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Established in 1887 and headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, Rawlings Sporting Goods is an innovative, leading global brand and manufacturer of premium baseball and softball equipment, including gloves, bats, balls, and protective gear.
Rawlings’ quality engineering and expert craftsmanship is why it’s the official base, baseball, helmet, face guard, and glove of Major League Baseball (MLB). It’s also the official baseball of Minor League Baseball and the official baseball and softball of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA).
Equipping a Large Salesforce and Smaller Retailers With Up-to-Date Digital Assets
When Rawlings released an abundance of new products last year, it faced a challenge. How could the iconic brand efficiently share its new product information and marketing materials with everyone it sells to?
With more than 9,000 SKUs, Rawlings sporting equipment is sold in nearly every major U.S. retailer, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Rawlings products are also sold to buyers that don’t have an automated way to onboard product information, such as smaller sporting goods stores, equipment dealers, D-BAT training academies, teams, and coaches.
Rawlings’ marketing team supports 40 to 50 sales reps in the U.S. and Canada that manage all of these accounts.
A Salsify customer since 2015, Rawlings used the Salsify Product Experience Management (PXM) platform to help launch its direct-to-consumer (DTC) site in 2016 and was able to reduce the time it took to arm its sales force, major retailers, and independent retailers with new product information by several months.
“The internal goal was always to reach as many of our customers and salespeople as possible with a centralized source of the latest product information and ad assets,” says Mike Poepping, director of digital marketing at Rawlings.
After restructuring the organization in late 2021, Salsify moved from the IT department to marketing. Poepping then hired Matthew Patston, senior content manager, to manage Salsify and the content needs for the team in February 2022.
At the time, the marketing team had a lot of great product information but needed a way to make it self-service and accessible for their sales team and Rawlings’ clients.
“Getting clients what they were looking for still required an email to the salesperson and then an email from the salesperson to the marketing team and then sorting, downloading, cleaning up, and sending the information back out.”
— Matthew Patston, Senior Content Manager, Rawlings
Adopting Salsify Catalog Sites To Create Shoppable Experiences for Every Client
The Rawlings digital marketing team tried an early pilot of Salsify Catalog Sites at the end of 2022. The new capability allowed them to ensure internal teams and external partners have read-only access to a curated view of the most up-to-date product content and rich media stored in the Salsify PXM platform.
“Catalog Sites was an upgraded, more shoppable version of what we'd already been doing in our digital catalogs,” Patston says.
After meeting with different brand marketing teams to discuss what kinds of information customers might find helpful, Patston launched a new catalog site that includes inventory information, product specifications, marketing copy, and digital assets on each individual product detail page (PDP) for a given SKU.
Supporting Sales With Better Navigation and Fast Response Times
Rawlings’ navigation has improved, which means sales and customers spend less time searching for information. For example, Patston added a property to sort what shows up on the first page so that his team has more control over which products are being promoted at any given time.
Patston was also able to quickly create a catalog site specific to a large account (for example, Scheels) using the general account as a baseline in about 30 minutes.
This customized Catalog Site can be adjusted to provide a hyperfocus on the products that a particular retailer is stocking and carrying. This includes lifestyle photography and technical graphics that can be used to support sales.
“Salsify Catalog Sites is really helping the team work a little bit faster and unlock a little bit more time in everyone's schedule to keep on optimizing things.”
— Matthew Patston, Senior Content Manager, Rawlings
Driving Efficiency for Internal Teams and External Customers: From 10 Minutes to 10 Seconds
The Rawlings sales team had positive feedback right away about how easy it is to find what they need. The team can now send a customer directly to the catalog site where they can get inspired and access exactly what they need to put a product in the market — without additional hand-holding from a sales executive.
“Partners that we’ve worked with for a long time are now getting this new resource. It is a better way to share this kind of data directly with them,” Patston says.
Prior to setting up Salsify Catalog Sites, it took 10 to 12 clicks for a customer to find a product and download all the related assets they needed. But with the shoppable interface of Catalog Sites, what took 10 minutes to find can now be done in 10 seconds, according to Patston and the Rawlings team.
Rawlings has also streamlined its search engine optimization (SEO) through Catalog Sites. Its SEO content is no longer created ad hoc as new products launch. Salsify made it quicker and easier for the team to access and share the right copy.
For example, team members who are in charge of posting products to the DTC sites like Rawlings.com or Easton.com can now easily find the product images, meta titles, and meta descriptions.
There are also qualitative benefits to using the PXM platform. For example, there’s a greater ability to enforce data consistency. Patston is able to set what types of content are required before the product listing can go live on the catalog sites. With a robust set of product content for each SKU, the sports brand enables its sales partners to tell a more holistic story.
Boosting Product Engagement With Brand Personalization
After Patston’s first year, Rawlings now has a shoppable, centralized repository for its 9,000 product SKUs that’s accessible to retailers of all sizes. The brand is supplying rich media that’s differentiated for important retailers and advanced navigation options, such as products listed by a player’s position.
Catalog Sites allows Rawlings to provide rich, self-service access to curated product data, done so from a trusted and centralized product information management (PIM) data source.
“The progress we've made on the Amazon channel, even in the last two months, would not have been possible without us also doing all of this data work on the front end to get Catalog Sites stood up. This is the data we need to kind of go to market with a certain product on the digital shelf. Salsify is allowing us to have cleaner data to do all kinds of other things on Amazon, Walmart, and our own site,” Patston says.
“With everything in one place [with Salsify Catalog Sites], if someone is sort of on the fence about what to order, they can now click through and see all the marketing firepower behind the product. They can do that in 10 seconds rather than 10 minutes.”
— Matthew Patston, Senior Content Manager, Rawlings
“Getting clients what they were looking for still required an email to the salesperson and then an email from the salesperson to the marketing team and then sorting, downloading, cleaning up, and sending the information back out.”
— Matthew Patston, Senior Content Manager, Rawlings
“Salsify Catalog Sites is really helping the team work a little bit faster and unlock a little bit more time in everyone's schedule to keep on optimizing things.”
— Matthew Patston, Senior Content Manager, Rawlings
“With everything in one place [with Salsify Catalog Sites], if someone is sort of on the fence about what to order, they can now click through and see all the marketing firepower behind the product. They can do that in 10 seconds rather than 10 minutes.”
— Matthew Patston, Senior Content Manager, Rawlings
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