How Fit is Under Armour’s CRM Strategy?

We take a 360 look at Under Armor’s CRM strategy. Check how they rank against brands we graded so far!

January 27, 2022

Under Armor is an active wear brand known for its apparel, shoes and accessories designed for sports and fitness. Can you guess how the brand scores when it comes to CRM?

1. Be Transparent 10/10

Under Armour’s CEO, Patrik Frisk shared a post about himself on Linkedin. He wrote about serving in the Swedish Army, being a peacekeeping soldier in the United Nations and how he planned on using his vast global experience to drive growth in Under Armour. Communicating with customers through social media is a great way to build trust and strengthen customer relationships. Under Armour also shares its financials on its websites. This gives customers access to information about the brand’s internal operations. From where we’re standing, Under Armour does a great job of being transparent by keeping customers updated about its activities.

2. Perks and Incentives 10/10

Under Armour offers customers a lot of incentives and perks! Here’s what we got when we landed on the website:

20% off on our next order if we sign up to receive emails from Under Armour

Free standard shipping if we created an account
10% student discount

50% off on UA Outlet

20% off for Active Duty Service Members, Veterans, First Responders, Healthcare Workers and Teachers.

Under Armour does a great job helping customers save money and communicates its perks and incentives clearly throughout the customer journey.

3. Be Relevant 10/10

Being relevant as a business shows you’re in tune with what customers want and is key to building a long-lasting relationship with them. Under Armour builds relevance by offering products that meet the needs of customers. The brand offers customers the UA Sportsmask, a face mask designed specifically for athletes.

To deliver a frictionless checkout experience, Under Armour offers customers different payment methods and installment payments options. The brand also offers flexible delivery options such as store pick- up, 1 day delivery and 2 day delivery.

For being relevant to today’s modern customers, Under Armour gets a 10 from us.

4. Be Helpful 10/10

For this commandment, we look at how a brand contributes to making real and sustained change in the communities they operate in. Let’s see how Under Armour’s doing when it comes to philanthropy.

Under Armour launched a charitable non-fungible token (NFT) to celebrate Stephen Curry’s record for lifetime 3-point shots in basketball. Proceeds from the sale of the NFT will be donated to charities focused on increasing youth access to sports. Under Armour supports the Travis Manion Foundation with a new For the Heroes collection by Project Rock. The brand also partners with charities across the world and supports two major international human rights initiatives – the Women’s Empowerment Principles and Better Work. We score Under Armour 10/10 for supporting its community.

5. Realtime personalization 5/10

Logging into the Under Armour website, we were able to choose the location we wanted to shop from. We noticed that the homepage and content for each country were different. It’s a good start. But it’s also where it ended.

To test Under Armour’s realtime capabilities, we placed a pair of women running shoes in our cart. Sadly, returning to the HP, we didn’t see any change in the content or messaging to reflect what was in our cart, our previous onsite search, or browsing behavior. Heading to checkout, we were shown other items we might like. But we didn’t find anything relevant.

Under Armour missed opportunities to entice us to make an additional purchase. For instance, leveraging our data, Under Armour could easily have shown us a pair of women leggings at checkout to go with our running shoes.

Finally, after leaving the Under Armour website, we were not targeted with sponsored ads on Facebook. We were disappointed with Under Armour’s realtime personalization strategy.

6. Master UX 10/10

Under Armour’s website is clean and easy to navigate. The product categories are visible at the top level of the main navigation and the categorization structure is neither overly narrow nor too large. This made navigating through the different categories on Under Armour’s website easy. The brand’s product page is functional. The product images are in a 360-view which provided us with a ‘feel’ of the product and allowed us to see products from all sides and angles.

The product descriptions were clear and detailed, and the products had ratings and reviews. We liked that we were able to see the most critical and favorable reviews at a glance.

Under Armour has a well-executed FAQ page. The FAQ page is organized by category and easy to scan. Overall, Under Armour’s website delivers an excellent user experience.

7. Leverage Social Media 4/10

Under Armour has a social media presence with a strong following. The brand has 8.4 million followers on Instagram, 954K followers on Twitter and 11.2 million likes on Facebook.

The brand’s Instagram feed is curated to inspire high-performing athletes and teams at the high school, colleges, and professional levels.

Under Armour’s posts are mostly promotional and about Under Armour events. Under Armour’s usage of hashtag #TheOnlyWayIsThrough gives followers something to engage with. Under Armour does a great job of leveraging video content to catch its audience’s attention.

Under Armour doesn’t post frequently on Facebook. The last post we found was for April 8th, 2020. Under Armour doesn’t post frequently on Twitter. The last post we found was for December 24th, 2021. 🙁

In all, we think Under Armour isn’t leveraging social media fully to engage its customers. There’s no point in having a social media page if you’re not going to be active. If Under Armour is keen on being active on Facebook and Twitter, we recommend posting platform-specific content at once a couple of times per week using a scheduling tool.

Overall, Under Armour is getting 59/70 (84%) – enough for a spot in our top 10! The performance apparel brand falls short on personalization and its social media.

Our Advice to Under Armour

Leverage customer data to create a realtime personalized website experience for each customer. This will help Under Armour offer tailored product recommendations and personalized customer communication in line with its customer’s demographic or contextual data across your website. Find out more about how to unlock realtime personalization at scale here.

By adopting our realtime personalization suggestions, we’re sure Under Armour’s CRM will reach Olympian status in no time.

Here’s the full rankings so far: