Many clubs, including Crunch and Gold's Gym, are using smartphone apps to drive brand awareness, member satisfaction and revenues. Photos courtesy of Apple, Crunch, Gold's Gym.

Want to find a step aerobics class you can hit on your way home from the office? For the members of many fitness clubs today, there’s an app for that.

Smartphones now make up almost 30 percent of all wireless phones in the United States, according to a Nielsen report, and researchers Gartner Inc. predict that the web-enabled phones will replace computers as most people’s primary means of accessing the Internet by 2013. In response, forward-thinking companies are increasingly investing in making their brands accessible to smartphone users through mobile-friendly websites and mobile applications. And that includes many major fitness club industry players—24 Hour Fitness, LA Fitness, Crunch and Gold’s Gym, to name a few.

Most club apps offer at a minimum the basics that a member or prospective member would look for on the club’s website, such as location information, class schedules and facility photos. But beyond that, the features and accessibility vary greatly, depending on each club’s strategy in creating its app.

For Crunch Fitness, New York, an app was a must-have, says Christina DeGuardi, the company’s vice president of marketing.

“Our member base is pretty young and savvy,” DeGuardi says. “Their usage of our website is so high that we knew that an app was something that our members would appreciate and that could become part of their daily routine.”

Crunch worked with IdeaWork Studios, the digital agency responsible for the crunch.com website, to create the mobile app, which launched in mid-January after around two months of development. The app is linked directly to the website, which means that when Crunch staff change a group exercise class time or a club’s contact details on crunch.com using the company’s content management system (CMS), it automatically is updated in the app, too.

Although anyone can download the free app, the user must enter a Crunch membership number to access its features. At press time, figures included 6,000 iPhone downloads and 4,000 Android phone downloads, meaning that more than 10 percent of all members downloaded the app within its first five weeks, DeGuardi says.

The app’s most used features are a check-in function, which allows users to pull up a mobile membership card for reception staff to scan, and a class finder that lets members search by class name, instructor, time or location.

The app also has a version of the website’s members-only iCrunch section, which users can personalize by setting their favorite classes, tracking their goals, and maintaining a photo log.

The app cannot be utilized by nonmembers, but DeGuardi says that it is still a useful recruitment tool for Crunch.

Members can choose the “shout your check-in” setting, which automatically updates their Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter accounts with their whereabouts when they arrive at a club. They also can use the app to send a two-week guest pass to a friend or post a referral as a link on their Facebook walls to offer a guest pass to all of their friends.

DeGuardi would not specify how much Crunch spent to develop the app, but says the range of pitches went from $40,000 up to $100,000.

“I can say that a lot of companies were coming back and saying that for the things we wanted to do, the development would be about $100,000—and we didn’t even get close to that,” she says.

Whatever the initial investment, DeGuardi says the app is producing returns via the referral feature and a specials section where the club offers discounts on merchandise and services.

Crunch already is working on phase two of the app, and DeGuardi hints that the next version may offer features for nonmembers.

“That’s definitely on the radar for something we might want to do going forward,” she says.

NEXT PAGE: HOW THE GOLD’S GYM APP REACHES POTENTIAL MEMBERS

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© 2012 Penton Media Inc.