If you’re an eCommerce store owner selling activewear products, here’s an interesting study that could change your marketing strategy for 2025.
We picked the 5 biggest and fastest-growing activewear brands: Nike, Adidas, Puma, Under Armour, and Asics.
Analyzing more than 200 of their campaigns revealed interesting email marketing strategies and insights. Here’s what we found.
A Remarkable Digital Sales Growth in 2024
In 2024, these athleisure brands saw significant digital sales growth, contributing substantially to their overall revenue.
For instance, Adidas reported net digital revenue of $1.694 Billion from its online sales (on adidas.com).
A similar trend is also seen with other brands including Nike, PUMA, Under Armour, and Asics.
Nike stands out with its digital sales generating 27.5% of its $51.542 Billion revenue via its online store.
A significant portion of such online sales growth, for all the brands, can be attributed to effective email marketing strategies.
We analyzed hundreds of email campaigns of these brands to uncover interesting insights for you.
The Billion Dollars Activewear Email Marketing Strategies Analysis
Explore and implement these email marketing strategies of athleisure brands to increase your customer engagement and revenue.
1. Nike Email Marketing Analysis
Known for its brand voice of motivation and resilience, Nike reflects it in email campaigns. Its emails focus on limited-edition releases, personalized offers, and urgency to maximize customer engagement and sales.
Strategy That Works For Nike
Nike’s approach to strategic send times, engaging content, and personalization drove significant interaction, particularly around special events and product launches, bolstering their revenue in 2024.
Nike leaned heavily on exclusivity with their product drops. Terms like “limited edition” and “Kevin Month 🎉” make customers feel part of a special club. It is an appeal to their loyalty.
2. Puma Email Marketing Analysis
Puma’s email campaigns focused heavily on promotions, leaning more on sales events, partnerships, and holiday seasons to get more engagement. Its strategy combined urgency with targeted messaging that reflects in their clicks and conversions.
Strategy That Works For Puma
Puma’s email campaigns were most effective during sales events and holiday periods.
They championed value clarity, highlighting massive discounts upfront (“Up to 60% off + extra 30% off”).
This straightforward messaging cut through the noise and appealed to bargain hunters.
3. Adidas Email Marketing Analysis
Adidas utilized a strategic mix of subject lines, send times, and tailored CTAs to engage customers in their campaigns. Their email strategy focused on both product promotions and customer engagement through limited-time offers and events.
Strategy That Works For Adidas
Adidas nailed FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) with urgency-packed subject lines like “Final hours: Savings for all.”
Why? People hate missing a deal. It prompts immediate action.
4. Asics Email Marketing Analysis
Asics employed a consistent approach in their email campaigns, focusing on loyalty programs, seasonal product launches, and community engagement to connect with their audience.
Strategy That Works For Asics
Asics used routine psychology, sending emails early in the day to fit into their audience’s morning habits. This alignment increases open rates because customers are in a “checking mode” during these hours.
5. Under Armour Email Marketing Analysis
Under Armour focused on product performance, exclusivity, and seasonal campaigns to engage customers. Their email strategy blended inspirational messaging with targeted promotions.
Strategies That Work For Under Armour
Under Armour’s strategic focus on evening send times, urgency-driven campaigns, and seasonal promotions proved highly effective. It paired clear CTAs with phrases like “Last Chance” prompting action during peak shopping windows.
For all these brands, their strategies worked every single time because each brand taps into the core psychological triggers of its customers.
It is a common denominator in all the email campaigns from all the brands studied.
These strategies mirror broader e-commerce trends such as personalization, urgency, and simplicity. More insights below.
Takeaways for eCommerce Brands in 2025
Further cross-analysis of the email marketing strategies of these brands revealed some interesting insights.
- 3 out of the 5 brands send emails in the evening; the median time ranging between 03:30 pm and 06:30 pm.
- Contrast in send times with most emails sent either at the beginning of the day or during after-work hours.
- Nike and Puma also send emails close to midnight, targeting late-night shoppers.
- All five brands send at least 2 emails weekly, with Puma sending up to 5 emails.
- To increase their open rates, all the brands are consistent in their subject line length.
- The average subject line length is between 6-7 words.
- The subject lines of all the brands are catchy and prompt action, emphasizing urgency.
- Surprisingly, the brands use minimal emojis in both subject lines and the preview texts.
- Except for Asics, all the remaining brands write the preview text to complement subject lines with seemingly no framework.
- 3 out of 5 brands’ preview text is 50 characters or longer.
- All five brands have a 2-word CTA in most emails.
- “SHOP” is the most common word used in CTAs, with Under Armour using the word in more than 90% of the emails studied.
- Interestingly, the word “Buy” was never used in any CTAs studied as it might trigger the SPAM filter, affecting email deliverability.
To Summarize
The email campaigns of the biggest activewear brands appeared unassumingly simple. Adidas’s urgency to Nike’s exclusivity strategies proves that email campaigns can result in billions of dollars. For 2025, use these insights in your email marketing campaigns. Your next email campaign could be a game-changer.
