Rapidly changing lifestyles have pushed people to take better care of their wellness and fitness. Rather than need, fitness has become more of passion for millennials. A health-conscious generation is now willing to pay for the right regimes by joining online gyms and slimming clubs or linking up with wellness and fitness apps that help them to stay fit.

According to a research, the market for fitness solution apps will increase by 210% by 2020.

And hence, gyms, slimming clubs, wellness centres and fitness trainers all have adopted dynamics of the online world to get an edge in the cut-throat competition. The fitness market is expected to demonstrate significant growth by 2021. So, ‘Now” is the right time for startups to get into the industry.

How startups can flourish with wellness and fitness apps

Undoubtedly, mobile applications provide better business benefits as compared to websites. This is because of a mobile app:

• offers better personalisation,
• works faster than websites,
• sends notifications,
• possess the ability to work offline, and
• is more user-friendly.

In the last couple of years, a pool of startups has emerged to address the requirements of fitness enthusiasts. mHealth apps in startups are now not a new thing. These apps consist of various healthcare segments like nutrition and diet, exercise and yoga, lifestyle management, on-demand medical services, wellness and fitness, and others. The wellness and fitness industry is currently dominated by weight loss and beauty treatment services.

This is how a growing healthcare startup (e.g. gym, slimming centre) can benefit from wellness and fitness apps.

1.Wearables and related fitness apps

How often you surf your Google Play store or Apple App store? If you do it quite frequently, for sure, numbers of fitness applications would have popped up. Since 2014, wearables are in limelight and their popularity continues to increase.

According to the forecast by Statista, fitness applications that analyze fitness achievements like the weight lifted or miles run are only going to become more popular.

Wearables include smartwatches, heart rate monitors, and other tracking devices.

Hence, while developing wellness and fitness app solutions, startups should build it not only for iOS and Android devices but also for popular wearable devices.

2. Focus on most popular fitness activities

As mentioned above, multiple types of mHealth apps are gaining popularity. However, by far, the apps that lead market shares are bodyweight training and strength training.

• Fitness activity tracking apps: these usually acts as a marketing tool to boost the sales of activity tracking devices
• Workout apps: these are popular because they comprise a pre-arranged schedules in different formats such as video, text and 3D models, where a user can set their difficulty level and accordingly get started.
• Diet and nutrition apps: weight gain and weight loss being exceptionally challenging and popular, these apps see very bright potential in the coming future. These apps create a logbook of nutrition and calories, track diets and maintain a record of exercise and yoga routines.

3. Other ideas for monetization of apps

On publishing an app in either or both of iOS app store and/or Google play store, any business will immediately think of how soon they can monetize the same. Here, are some app monetization ideas, which any startup can afford and go ahead with.

• Launch FREE app with in-app advertising:

Digital advertising is rising day-by-day. Since mobile apps are snatching the market share of websites, advertisers have also started considering mobile apps as one of their preferred advertising destinations. In your wellness and fitness apps, you can also have an inbuilt feature of paid advertisements. But, they have to be relevant to the content your users are accessing and should not pop-up randomly as a SPAM!

Advertisement partners promote their ads on your app and if a user clicks on it, advertisers pay remuneration to the app owner. Most of the advertisement partners permit an app owner to monetize through cost per click, cost per view, or cost per action.

The only limitation of this model is sometimes a user gets irritated with unwanted advertisements and may uninstall an app.

• Launch FREE app with in-app purchases

This model eliminates the limitation of the previous model. Here, there will not be advertisements for any other products or services. Instead, in your FREE app, they are getting an option to buy something which is pretty relevant to what they are looking for. For example, there are few FREE workout videos for beginners and intermediaries.

But, if a user wants to surf videos meant for advanced levels, s/he may need to shed few dollars to access the same. This is very common sort of monetization in most of the gaming apps. However, the same model works in all other sectors too.  Here, an app owner has a huge potential to generate handsome profits as both user engagement and user interaction grows significantly.

• Launch paid apps

This is a pretty simple model as the name suggests, it’s neither FREE nor FREEMIUM. Here, depending on the type of your wellness and fitness app, a user has to pay to access and download your app. Apart from the healthcare sector, such apps are also popular in the categories like movies, music, education, etc. where a user has to first pay and then access the app. However, a question is why will a user pay when there are similar FREE apps available in the same play store and app store. Well, to showcase the value-for-money of your paid wellness and fitness apps and convince your user, you need to use compelling title, description and images along with highlighting unique features.

At last…!!!

Wellness and fitness oriented startups are driven by their members. Looking at the current scenario, a growing number of these new members are Millennials. Since millennials are so tech savvy, wellness and fitness centers should embrace the same technology i.e mobile apps. With a perfect app monetization strategy, any startup can easily hit jackpot.