Objective
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.

Results are available upon request

In the seven days leading up to Black Friday, we detected a new analytic trend: the average number of items left abandoned in Sport Chek’s website carts increased by the hour, reaching unpreceded high. We called this new trend “online window shopping”: placing items temporarily in Sport Chek’s carts, consumers look for similar options on its competitors’ website. Consumers were prepping up for Black Friday, ready to make the best deal as soon as Black Friday began at midnight!

Beat Amazon for Black Friday

The fierce competition between retailers during Black Friday is reaching unprecedented heights. Sport Chek listened to its consumers and leveraged “online window shopping” to win the retail war against Amazon. Products left in Sport Chek’s website shopping carts became a gold mine of insights on what consumers were looking to buy: we used those start products to attract more consumers. New consumers visiting the site generated either e-comm sales…or abandoned items in their carts, providing more real-time data from which we selected more star products. An infinite loop of insights and sales.

Understand and bet on Digital Window Shopping

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A live data stream was quickly set up to generate insights from the “online 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, URLs and associated SKUs were fully leveraged to created new, dynamic campaigns in only a few hours. Armed with the insights of the shopping carts abandoned over the last seven days, we gained many precious optimization hours versus of the competition.

This new approach was everything but a mere re-targeting campaign. We did not use carts data to retarget a small pool of visitors who had abandoned them. To win Black Friday, a 24 hour sales event, the insights generated created massive reach in a record time. Items that we found in abandoned carts were quickly featured in our mass campaign, reaching 30% of Canadians consumers in only a few hours. We promoted star products online to a wide audience of high potential consumers, through a variety of digital touchpoints, from YouTube to Google search to Instagram. We relentlessly optimized the campaign towards the most performant placements, formats and creatives.

We 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. Finally, thanks to custom-built scripts, abandoned carts data was crossed with inventory data and we stopped advertising products as soon as inventory ran low.

A succesful campaign

Festival of Media Global
2019
Data - Data & Insight
Festival of Media Global
2019
Best in E-Commerce
Festival of Media North America
2019
Data - Data & Insight
Internationalist Digital
2019
Local Brand or Service in a Local market
Media Innovation Awards
2019
Best in Retail
WARC Media Awards
2019
Best use of Data

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