Dick’s Sporting Goods drives mass personalization effort
Dick’s Sporting Goods is putting a data backbone in place to track real-time customer data for personalized marketing at scale.
The nation’s largest sporting goods retailer has selected the Adobe Experience Cloud platform to support an initiative to quickly deliver digital customers experiences that can be scaled during peak periods. The deployment expands a partnership that first began in 2017, when Dick’s selected Adobe as its customer analytics and A/B testing platform.
Utilizing Adobe business intelligence technology as a base, Dick’s is able to better understand what customers are looking for when they engage online, and augment the experience to make it feel more relevant to the individual. Dick’s can also move more quickly with Adobe Experience Manager cloud service, delivering new web and mobile experiences that are modular and scalable during peak shopping periods.
Dick’s is also rolling out the Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (RTCDP), part of its Adobe Experience Platform CRM solution. RTCDP provides a foundation to gather customer insights across channels while interactions are taking place, with the goal of enabling real-time personalization. Dick’s will also be able to provide marketers with access to deeper insights on the overall customer journey, as shoppers move between digital channels.
For example, the solution will ensure that a first-time Dick’s shopper who comes in for tennis equipment will receive content in the future on tennis balls, instead of new wrestling gear. Dick’s will also leverage RTCDP to help personalize perks in its ScoreCard loyalty program.
Dick’s is rolling out this new omnichannel personalization platform following its successful June 2021 effort to offer customers a single, secure login across all digital and mobile touchpoints. Before focusing its strategy on a unified omnichannel experience, Dick’s Sporting Goods developed five web and mobile apps. As more customers leveraged these digital touchpoints, the retailer found that a lack of consistent customer identity across its different apps and sites prevented shoppers from navigating digital touchpoints with the same ease as walking from department to department in a brick-and-mortar store.
“We have always prioritized meeting the customer where they are, whether that is inside of a retail location, or digitally through our e-commerce platforms,” said Steve Miller, senior VP of strategy, e-commerce and analytics, Dick’s Sporting Goods. “We didn’t realize how valuable this would become in the midst of a global pandemic, when our customers unleashed their inner athletes, and needed us to show up for them in new ways. Our investments and new services in digital will come to life with the help of Adobe Experience Cloud, enabling us to deliver seamless experiences across channels, and drive a mass personalization effort that covers millions of customers.”
As of October 30, 2021, Dick’s Sporting Goods operated 734 Dick’s Sporting Goods stores across the United States. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, the company also owns and operates Golf Galaxy, Field & Stream and Public Lands stores, as well as GameChanger, a youth sports mobile app for scheduling, communications, live scorekeeping and video streaming.