Mitre Doubled Average Order Value on WhatsApp in Two Months
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Mitre is a heritage football brand, rooted in the game for more than 200 years. Once the Premier League's official ball, Mitre today holds its ground in grassroots football through its sponsorship of the FA Cup and the Community Shield, serving the Saturday and Sunday league players, coaches and clubs who keep the game running. Mitre is part of Pentland Brands, the family-owned, London-headquartered group whose portfolio also includes Speedo, Berghaus and Kickers.
Mitre's Most Valuable Customers Were Buying Without Ever Opting In
Mitre had a gap that email could not close. A large group of its customers, believed to be coaches and bulk buyers ordering balls and kit for whole teams, were buying on the site but had never opted in to marketing. Soft opt-in did not reach them. They were buying, often in bulk, and they were invisible to CRM.
Pentland's CRM team works across a portfolio of seven brands, and most of that work runs through email. "The majority of our communication goes through email," says Sophie Wright, Senior CRM Manager. SMS was an option in some markets, but an expensive one across EMEA. The team wanted Mitre to test whether WhatsApp, a channel people actually open, could reach the customers email never had.
Bao Dao, Director of CRM at Pentland Brands, says: “The aim is a connected CRM ecosystem in which email, SMS and WhatsApp each do the job they are best at, and for Mitre, WhatsApp's job was to reach the customers the other channels could not.”
The timing was right. The new season was approaching, and the summer brought the World Cup and a run of tournaments: moments when football fans are already on their phones, in the game, and open to hearing from a brand that is watching with them.
Sophie's one hesitation was resourcing. "We are a very lean team," she says. People across the business assumed WhatsApp meant a traditional two-way channel with someone at the other end. "My hesitancy was around the lack of education on how it actually works. It is two-way communication, but not in the traditional sense."
Match-Day Moments, a Welcome Journey That Captures Email, and an AI Agent for the Team Kit Run
Mitre went live on Merx in June, while Pentland was in the middle of migrating seven Shopify sites and moving its CRM to Ometria. Lottie Bishop, Technical CRM Manager, led the technical setup, on the webhooks and the integration with Ometria. "Integration-wise, the team made it really easy and knew where they needed to go."
A welcome journey that turns an anonymous order into a first-party record. Opt-ins were built through on-site pop-ups, organic and paid social on Meta, soft opt-in and email awareness sends. Once inside, every new subscriber flows through a welcome journey that captures interests and, critically for Mitre, asks for an email address. For a base of previously unreachable coaches and bulk buyers, that single question is the difference between a one-off transaction and a customer the brand can speak to again.
Broadcasts timed to the match, not the marketing calendar. "For Mitre we have moments in time in which to communicate, during specific matches," Sophie says. During the World Cup the team sent messages tailored to how a match was going. For the Community Shield, a message went out at half-time. "It's very much in-the-moment marketing, to really drive into our brand's tone of voice and who we are." Around those moments, the evergreen campaigns lead into back to season, refresh and training, where most of the base's interest sits.
An AI agent that can handle a team order. Trained on the Mitre catalogue and knowledge base, the AI agent handles where's my order, help with orders, promotions and product recommendations. For a coach buying a dozen size 5 training balls in a specific colourway, that means going from "show me red and white" to a completed order in twenty minutes, inside a single WhatsApp thread. When the agent reaches the limit of what it can help with, it hands over to the customer service team rather than looping. "A lot of team members at Pentland really put it to the test at the beginning," Sophie says, "and I think that enabled it to do well."
Integrated with the stack Pentland already runs. Merx connects to Shopify to handle codes and orders, and a webhook into Ometria lets the team decide which journeys each customer gets: a mix of email and WhatsApp, or WhatsApp alone. Running the channel takes Sophie's team a couple of hours a week, and when something needs attention, Merx responds within a couple of hours.
Planned, sent, reviewed, improved. Aparna Kumari, CRM Executive at Pentland Brands, plans the WhatsApp calendar and audience segmentation, and every campaign feeds into the next. "Once the execution is done, we circle back and see which campaign performed how: heat maps, what customers clicked most, which A/B tests to run next," she says. Merx's reporting makes that part of the job easier. "The process with Merx is very easy: the navigation, the reporting, everything on the KPIs," Aparna says. "That's a very good thing."
102% Higher Order Value and a Contactable Base That Did Not Exist Before
In Mitre's first eight weeks on WhatsApp, the channel delivered:
- 20% order conversion
- >15% ecommerce revenue
- 102% higher average order value than the site average
- >17,000 customer attributes captured through conversation
The order value is the number Sophie keeps coming back to. "Mitre has a significantly higher AOV on WhatsApp than we see on site," she says. "Versus D2C and email, it's probably double. That's a really key positive." It is what happens when the coaches and bulk buyers, the customers with the biggest baskets, finally have a channel that reaches them.
The automated journeys keep adding to that. By early October, Mitre's abandoned basket journey was returning more than £9 for every £1 spent.
Contactability was the other unlock. "They are our customers, but they weren't opted in, and now they are," Sophie says. "Being able to ask those people for their email address and interests bolsters our first-party data. That's definitely been an uplift."
Sophie says: "Engagement rates look similar to email. The difference is what happens next. They can be served within that second, or if they have a question, it can be answered, which obviously doesn't happen with an email." More than 90% of customer queries are handled and resolved inside the WhatsApp conversation, and the customer service team now reviews Merx's conversational insights every Monday before writing up trade notes. "They find it extremely helpful."
Aparna sees the same in the inbox, where many conversations start with a coach asking which ball is right for their team. "There are a lot of people who have replied to our messages asking questions," she says. "That shows intrigue." For Aparna, that is what makes clear consent so valuable. "If your customer is providing consent, showing interest and is intrigued to know more, that's a standout point from a brand point of view," she says, "and it creates a better customer journey as well."
Then there is the part that does not show up in a dashboard straight away. "During the Mitre match sends, it helps bring down the curtain," Sophie says. "It feeds into the brand being like, we're sat on the sofa too, watching with them. It might not translate into specific figures up front, but over time that has a bigger value and a bigger impact."
As the new season gets under way, the channel is growing again. Beyond Mitre, Sophie sees a place for WhatsApp across the rest of the Pentland portfolio, launched brand by brand at the right moment. Asked whether she would recommend Merx to other CRM teams: "I would."
