Sun & Ski Sports

The Client

Since 1980, Sun & Ski Sports has been a specialty outdoor retailer inspiring adventures through exceptional customer service, first-hand expertise, and competitively priced brands ready to perform for any journey. The company has 31 stores in addition to its online store and specializes in equipment, apparel, footwear, and accessories to enhance its customers’ active lifestyles and year-round activities.

The Situation

Sun & Ski Sports wanted to give customers the specific, helpful information they needed to make informed buying decisions. Like other retailers, Sun & Ski Sports’ customers expect to hear about the great deals and services the company offers but don’t want to be inundated with irrelevant information. The company’s goal was to improve customer targeting to increase engagement rates and return on investment.

The Challenge

Being both an online and physical retailer and having a solid presence on social media, email, and in-person events, Sun & Ski reaches a wide variety of people. But its large audience size meant that customer segmentation and targeting were difficult. The company needed a solution to help pinpoint the shoppers with the highest conversion potential out of a sea of customers.

The Solution

To reach its customers wherever they might be, Sun & Ski Sport created a rich omnichannel experience spanning a variety of media channels. Acquia CDP allowed the company to take full advantage of multiple platforms by aggregating the data in one place. This meant that Sun & Ski Sports could better target customers — for example, by utilizing a customer’s in-store purchase information to determine whether direct mail outreach would be relevant to them or by using their email engagement to refine the ads they were shown on social media.

In addition to aggregating customer data from various sources, Acquia CDP offered Sun & Ski Sports the immensely powerful tool of creating custom machine learning (ML) segments through Machine Learning Studio. It allowed the company to more effectively parse through the vast volume and variety of data available in Acquia CDP, ultimately helping Sun & Ski Sports recognize subtle trends in customers’ brand interactions.

The Results

Using Acquia CDP to improve customer targeting meant Sun & Ski Sports’ audiences got the information they wanted, and fewer received unwanted information. This translated into a:

• 1,500% increase in response rate for direct mail efforts
• 1,100% improvement in incremental net profit per name on direct mail pieces
• 200% increase in paid social clickthrough rate 
• 25% reduction in cost per click for paid social efforts