CRM & Membership Refresh
With customer acquisition becoming increasingly competitive and expensive, retaining existing customers became one of Decathlon Australia's greatest growth opportunities. Rather than treating CRM as simply an email channel, we reimagined it as a complete customer experience to connecting loyalty, lifecycle marketing and personalised communication to strengthen long-term customer relationships.
Working across global, digital, retail and commercial teams, my team led the transformation of both our CRM strategy and membership program, creating a more valuable customer proposition while delivering measurable commercial growth.
Loyalty
CRM
Strategy
Digital
Customer Experience
Loyalty CRM Strategy Digital Customer Experience
The Context
Along with our expansion of Connect Stores across Sydney, Decathlon Australia's customer base continued to grow, our CRM program was no longer keeping pace with customer expectations.
Lifecycle journeys lacked personalisation, our loyalty proposition offered limited value beyond transactional discounts, and many customer touch points no longer reflected the refreshed Decathlon brand experience.
At the same time, rising acquisition costs meant increasing frequency of purchase and customer lifetime value had become a strategic priority. We recognised an opportunity to strengthen loyalty by delivering more personalised communications, rewarding customer behaviour beyond purchases, and creating a membership experience that customers genuinely wanted to engage with.
The Insight
Every interaction should add value to the customer while strengthening their relationship with the brand. By combining better segmentation, behavioural automation and a more rewarding loyalty program, we could increase purchase frequency, improve engagement and build stronger long-term customer relationships without relying solely on promotional campaigns or discounting our already tight margins.
The objective wasn't simply to send more emails, we knew volume wouldn’t cut it. It was to create an ecosystem that encouraged customers to keep returning because the experience was genuinely useful to them.
The Execution
Working closely with global teams, digital, retail and commercial stakeholders, my team led the localisation and rollout of the new loyalty proposition across Australia.
Key initiatives included:
Redesigning the customer lifecycle with personalised, behaviour-led email journeys.
Creating sport-specific post-purchase content that educated customers, recommended complementary products and promoted in-store services including bike servicing and product recycling.
Refreshing automated lifecycle journeys including welcome, abandoned cart and browse abandonment with improved segmentation and messaging.
Launching Decathlon's new global membership program, introducing a points-based loyalty system that rewarded purchases, birthdays, recycling initiatives and ongoing engagement.
Rolling out new membership communications, point-of-sale materials and in-store collateral across every retail location.
Partnering with retail teams to train store staff on the new customer proposition and ensure consistent customer experiences nationwide.
Introducing SMS marketing as a new owned channel, enabling targeted, time-sensitive communications during key commercial periods
Throughout the project, customer insight, behavioural data and commercial performance informed every decision, ensuring each touchpoint balanced customer value with measurable business outcomes.
The Impact
The transformation completely changed how we engaged with our customers, shifting CRM from a promotional channel to a strategic driver of customer loyalty and lifetime value.
Improved segmentation and personalised lifecycle communications significantly increased engagement while reducing unsubscribe rates, demonstrating stronger customer relevance.
Most importantly, the combination of a refreshed CRM strategy and enhanced loyalty proposition encouraged customers to return more often, engage more deeply with the brand and contribute greater long-term commercial value.
Membership database grew 114%.
Opt-in rate grew to 88% of total purchases omni channel.
Unsubscribe rate dropped to 0.3%.
Addition of new channel with direct SMS, achieving MER of 10.2
Increase average frequency of purchase from 1.1 to 2.7 per year.
AOV for eCommerce grew by 33% and by 12% for in store from introduction of points loyalty scheme.
Over $20,000 revenue per month attributed to automated lifecycle journeys.