Sportsman’s Warehouse Holdings CEO John Schaefer wants to enhance the company’s customer loyalty efforts this year.
During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call on April 2, Schaefer said that while traffic on a same-store basis, or customer frequency, remained negative, but conversion improved year-over-year once again and the average order size remained the same.
“We believe that the steady increase in conversion, the stable average ticket price despite average selling price, decreases in both fire arms and ammunition prices, and the continuing sequential improvement in traffic are illustrative of the strengthening loyalty we are building with the long-term, multi-visit customer we are focused on tracking,” Schaefer said, according to Seeking Alpha.
Despite the fact that the company’s loyalty program negatively impacted gross margin by about 20 basis points, Schaefer said Sportsman’s Warehouse Holdings is ready to start driving marketing programs on the loyalty base, which he expects to begin in the middle of the year.
“While 2014 was a difficult year from an industry standpoint, we are very pleased with our performance as well as the progress we made against our strategic growth initiatives during the year,” he explained. “We delivered 17% store growth with the opening of eight new stores, including four in an eight-week period, all of which were self-funded with free cash flow generated from operations. We continue to refine and implement our 30,000-square-foot model. We finalized our store-within-a-store program in the closing area. We made significant strides in our private label initiatives. We implemented a customer loyalty program that has just passed a 500,000-member level.”
What’s more, the company made significant headway in its department manager and training programs, resulting in 52 of its 55 store managers being hired from within.
Fourth-quarter sales increased 5.6%, to $185.6 million while same-store sales declined 5.3%.
The average selling price in firearms decreased 2.7% during the quarter on unit increases of 8.0%, Schaefer said.
“Consistent with the third quarter, our firearm unit sales trended above the adjusted mix data,” he explained. “For us, specifically, when looking at the states in which we operate retail stores, we have gained the market share in every quarter this year, despite the increase in competition in many of our markets, which we believe speaks to our premise of peaceful coexistence with other national retailers.”