Exclusive Interview: Paul Bell — Executive Director of Leeds United
CEO of DiscountIF, Lewis Holland, got an exclusive interview with the executive director of Leeds United. Paul was kind enough to share his insights how Leeds United have invested in their online retail store to improve their commercial revenues.
We’re curious to know, what changed this year with Leeds’ online merchandise store?
We’ve made some significant changes and improvements to our online retail store this year which are delivering excellent sales growth this season.
One of the first things we identified was that the online retail store was not mobile friendly and that the user experience and journey needed to be addressed quickly. Whilst the experience on desktop was fine, the mobile experience was far from user friendly with fans having to view the desktop site through the small screen.
“When fans are buying a ticket for the game we can prompt them to also buy a shirt or other related club merchandise”
Working closely with our e-Commerce partner Talent, they were able to provide the club with an upgraded mobile friendly user platform allowing retail purchases to be made simply and easily through smartphones and tablets. Within Talent we also have the ability to cross sell tickets and retail within the same transaction, this means that when fans are buying a ticket for the game we can prompt them to also buy a shirt or other related club merchandise.
As part of the upgrade we also improved the look and feel of the store, with a focus on page layout and improving our product imagery.
We also launched a new official club website in September 2016 and as part of the redesign the new navigation menu and drop down make it much easier for our fans to reach the club store or specific sections within it. We also have dedicated assets across the official site to promote our retail merchandise and offers.
We also moved the on-line store away from our traditional local based server to a fully hosted cloud based solution. The server that we operated was fairly old and needed to ‘back-up’ during the night to store our ticketing and retail data — whilst backing up the site went off line for a number of hours and effectively meant the online store was closed for a period each day. The hosted solution allows us to trade 24 hours a day.
“We now email a daily retail offer to our database (c200,000 records)”
The other major change that we made was to promote and market daily retail offers to our fans. Working closely with the marketing team we now email a daily retail offer to our database (c200,000 records) supported by Twitter and Facebook postings with a link to the store. This gives us a combined communication reach of nearly 950,000 for each offer. The retail offers are varied each day and across the entire product range to ensure that each offer is fresh and of interest to the fans.
We had significant internal debate around fans unsubscribing from the database but this has not happened. In fact we have seen good open rates and high conversion from the daily retail offers that we send. Fans often don’t wake up wanting a new t-shirt or hoodie, it’s our objective to stimulate these purchases through promoting strong retail offers to our fans.
How is Leeds managing to reduce seasonality?
At the club we have made it a clear business objective to reduce the dependency upon sales of replica shirts and training wear.
We are in the fortunate position that our season ticket holders and fans visit Elland Road and our retail stores on multiple times during the year, therefore its essential that we continue to offer our supporters fresh product collections and merchandise the stores professionally so that there are always new things for our fans to see and purchase when they visit our stores.
“Detailed month by month plan to ensure that we have new product, new initiatives and new promotional activity every month within our retail business”
We have developed a comprehensive retail calendar that identifies key product launches during the season and a detailed month by month plan to ensure that we have new product, new initiatives and new promotional activity every month within our retail business.
This season we have significantly improved the stock turn on our lifestyle / leisure product, working closely with Kappa on two seasonal collections then interspersed with new ranges of ‘Legend’ product. We’ve improved our collections for ladies and kids and we’ve also spent time reviewing our supply chain and introduced two or three new suppliers to help deliver the types of product our fans desire.
This season we developed a new range of Kappa Basic product to offer to our fans, a high quality, stylish collection of basic t-shirts, polo-shirts and hoodies, ideal for everyday wear allowing us to hit new value price points and deliver fan offers that we have never run before, such as two t — shirts for £20 or two polo shirts for £25 — these offers have been a massive success and sold in significant quantities.
We have also introduced alternative badging options to the club crest, re-introducing the Leeds United ‘smiley’ crest of the 70’s for a leisure collection — this has proven to be extremely popular with our fans.
With regards to training wear, we also introduced a new collection of training wear that the players started to wear in January, with a new spring/summer colour way of sky blue & black. This is the first time that we have offered a new training wear collection mid season and has been extremely well received by the fans.
“We have introduced new lines such as reading glasses, cashmere sweaters and we will shortly be launching a premium branded golf collection”
In addition we are trialling new product lines each month, looking at the high street and trends within the industry to see what new opportunities may be available for the Club to develop. This season we have introduced new lines such as reading glasses, cashmere sweaters and we will shortly be launching a premium branded golf collection in partnership with market leading golf brand Titleist.
We’re also proved that our fans are comfortable purchasing high value items on line through our retail store. This season the Club appointed luxury Swiss watch brand Louis Erard as its Official Timing Partner and as part of that partnership developed a special edition watch to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Leeds United winning the first division title in 1992. The unique timepiece comes complete with a signed Leeds United shirt in a luxury display case and retails for £1992 — our fans are happy purchasing these luxury products on line.
Are you seeing any changes in your online vs. offline sales of merchandise?
We are seeing excellent growth in online sales following the improvements that we have made.
The sales figures clearly demonstrate that the daily retail offers that we send to our fans are working well and are well received. The offers are varied and eye-catching to ensure that there is interest for our fans — the open rates to the retail emails are good and we can see an uplift in daily online sales of at least 50% when we send out a retail daily offer to our database.
Our superstore at the stadium continues to perform well, this stadium is located just out of the city centre and therefore is a destination store visit for our fans, providing a high % conversion rate of purchases to visits.
Matchday sales at the stadium have continued to be very strong, particularly with the higher crowds that we have experienced this season. To handle the increased demand we have increased our staffing levels, improved staff training, customer service and operational efficiencies within the store to ensure that the store is well stocked and we are maximising sales leading up to kick off and after the game.
The recently opened city centre store is enabling the club to sell merchandise to a wider section of our fans who may be working in the city and also to passing shoppers who are shopping for friends and family members who are Leeds fans. We can see a clear difference in the type of products purchased in this store and the Elland Road superstore, and we will continue to look at the product mix within the city centre store.
We also entered into a new partnership with Leeds Bradford International airport, taking some retail space in one of the airports busiest retail outlets close to the main departure gates. We have merchandised this space with targeted seasonal product and club branded accessories, allowing our fans to purchase any last minute items for their holidays on departure. This trial has been positive and we will now look to expand our presence at the airport this year ahead of the busy summer period.
Any particular investments you’ve made in technology?
Yes we’ve made a number of upgrades to our technology infrastructure this year.
As previously mentioned we took the decision to move from our traditional server based solution to a fully hosted, cloud based solution with our e-commerce partner Talent. This has allowed the store to operate and transact 24 hours a day without the need for the server to back-up and effectively close the store.
This decision made an immediate impact, with fans now able to buy match tickets and merchandise from their mobile or devices at any time. Importantly our fans in Australia and Asia are also now able to shop online during their working day. Within the first 3 weeks of moving to this solution we sold around an extra £50,000 of tickets / merchandise during the hours that we were previously offline.
We also introduced VE technology to our e-commerce platform. This technology helps us to follow up purchases that are abandoned before they are completed, identifying those product items of interest and encouraging our fans to complete their purchase. This technology has also worked really well for us.
What will we see over the coming year with Leeds’ online merchandise store?
We will continue to develop exciting products for our supporters with significant focus on expanding our leisure wear and lifestyle product ranges. We will also look to expand our range of ladies product and kids collections.
We will continue to look at additional retail opportunities for the Club. Following the successful opening of our City Centre store in the Merrion Centre we have extended our lease and we will also expand our presence in the airport ahead of the Summer.
We are also now starting to use the first team players as models to help promote the leisure product and also using fashion models to help showcase the style and fit of our garments.
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