2020 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

Objectives and Challenges

For Black Friday, Sport Chek had an ambitious target: beating Amazon at the online retail battle they’ve owned for more than a decade. Quite a challenge, since Sport Chek invests nothing close to the billions Amazon invests online.

Insight and Strategy

In the seven days leading up to Black Friday, a new analytic trend popped up: the average number of items left abandoned in Sport Chek’s website carts increased by the hour, reaching an unpreceded high. The brand called this new trend “digital window shopping”: after placing items temporarily in Sport Chek’s carts, consumers look for similar options on its competitors’ website.

Media agency Touche! quickly realized that these temporary carts were a golden mine of insights. They revealed, in real time, which items out of the hundreds of thousands sold by Sport Chek could be used to attract an unpreceded number of visitors to its website. It also revealed what categories and products to leverage to win the share of voice war against Amazon.

Execution

A live data stream was quickly set up to generate insights from the “digital window shopping” phenomenon and select the star products to be advertised and key categories to bid on. In real-time, data from abandoned carts adapted and drove the media execution. The top 1,000 products left in carts, their URLs and associated SKUs were fully leveraged to creat new, dynamic campaigns in only a few hours. Armed with the insights of the shopping carts abandoned over the last seven days, Touche! gained many precious optimization hours versus of the competition.

This new approach was everything but a mere retargeting campaign, using cart data to retarget a small pool of visitors who had abandoned them. Items that were found in abandoned carts were quickly featured in Sport Chek’s mass campaign, reaching 30% of Canadians consumers in only a few hours. The brand promoted star products online to a wide audience of high potential consumers, through a variety of digital touchpoints.

Touche! also used this live data feed to select which search categories to bid on. Sport Chek simply did not have the means to win the bidding war against Amazon across all categories, but thanks to the rich insights found in the carts, it could win in all the right categories. These categories drove a high volume of consumers to its website and we optimized their conversion with a carefully planned mix of upsell tactics.

Credits

Greg Shelly, Vice President, Enterprise Digital Marketing, Sport Chek