INTERSPORT grows loyal fanbase by 350% with Klaviyo

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INTERSPORT is a specialty sports retailer that provides regional communities across Australia with sporting footwear, apparel, equipment and accessories. In 2014, Kevin O’Hanlon, CEO of INTERSPORT Australia, sought to turn the company from an independent buying group to a large franchise in Australia, which now sells to Aussies through 87 stores and ecommerce. Klaviyo is helping INTERSPORT scale their growth.

Learn how INTERSPORT created a consistent omnichannel experience with Klaviyo

Challenge

INTERSPORT is known for delivering an exceptional customer experience across its 87 specialty stores in regional Australia. But when the brand expanded into ecommerce in 2017 and on Shopify in 2023, delivering a consistent experience across all touchpoints became challenging.

Each individual INTERSPORT store was maintaining a separate customer database, which was disconnected from the brand’s online store and CRM, creating disparate customer data.

“Our previous platforms didn’t connect effectively to our Google Analytics, so we never got a clear picture of how our marketing efforts were tracking,” says Denver Styles, CRM specialist at INTERSPORT. “We had to manually track down data and compare it, and even then we could only make general assumptions about customer behaviour.”

The team therefore struggled to understand everything from overall business performance to individual product performance and customer behaviour, both in store and online. And because they lacked reliable behavioural data, they had to rely on self-reported customer preference data for personalisation.

Solution

Klaviyo’s tight integration with Shopify centralised all of INTERSPORT Australia’s data, and helped the team to build a single view of each customer, including both in-store and online behaviour.

As a result, INTERSPORT were able to deliver a personalised customer experience across all digital touchpoints, and accurately report on attribution and customer behaviour.

“One of my favourite things about Klaviyo is how quick and easy it is to use,” adds Styles. “We used to run regular performance reports that took three weeks to produce because of the disparate data we had. Now with Klaviyo, I can create more detailed reports in less than half an hour, which enables us to be agile and responsive to customer insights.”

In short, with Klaviyo, I can achieve far more, with far less help, in far less time. That alone has made an incredible difference to our ROI and made my job easier, more meaningful and more exciting than ever.

Strategy

Since moving to Klaviyo, INTERSPORT has built a clearer picture of their customers’ journey. With these insights, the team have been able to expand the brand’s personalised, specialist customer experience from a store level through to every digital touchpoint by:

• Adapting to real customer needs: The team quickly learned that self-reported customer preferences weren’t as reliable indicators of future behaviour as real purchase data. For example, many customers who had previously told them they like pilates or yoga were actually coming to INTERSPORT for sports gear and shoes for their kids. That information has been vital in showing customers relevant product recommendations and tailoring email and SMS comms to reflect customers’ genuine needs.

• Optimising campaigns: Through a combination of abandoned cart flows, second-purchase discounts, and AI-powered optimisation, the team has improved engagement and purchase rates. For example, Klaviyo’s Smart Send Time feature revealed that sending evening email campaigns between 8:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m. tends to drive optimal engagement.

• Bringing regional and national together: INTERSPORT can now give individual stores the freedom and flexibility to run their own store-specific sales or in-store activations for locals, while giving the marketing team at a national level visibility into sends so they can avoid over-communicating with ecommerce campaigns.

With Klaviyo, INTERSPORT are driving a much larger share of revenue with lifecycle marketing than they used to. In their most recent month with Klaviyo, they saw a 4.9x larger share of online sales attributed to CRM than they saw in their final month with their old provider.

“Thanks to Klaviyo, I’ve never been more excited to be in customer relationship management, and a part of the INTERSPORT team,” Styles says. “We’re a franchise business and all stores are owned by families in regional communities. Klaviyo empowers us to grow our brand in our local communities and nationally, which makes my role more meaningful than it’s ever been.

Klaviyo’s platform is so intuitive. Even without any real Klaviyo training, I am able to use tools that make a huge impact on our ROI — and I’m only just scratching the surface of what Klaviyo can do.