after fixing email deliverability — instead of missing targets for 3 consecutive months.
with follow-ups reaching prospects when they're ready to convert.
from leads who previously seemed "cold" but were not receiving emails.
At LA Fitness, growth happens through consistent execution. As a privately-held fitness chain with 665+ locations across North America, the company built its success on converting walk-in prospects into paying members.
For Jordan Alvarez, LA Fitness's Director of Sales Operations, managing sales performance across hundreds of locations means ensuring every follow-up system works flawlessly. When someone tours a facility and expresses interest, the follow-up process determines whether that prospect becomes a member.
But Jordan discovered their most reliable revenue driver had a hidden problem that was quietly sabotaging results across multiple regions.
For a company running across 25 states and 2 provinces, tracking email performance became a conversion nightmare.
"I had sales counselors telling me their best prospects were ghosting them after initial visits," explains Jordan. "People who seemed ready to sign were just disappearing. We're talking about people who'd spent an hour touring facilities, asking detailed questions about our Pro Results training programs."
The numbers were devastating. LA Fitness needed sales counselors to convert 12-15% of leads to hit targets. But email response rates had plummeted 40% compared to the previous year, and 72% of regions were consistently missing monthly goals.
“Our prospective clients were ghosting us.”
Managing email authentication across hundreds of corporate-owned locations was becoming impossible. The company was drowning in technical problems it didn't understand.
"We started calling prospects directly to figure out what was happening," Jordan remembers. "Half of them claimed they never received our follow-ups. Others said they were interested but figured we'd moved on since they hadn't heard anything."
Then came the crushing discovery — nearly 40% of their carefully crafted follow-up sequences were landing in Gmail's Promotions tab or getting filtered to spam entirely. Prospects weren't rejecting their offers because they genuinely weren't seeing them.
Jordan learned that Gmail and Yahoo had implemented stricter requirements for bulk email senders in February 2024 (most companies had no idea changes were coming). Their spam complaint rate had climbed to 0.4% when Gmail's new threshold was 0.10% — they were unknowingly breaking rules they didn't even know existed.
What LA Fitness was suffering from was poor email deliverability. Landing in spam became the biggest bottleneck for the entire sales team. Fortunately, Jordan discovered Maxify Inbox by EmailWarmup through a friend and was intrigued by their approach.
"It wasn't some overhyped SaaS tool. Maxify Inbox offered a system (tools + email deliverability experts) that could handle domains that facilitated email programs for all our 600+ locations."
Jordan knew they'd found the answer, and LA Fitness implemented Maxify Inbox across all regions within weeks.
"When you're dealing with this scale, you don't need mere tools — but also experts who understand both the technical challenges and the business impact on sales teams. And nobody else is offering unlimited consultations in the market," says Jordan. "Maxify was exactly what we were looking for."
The onboarding process was surprisingly smooth. OAuth integration with their existing Google Workspace was instant, and Maxify transformed LA Fitness's entire follow-up process by offering automated warmup, unlimited validation with address replacement, dedicated IP protection, and a centralized dashboard where Jordan's team could design and publish follow-up campaigns across all 665+ locations.
"Our consultant fixes issues before they impact sales. Sometimes they prevent problems we didn't even know were coming."
Six weeks later, Jordan was staring at performance reports that looked completely different. The impact was immediate as LA Fitness achieved a consistent sales performance across regions.
Instead of chasing prospects who never received emails or troubleshooting technical authentication issues, sales counselors redirected their focus to relationship-building and strategic selling — while almost all of their emails were getting delivered to the inbox, rather than being flagged as spam or promotions.
"Within six weeks, we went from 64% to 95% inbox placement across Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook," says Jordan. "Our follow-up emails were finally reaching prospects when they were ready to make decisions."
Their spam complaint rate has plummeted from 0.4% to 0.06% and email engagement has increased by 42%, with open rates up 42% and click-through rates up 38%.
"We hit quota targets across 72% of regions in the first month after implementation," Jordan notes.
The transformation was so dramatic that the sales team was now crushing its targets, and actively helping drive the company's next phase of expansion (the company recently acquired XSport Fitness and is scaling Maxify across those new locations too).
LA Fitness is a privately-held fitness chain operating 665+ locations across 25 U.S. states and 2 Canadian provinces. Founded in 1984 and headquartered in Irvine, California, the company serves millions of members through full-service gyms offering cardio equipment, strength training, group fitness classes, basketball courts, pools, and personal training.
Industry
Health & Fitness
Company Size
Enterprise
Pain Point
Emails are going to spam, affecting sales quota attainment
Solution Used
Maxify Inbox
See what our clients has to say about our services and experience.
80%
Higher open rates
3.5x
Leads Converted
17M
Monthly Messages
