Sweaty Betty emerges fitter and stronger with AI tool

UK activewear retailer Sweaty Betty has proved that artificial intelligence can provide huge benefits if implemented correctly after witnessing a 62% revenue uplift in six months.

The company, which runs 65 UK stores, concessions and a growing online operation, has been working with Mastercard-owned Dynamic Yield’s data-driven, AI marketing technology to make better recommendations and online quizzes to get to know customers better.

The global activewear and lifestyle brand for women wanted to provide a curated, empathetic experience for shoppers. Sweaty Betty’s brand is based on empowering women to achieve their individual fitness goals.

The company wanted to accurately target customers from different markets with the right product based on their different needs, in order to deliver a more hyper-personalised experience that would drive loyalty, conversion and revenue.

Sweaty Betty wanted to improve the website experience and boost conversion rates by gaining valuable insights on key audience segments but needed to improve its ability to accurately target customers.

Sweaty Betty’s products come with higher price points and require more product education than many other sportswear brands because they are designed to last a lifetime.

This can be overwhelming for shoppers, so one of Sweaty Betty’s goals was to simplify and guide the product discovery process with quizzes, informing customers about the types of products to buy and questions they should consider when making a purchase.

Using Dynamic Yield Experience OS, these approaches could be tailored, tested and adjusted, increasing the viability by filtering the most popular products – like leggings and bras – based on the answer profile of each user.

In the UK, Sweaty Betty saw a dramatic uplift in revenue after using more personalised recommendations, including a +52% increase in the number of items per transaction and 57% higher order values.

In a trial aimed at measuring the effectiveness of personalised, time-sensitive messaging during peak-selling periods – notably Black Friday – Sweaty Betty found that pop-ups flagging “limited stock”, or the amount saved if checked-out at that moment, would lead to a 20.4% increase in purchases from new EU customers (compared to a control group with no personalised messaging). They also led to speedier checkouts and more conversions from site visitors.

Savings were based on each individual’s shopping cart and differed for each user. The pop-up was shown to 95% of those users who added an item to the shopping basket and proceeded to the following two more pages (showing reasonable intent to buy). The remaining 5% of visitors served as the control group, in order to measure uplift.

Following successful testing, Sweaty Betty determined that AI-powered recommendations drive better conversion rates than manually chosen ones. So, the retailer used the algorithms in Experience OS to add a product recommendation using contextual information from other users’ behaviour to serve similar browsed products in their results.

Trials showed a 3% uplift in average order value in the UK, and 8% rise in the US, after using recommendation widgets displayed on the product details page. Based on this success, Sweaty Betty has since deployed these widgets sitewide and significantly reduced the number of team hours spent on manually providing recommendations.

The retailer now plans to add its CRM data into Dynamic Yield to build more sophisticated audience segments. It also has plans to expand the personalisation programme and use the same AI technology to help make more recommendations via email.

Sweaty Betty lead digital product manager Helen Martin said: “With Dynamic Yield, we can build amazing experiences with huge agility and speed across digital channels. Since we’re no longer heavily reliant on big technical integrations and merchandising, we can now move faster and can deliver more experiences for our customers.”

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