Whether you’re creating a new health and wellness app for your business or looking for ways to enhance your existing wellness app, focusing on the features is the best place to start.
The cool part about modern no-code app development is that new features can be added with a single click. If you’re using a robust app builder like Buildfire, your wellness app can have as many of these features as you choose.
All of the functionality below is extremely versatile and works equally well for spas, health clinics, rehab facilities, physical therapists—essentially any business in the health and wellness space.
1. Appointment Booking
Every client or patient should be able to book an appointment from your app in just a few clicks. You can add this feature for both in-person sessions and virtual appointments.
This eliminates all friction associated with appointments booked over the phone. Users can book 24/7 from the app and will see availability in real-time instead of only being able to schedule during business through a receptionist who has to verbally convey available slots.
Not only is this much more efficient for your team internally, but it’s what your clients prefer.
If you’re running a spa, clients can book their treatment type, select a massage therapist, add on extras or upsells, and pick a time that’s convenient for them—all in less than 30 seconds.
You can even set up this appointment booking feature to require deposits or prepayments in an effort to reduce no-shows. Cancellations and rescheduling can be handled through the app as well.
2. Secure Document Exchange
Waiting for people to fill out paper forms in person prior to an appointment is a waste of everyone’s time. Beyond the extra time spent in the waiting room, now your staff has to keep hard copies organized or manually re-enter all of the information into your digital database.
Using your wellness app to manage intake forms is far more efficient, and you can even automate this process.
Whenever a new appointment is booked, you can automatically send any required forms to the user. They can fill out those documents prior to arrival, providing a smoother experience while eliminating duplicate work for your office staff.
Intake forms are just scratching the surface of how you can leverage this feature.
Doctors can share test results with patients 24/7 through a secure document manager. Chiropractors can upload posture assessments and x-ray comparisons. Physical therapists can share personalized recovery documents aligned with their patient’s treatments.
Essentially, any document or form that would normally be exchanged via email, fax, or in-person can be digitized and handled through your wellness app. The possibilities are limitless here.
3. On-Demand Videos
Adding a video library to your wellness app is an excellent way to drive engagement when users are outside of your facilities.
Even your best customers may only have an appointment once or twice per month. But by providing them with additional resources to access 24/7, they can become daily app users.
The video content obviously depends on the type of wellness facility you’re running. Spas may focus on videos related to guided meditation and breathwork, while physical therapists and centers can share exercise tutorials to help patients recover from injury.
You can also set up your videos to be accessible from the app in offline mode—making it easy for users to access content when they’re not connected to Wi-Fi.
Best of all, adding this feature to your app is a breeze. You can simply install a YouTube plugin or Vimeo plugin to connect your channel, and then select which videos to include in your app. It’s easy to set up folders of videos by category, create playlists, and hide premium videos behind a subscription-based paywall.
4. Location-Based Services
If you’re running a multi-location health and wellness business, you can add a feature to your app that directs people to the closest office.
The app and all of its primary functions will be available for all users. But each individual location can have its own page or space in the app that contains location-specific details—like address, phone number, and operating hours.
This can also help clients plan for their upcoming visit.
For example, one spa location may have a sauna and a steam room, while other locations just have a sauna. One location may have a full lap pool and jacuzzi on-site, and another may offer cold plunges and cryotherapy.
A physical therapist may want to warn patients of a parking fee and provide clear directions on how to find the office upon arrival.
These extra touches really improve the overall user experience at multiple touches—when they’re browning for information, booking an appointment, and when they arrive.
5. Goal Setting
Each person who uses a health and wellness app wants to better themselves in one way or another. Everyone’s goals are different, but the app can serve as the common ground to help achieve them.
You can trigger the goal-setting prompt either immediately after a download or potentially wait until after you’ve met with the client for an appointment. It all depends on your business and how you want to provide care.
This could be a simple push notification that asks how they’re feeling or reminds them to take a deep breath. Or you could ask them to log workouts and weight loss progress.
But once a goal has been established in the app, you can follow up with daily check-ins to keep people coming back and on pace for their goals.
6. Activity Tracking
This feature is a must-have for dietitians, nutritionists, trainers, therapists, and physicians who want to provide more personalized client care.
You can set up a feature in the app that lets users track different activities like daily water intake, miles walked, meals, and more. A simple checkbox for something like “meditation” or “yoga” being marked for completion each day can also work.
This can be even more specific to your practice and customized in any way that you see fit.
Adding this feature to your wellness app accomplishes two things simultaneously. First, it incentivizes users to open your app and stay engaged multiple times per day. But more importantly, it also helps hold them accountable and keeps them on track for their aforementioned goals.
7. In-App Messaging
Adding a secure chat feature to your wellness app is a simple and highly effective way for users to quickly ask questions and help without forcing them to call your office or submit a generic online form.
Some users may just ask basic questions related to your services, and you might get some “Are you open today?” questions on a holiday. Others might use it to let you know they’re running late for an appointment.
Some health and wellness businesses take this feature a step further by using it to provide patient care.
For example, a patient in physical therapy might have some questions while they’re doing exercises at home. The in-app messaging feature is a quick way for them to ask their therapist a question.
8. Gamification
Gamification features are often overlooked in the health and wellness app category. But this is an excellent way to drive engagement and keep people on track with their goals.
There are tons of different ways to set this up. Ultimately, you just want some type of system that rewards winners of different “games” on a weekly or monthly basis.
For example, here’s how Renaissance Ranch added gamification features to their rehabilitation app. Users earned points for different actions—like exercising, reading, meditating, or calling a sponsor. Points are updated in real-time and tracked on the app leaderboard. One month, the users at the top of the standings were awarded tickets to a professional basketball game.
We’ve seen other apps use the gamification and leaderboard method to create friendly competition amongst users—like seeing who can walk or run the most miles in a week.
The idea here is to find creative ways to incentivize users to do things that are good for themselves while also good for your business.
9. Community Wall and Message Board
An in-app message board helps add a social media-like element to your app that ultimately helps you build a more engaged wellness community.
It allows your clients to connect with other people who have similar goals that they otherwise wouldn’t have a chance to meet since the vast majority of your services are isolated and not offered in group settings.
People can use this to share tips for success, upload progress photos, ask questions, and get involved with different discussions.
For example, someone going through pain and tough rehabilitation sessions may use the community wall for support. Others who have already been through this can help reassure them that the first few sessions are the hardest, but it gets easier.
If your community wall is stale or inactive, you can always jumpstart the conversation by asking moderator-led questions. For a spa, you might ask people what their favorite treatment is. This could lead to a glowing review of your hot stone therapy that eventually causes more people to purchase this add-on for future appointments.
10. Digital Member ID
Rather than issuing physical ID cards to your clients, you can use your app to manage digital member IDs.
Nobody wants to carry around an extra piece of plastic or attach another barcode to their car keys. But everyone has their phones on them 24/7.
This feature can also automate your check-in process, as people can simply scan their member ID card upon arrival instead of waiting in a queue and checking in with a receptionist.
It works really well for spas, especially spas offering full access to their facilities on days when clients book a treatment. A massage may only last 60 or 90 minutes, but the digital ID card can help keep everything organized as people move around your grounds throughout the day.
Strategically placing a QR code scanner by the pool, sauna, or relaxation room can ensure that only people with verified access are using them—without forcing your staff to remember everyone who’s checked in.
11. Loyalty Rewards
Using your wellness app to create a customer loyalty program is a simple way to encourage more frequent transactions and increase your average order value (AOV).
You can set up tiered rewards levels based on spending, with different perks unlocked at each level.
For example, Tier 1 can be unlocked once a customer spends $500 in a year, which gets them 20% off spa services booked Monday-Thursday. Tier 2 is reached at $1,500 and gives customers 25% off services everyday and full access to the spa facilities (even on days when they don’t have a service booked).
Alternatively, you can treat every purchase equally and set up a mobile punch card that comes with a $50 or $100 reward credit after ten visits.
Regardless of which route you take, users can track their loyalty progress through the app in real-time, which incentivizes them to spend more so they can be rewarded for their loyalty.
12. Personalized Push Notifications
One major benefit of creating a health and wellness app is that it gives you direct access to the lock screen of every user who downloads the app.
So you can send out push notifications with a higher probability of being seen and read compared to emails that are more likely to end up in spam or trash folders.
There are dozens of different push notification campaigns that you can run in your wellness app. Popular options that tend to be more effective include:
- Appointment reminders
- Promotional deals and flash sales
- Birthday or holiday discounts
- Rewards status updates
- Daily check-ins and goal reminders
You can even set up advanced push notifications by leveraging location settings and geofencing capabilities—automatically triggering a push notification if a user comes within a certain radius of one of your locations.
13. Premium Subscriptions
Your wellness app opens the door to new revenue streams outside of your core services. In addition to using your app to let users pay for what you’re already offering, you can create digital resources and services that can be purchased directly through the app.
For example, maybe your spa app has a mental health page. For $20 per month or $200 per year, clients can optionally access daily meditations and guided breathwork exercises.
Other providers may consider adding a subscription service for virtual appointments.
Just think of something that’s low-cost and easy to implement for you that provides enough value to users to justify an added cost (all optional, of course).
14. Employee Portal
The vast majority of the features on this list are customer-facing. But you can also set up your health and wellness app to be used internally—unlocking tons of other great features to streamline processes and make your team more efficient.
Here’s how it works.
When configuring your app, you can simply tag users as employees. So when those people log in, they’ll have an entirely different interface than your customers (and access to different features).
You can use this portal to onboard new hires, deliver HR documentation, create employee training modules, handle expense reimbursements, collect employee feedback, and so much more.
The Amputee Walking School used this concept to provide trainers and therapists with on-demand resources while working directly with patients. Since these types of rehabilitation services are done outside of a controlled setting, the app’s mobility provides staff with a convenient way to apply hands-on training in real-world scenarios.
Final Thoughts
Gone are the days when you need to hire developers and spend months developing new features for your app. Thanks to modern tools like Buildfire, you can install any of these features to your app in a matter of minutes thanks to our extensive plugin marketplace—and you’ll never have to write a line of code.
Creating a mobile app for your health and wellness business will give you an edge over your competitors and improve the client experience. And since Buildfire is so affordable, you’ll generate revenue with a high ROI almost instantly.
Sign up for your 30-day free trial of Buildfire today to get started. If you need more support and have questions about how to create a wellness app, book a demo to connect with a Buildfire app expert.
