B2C Marketing: Finish Line increases email revenue 50% via segmentation

"Honor the conversation," Aaron Buchanan, Digital Personalization Manager, Finish Line, said in reference to marketing’s relationship with consumers in the emailing space.

Winner of Best B2C Email Campaign at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2015, Finish Line is a top athletic footwear and apparel retailer. The company has over 1,040 Finish Line branded locations primarily in the U.S., and FinishLine.com was ranked #148 in Internet Retailer's 2014 Top 500. However, the company suffered from inauthentic customer communications when it came to email.

Buchanan presented at Summit 2015 on the importance of marketers humanizing their interactions with consumers and making them more like conversations. Buchanan and his team implemented this more personalized approach by utilizing Finish Line’s customer data to better personalize its messaging.

From this personalization and segmentation emailing effort, Finish Line was able to achieve:

• A 50% increase in email revenue for trigger-based programs


• 2.5x increase in overall website effectiveness from content optimization

Buchanan focused on the importance of treating customers as individuals when possible.

"Recognize that you have thousands of sessions coming to your site every day. Each one of them is exhibiting really granular behavior," he said. "If you can monitor all of those behaviors, you can truly honor the customer by continuing the conversation in the way that they tell you is appropriate."

In this session, Buchanan breaks Finish Line’s success down into six key steps:

1. Partner with a solution provider and implement tools


2. Infuse marketing needs into existing creative processes


3. Segment subscribers


4. Unify multichannel efforts


5. Optimize site content


6. Test email campaigns to ensure effectiveness

Watch the above session to learn how to translate the personalization of a brick-and-mortar store to the digital sphere, move toward automation, away from the batch-and-blast emailing efforts and how to remedy cart abandonment.

Related Resources

MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 — At the Bellagio in Las Vegas, February 22-24

Email Segmentation: Finish Line's automation initiative lifts email revenue 50%

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