Turning First-Party data assets into marketing assets

How Decathlon built a new growth channel from the ground up, driving incremental revenue across digital and retail.

“Building an always-on digital media channel is like working out at the gym – it’s about overcoming old habits and pushing boundaries to embrace change. But with a team effort, expertise, and trust in the vision, the victory was worth the effort. With a successful implementation now under our belt, we're ready to scale this internationally.”

Aurélien Deschodt, Global Head of Digital Media & Acquisition, Decathlon United

Working with Epsilon has enabled Decathlon to:

2.3M

Individuals reached within a couple of weeks only. Reaching customers (web & stores) and site visitors

50

of incremental revenue linked to offline purchases

6:1

Incremental Revenue On Ad Spend (iROAS)

Episode 1

Building a new growth channel with first party-data.

Many retailers struggle with seasonality and the ability to identify and reach in-market individuals online.

Here begins the story.

Challenges

Decathlon wanted to leverage the value of its first-party data by adopting a 1:1 omnichannel platform to deliver personalised, full-funnel, always-on digital campaigns that generated incremental revenue.

Seasonal and weather-dependent sports meant only 25% of Decathlon’s customers visited its websites every 90 days.
A lack of regular engagement was limiting its first-party data, making delivering personalised, impactful messages harder due to gaps in its understanding of buyers' preferences and interests.
Failing to recognise and reach its audiences over time was impacting its ability to drive long-term sales from them.
Focusing marketing campaigns on peak business periods was skewing activity, preventing it from delivering broader cross-year activity that always-on digital campaigns could offer.
Its current measurement approach was hindering its ability to deliver precise reporting across devices and channels, making it difficult to improve media efficiencies and allocate marketing investment effectively to those channels delivering results.
Not being able to recognise its customers online and offline or across devices and browsers had led to disjointed messaging.

Solutions

Epsilon built a single customer view for Decathlon, providing a consistent, unified view of its customers so they could better understand their buyers.
Introducing AI allowed real-time decisioning to be implemented so activities could be built around the most up-to-date audience insights, including browsing behaviour, purchasing data and customer attributes. Ads could now be built dynamically, with headlines, images, offers and call to actions all personalised.
A new approach to measuring incrementality was adopted using a statistically robust test and control methodology. This provided Decathlon's Data Science and Financial Control teams with transparent insights to assess reliably and credibly the impact of every campaign.

Results

Working with Epsilon has enabled Decathlon to:

Measure 87% of its conversions by matching individuals across devices, cookies, and channels.
Increase its average number of customer touchpoints to 4.
Develop 1,300 unique message variations and deliver 2.3 million unique communication sequences.
Offer personalisation based on a user’s sport and motivation for 55% of its delivered impressions.
Discover the value of its customer messaging by identifying that messaged clients made 35% more repurchases than those that weren’t.
Attain a 3-point increase in purchase frequency for its multichannel customer segment.

“Epsilon is our perfect partner because we share the same vision around customer-centricity and continuous innovation. They’ve helped us harness the power of data and technology to unlock new insights so we can deliver true personalisation. Now our campaigns are more effective because we can connect our end-to-end execution with business outcomes. And we’re not just contributing to sales – we’re generating revenue that otherwise wouldn’t have been realised.”

Aurélien Deschodt, Global Head of Digital Media & Acquisition, Decathlon United

How can you break through?

We get it. Each industry and each company encounters their own unique set of challenges. But what if we repositioned those challenges as opportunities? See just how far we can go.

Digital Media Solutions

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Increasing incrementality through the power of perfect personalisation