Inside the CRM program Powering Academy Sports + Outdoors

This article is part of our Lifecycle Leaders series. Subscribe here to get every edition along with expert insights like this and journey breakdowns from the world's largest brands.

I collected 8+ months of emails from one of the largest sports retailers in the country to break down their lifecycle program.

Every year, I inevitably have to replace all my socks because they always get holes in them. As a result, I always end up buying new ones from the same place: Academy Sports & Outdoors. And this time, I decided to track what happens after the purchase, so for nearly a year, I’ve been storing every message they sent me.

While I expected a multi-billion-dollar brand to be running a super advanced lifecycle machine, what I actually found was a simple system built around consistency, volume, and discounts.

I just completed my largest journey breakdown ever: 218 emails. And I laid out all the key sends and learnings in Figma:

• How they think about audience enrollment (e.g., segmentation and targeting)
• How they leverage price to drive action and urgency
• The entire CRM calendar is mapped out
• The framework and structure behind every email (subject lines, preview text, CTAs, etc.)
• And trends across the entire program

These bullets just scratch the surface (and having the actual visuals always makes things come to life), so I highly recommend checking out the full FigJam board below to get all the takeaways.