick: Such a good point—soft skills are the multiplier.

Chanelle, thanks for being on the show. Last word: if someone forgets everything, what’s the one thing they should remember about the work you’re doing?

Chanelle Leslie: About the work The Class is doing? I think they should remember that if they are really going through a hard time in life, try somatic movement, give it a shot and really throw yourself into it. You might be feeling a little cynical if you’ve never tried it before. That’s totally okay. But just let yourself go and you’ll be surprised at how great you feel after a somatic workout.

Rick: Love that message. If people want to check The Class out, how can they do it?

Chanelle Leslie: Go to YouTube and type in The Class, and we have a few things on there that you can try for free.

Rick: Amazing. We’ll include a link in the footnotes. Chanelle, really enjoyed it—especially the persona-led messaging, quizzes, and conversion insights.

And just to confirm—what was the book again? Super Communicators.

Thanks again for being with us today, and I wish you a wonderful day.

Chanelle Leslie: Thanks so much, Rick. Bye

Rick: bye. Bye everyone.