Stadium Goods’ Strategy Behind a 268% Jump in Email Revenue

Stadium Goods ,a premium sneaker and streetwear marketplace, saw email revenue jump 268 percent year-over-year this Black Friday. That kind of lift didn’t come from a single campaign or holiday gimmick, but from a year of refining our CRM playbook: reactivating cold subscribers, merchandising around the products sneakerheads were already hunting for, and making the path from email to purchase as frictionless as possible.

Warming Up the Cold Side of the List

For years, we followed the standard playbook of sending mostly to engaged subscribers — people who had recently opened, clicked or purchased. It’s considered best practice for a reason. But throughout 2025, we made a deliberate shift to bring our full list back into the conversation.

Cold subscribers still had value, but they weren’t hearing from us. We started sending more campaigns to the entire database, trading a few points on open and click rates to gradually rebuild recency across our audience. Over time, that expanded our active base and lifted our revenue floor going into peak season.

Leaning Into Hot Drops, Not Curation

In 2024, we leaned heavily on category-based emails built around themes or product types, things like seasonal edits. But here’s the thing about sneaker culture: the culture does its own curation. Our customers know exactly what they want. Our job is to let them know we have it in stock, authenticated, and ready to ship.

In 2025, we shifted our merchandising strategy to spotlight specific drops instead of broad themes. Black Friday showed how well this worked. It coincided with the Air Jordan 4 “Black Cat” release, one of the biggest drops of the year. We secured pairs early through key supplier relationships and built our entire Black Friday creative around it. Aligning the biggest shopping day of the year with one of the most anticipated sneaker releases drove the highest single-day sales for any SKU in our company's history.

Improving the Path to Purchase

We also spent the year refining how email traffic flowed to mobile. We tested different routing strategies with our linking and measurement partner, Branch, to see what converted best.

Early in 2024, we prioritized app downloads after migrating to a new platform. Initially, routing email traffic to download screens worked, but the lift flattened after a few months. We had captured the users who were willing to download the app. For everyone else, that extra step just slowed them down.

We pivoted to sending non-app users to the mobile web with a small download banner, and kept app users deep linking into the app. Sales from email picked up immediately and stayed consistent through the rest of the year. That simple change removed friction and met customers where they were.

We also cleaned up UTM attribution across all our campaigns. During Black Friday 2024, we could see email driving sessions and sales in real time, but it wasn’t showing up properly in our analytics. We spent time testing and fixing how our systems handed off data to each other. By the time we hit Black Friday 2025, we had a clear, accurate picture of email’s impact on revenue.

Black Friday as Proof of the Playbook

Black Friday wasn’t a new strategy. It was a higher-volume version of what we’d been doing all year. The work that drives peak performance happens in the months before.

• Reactivate your dormant subscribers throughout the year, not just when you need them.
• Focus your merchandising on what your customers are already looking for, not what you think they should want.
• Remove every unnecessary click between their inbox and checkout.

Do that consistently and you'll have a reliable engine when it matters most.

Matt Tompkins is the CRM manager at Stadium Goods.