In the first Retail Personalization Index, Adidas earned a passable but unimpressive score, thanks to a solid sneakerhead strategy and a rich fitness app with sleep tracking functionality and motivational content. A few months later, the sportswear giant announced that it would stop advertising on television and instead, focus on targeting individual consumers.

Adidas’ beautiful website is both fashionable and functional. There are attribute-based and collaborative filtering product recommendations, perfect for converting new customers. There are also more behavior- and interest-based recommendations for repeat customers, who help personalization efforts.

Through Adidas’s marketing strategy, shoppers can create profiles, where they specify their favorite sports and save coveted items to their wishlists. That gives the retailer something to work with, recommending relevant products, content and offers. These profiles are part of the Creators Club loyalty program, which centralizes preferences, wishlists and order history, helping Adidas better personalize the customer experience across every channel.

For example, app users with items in their shopping carts receive reminders via push notifications. Those reminders also extend to email, the channel where Adidas has made the biggest strides over the past two years. The brand’s cart abandonment emails double as opportunities to upsell, with even more relevant recommendations. In addition, Adidas features onboarding messages that are personalized with sign-up data.

Nothing highlights Adidas’ email improvement like a campaign from last spring. The retailer filmed 30,000 Boston Marathon runners and was able to keep track of them thanks to a RFID chip on each of their bibs. Within 24 hours, Adidas emailed a unique video clip to each one of them. Adidas also published those clips to its campaign website, driving 80,000 visitors because people loved to share personalized content (no matter how sweaty and rough they may look — it was also raining during the Boston Marathon).

So far, so good. Adidas delivered record results in 2018, increasing profits by 45%. We’re excited to see their momentum, especially given the company’s plan to personalize every one of its platforms by 2020.