Case Study: Marathon Sports achieves 225% promotion lift and customer-data transformation with SugarCRM

Outrunning the Competition Sports Retailer Sprints into Data-Driven Marketing with Sugar

Marathon Sports, a leading sportswear and equipment retailer across the west coast of Latin America, faced rising regional competition and a regulatory change that forced it to make loyalty cards free. With a database of more than one million customer ID numbers but almost no contact or preference data, the company launched “Project CRM” to move from transactional retailing to data-driven marketing and deepen customer loyalty.

Marathon implemented Sugar as a central CRM, integrated it with POS, kiosks, social channels and Act-On, and launched targeted email programs and events like “Marathon Day.” The platform enriched profiles for over a million customers, more than doubled average purchase value during campaigns (from about $68 to $152), increased retention from 47% to 57% and visit frequency from 1.4 to 2 visits/year, drove a 60% sales lift and 35,000 transactions on Marathon Day, and significantly boosted social and email-driven conversions.

Marathon Sports

Jaime Morillo

Chief Customer Officer