Our customers are the ones who inspire us to work harder every day. We love learning about the amazing things they do with Amperity and we love sharing it with you. That’s why we’re back with another spotlight on one of our power users who applies the force of customer data to their company to make magic happen.
Shannon in five:
Personalization Lead at DICK’s Sporting Goods since August 2020
Favorite thing about Amperity is how easy the tools are to use, especially VSE and SQL
Uses Amperity to create customer segments and personalize messaging
Is a huge Peloton Advocate
Has completed enough Peloton rides to join the Century Club
What are you responsible for as a Personalization Lead?
My team is responsible for the enterprise personalization strategy and enablement across DICK’s Sporting Goods, and we work across and support a number of teams within Marketing and eCommerce. We also work very closely with our Technology and Data & Analytics teams.
Our team wears many hats. We are project managers, consultants, and subject matter experts in our customer data and audiences. We regularly work with data within the Amperity both validating and creating models and segments.
We’re bringing DICK’s Sporting Goods customer data to life by first focusing on our audiences, customer segments, and customer journeys. Once we have more capabilities in place, we’ll be able to focus on 1:1 messaging, informed by the better ID resolution we get from Amperity. Currently, we’re implementing Adobe Campaign and Journey Orchestration along with a content management tool — Amperity is directly connected to them and will be driving the programs when we’re live.
Has your use of Amperity changed how you get work done?
We spend a lot of our time with the data, gaining insights about our customers, creating segments, and using attributes to personalize messaging. Before Amperity, we spent much more time doing this work and we had to work around data quality issues. Our legacy merge process was also rule-based and led to us merging family members. Now, we have the ability to separate family members, leading us to a larger customer audience than we had previously (without spending any acquisition budget!). We also uncovered 100k more gold-tier loyalty members after updating our Amperity data model.
Our audiences grew without spending marketing dollars because Amperity helped us identify individuals that had previously been combined as “one customer” within a household.
Our Google Cloud and Big Query have an Amperity connector which gives our teams the ability to send audiences and segments. This saves us at least ten hours a week and also stops us from spending on a contractor budget. Most importantly, our teams can use their brain power on more impactful activities instead of writing thousands of lines of SQL code.
Once we start running campaigns with our connector to Adobe Campaign and Customer Journeys, we expect to see an improvement in our campaign performance by the end of summer.
What’s the coolest thing you’ve been able to do with data?
Probably the most interesting thing we’ve been able to see in the data is how much more intelligent and advanced the Amperity stitch process is versus the traditional merging process. This allows us to see when someone fits with a new customer audience
It’s also given us greater reach within our customers. Our audiences grew without spending marketing dollars because Amperity helped us identify individuals that had previously been combined as “one customer” within a household.
What is your favorite feature/capability in Amperity and what do you use it for?
I use the product every day and I use it to do a lot of validation and model creation. This tool is so easy to use — I use both VSE and SQL. VSE is amazing when I’m looking at a customer profile and SQL allows us to look at the audiences and linking tables (The shortcut to writing all those lines of SQL code is so helpful!)
Not only are Amperity’s products great, but your teams have been indispensable to us.
What were you surprised to learn once you had access to your data?
I wasn’t exactly surprised, but it was great to be able to validate some of our hypotheses. We know the faults of our data and knowing there was something that allowed us to do better was amazing. Most companies are dealing with the same problem as us: They’ve been in business for a while and have been collecting customer data from stores, but now that they have to use the data in a digital format they’re finding it difficult. Amperity made the transition so much easier and allowed us to make full use of the valuable data we’ve been collecting for years.
What sort of things are you doing with the segments you are running?
We are using these segments now to gain insights and seize the opportunity. By the end of summer, we will be using these segments to drive marketing messages in Email, Direct Mail, and SMS, and our mobile app will follow shortly.
What’s one of your hobbies outside of work?
I am a major Peloton advocate! I love my Peloton Bike and Tread (my user ID is @shannonmaple) and I am always telling people about the benefits of the community — such as all the classes and workouts you can do with the hardware and with the app. I’ve done so many rides that I’m part of the Century Club, which is when Peloton sends you a celebratory t-shirt for completing one hundred rides.
Thank you Shannon!
And to our readers, we'll be back with more Customer Spotlights soon. In the meantime, you can check out previous installments here.
DICK's Sporting Goods is a joint customer with Amperity and Microsoft Azure.