Case Study: 17th Street Athletic Club achieves 250% increase in signups with Mailchimp

How 17th Street Athletic Club used multiple channels together to grow their audience and recruit new members

17th Street Athletic Club, co‑founded by Shannon Boughn and Marissa Axell in San Francisco’s Mission District, faced a membership plateau and needed to grow their audience and recruit new members. Marissa had been using Mailchimp for email to existing members and expanded into multichannel marketing with Mailchimp tools — building a landing page, running Facebook ads, and setting up automated welcome emails — to attract new prospects.

Using Mailchimp, the club launched a landing page promoted by a Facebook ad and triggered a welcome automation for every signup. Within the first week they collected more emails than they normally would in a month, achieved a 250% increase in challenge signups (about 50% of leads joined the 6‑week challenge), and saw year‑over‑year improvements of 30% higher attendance and 37% more new members and online bookings.

17th Street Athletic Club

Marissa Axell

Fitness Coach