JD Sports has identified a multi-million-pound opportunity to grow its UK in-store loyalty sales after an AI-powered personalisation trial found that more relevant offers can outperform bigger incentives.
The sports fashion retailer partnered with Leeds-based HyperFinity to test how different personalised offers influence customer behaviour and build an evidence base for its wider loyalty strategy.
HyperFinity designed a personalisation engine for JD Sports UK and used it to test a series of approaches, including ‘buy again’ category offers, cash-based rewards, spend multipliers and cross-selling based on customers’ previous purchases.
According to the companies, the trials found that relevance consistently outperformed simply increasing the value of an incentive.
Higher-spending customers responded better to spend multipliers, while lower spenders reacted similarly to both cash rewards and multipliers.
The programme also tested whether cross-sell offers based on previous purchasing behaviour could increase basket spend and examined how frequently customers should receive offers.
The trial found campaign spacing needs to be tailored to individual customer behaviour to reduce the risk of offer fatigue.
HyperFinity said the programme resulted in an uplift in total in-store loyalty sales across JD Sports UK during the trial period, although the companies have not disclosed the size of the increase.
JD Sports has now identified what it describes as a multi-million-pound opportunity to grow in-store loyalty sales within the first year of scaling the programme.
Chris Hope, Global Head of Insight & Analytics (Customer/Loyalty) at JD Sports, said: “HyperFinity quickly understood what we were trying to do and helped us run the trials in a clear and structured way. The insight we gained into customer behaviour has been really useful for shaping how we approach personalised offers going forward.”
Alongside its analysis, HyperFinity provided JD Sports with measurement dashboards, customer segmentations, campaign templates and insights into product seasonality and affinity.
Thomas Hill, co-founder of HyperFinity, added: “JD Sports is one of the most recognisable retailers, and the challenge the brand brought to us is one we hear often – how do you build genuine confidence in personalisation to enable the execution at scale? By running structured, evidence-led trials, we were able to give JD a clear picture of what works, why it works, and what the commercial opportunity looks like. That kind of actionable intelligence is exactly what we’re built to deliver.”
