We undeniably live in a digital-first era today where groceries get delivered to our homes in a matter of minutes and if you’ve wondered as to how your favourite delivery App exactly knows what you wish to buy & when you’re most likely to order, you probably have already experienced the impact of a Customer Data Platform (CDP) on user engagement. Everything from food delivery to content streaming now increasingly focuses on providing a highly personalised experience on the back of incisive behavioural insights - so much so that according to a report by a leading consulting firm, about 71% of consumers expect their preferred brands to deliver personalized interactions and get frustrated when the same does not happen.
As a natural extension then, it would be fair to assume that the average sports fan would behave similarly as well. In fact, the various App Push notification campaigns that SI has executed for diverse clients also revealed that the click through rate (CTR) was roughly 2x with personalized messaging vs with generic communication. So what exactly is a CDP & how can it help sports organisations deliver an enhanced fan experience? Quite simply put: a CDP is a dynamically evolving data warehouse storing the identity and behavioural trends of the entire fan universe.
There could be multiple digital or physical touchpoints through which fans get to interact with sports organizations - be it Owned Assets such as Websites/Apps, Third Party Services such as Ticketing/Shop integrations or Offline Activations such as Registration kiosks/Point of Sale locations on the ground. The journey would begin with a Registration (i.e. validation via Contact number or Email ID), after which the CDP would assign a unique identifier to track the lifecycle of the fan thereafter. Each digital interaction of the fan would then mean an enhanced understanding of the unique preferences and patterns, for eg.
Fan A: who resides in Mumbai, is a fan of Ronaldo, is reachable via WhatsApp and likes to play Fantasy
Fan B: who resides in London, is a fan of Messi, is reachable via Email and likes reading Player Blogs
Fan C: who resides in Paris, is a fan of Pogba, is active on the App and watches locker-room BTS content
CDPs make it extremely easy to create highly granular fan profiles that also evolve over time based on the changing patterns in behaviour, thus enabling us to craft highly targeted communications that appeal to the ongoing pulse of the fanbase. It also helps plan our channel strategy better, so as to ensure that the right amount of resources are allocated to the modalities that offer the highest probability of returns. While the actual extent of possible Fan Profiling is far beyond what comes naturally to our minds, the following gamut of broad attributes offers at least an introductory image of the same.
As we can imagine, CDPs thus have the potential to empower sports organizations to maximize fan affinity and commercialisation with the deployment of a minimal level of resources. They truly enable us to ‘make the most of the fanbase’ not only by driving efficiency in campaign management, but also by creating truly delightful personalized experiences. We must not overlook the fact that fans are getting more habituated by the day with a similar style of digital interactions in other parts of their lives & this sense of a new engagement normal makes it an urgent priority for organizations who wish to stay ahead of the curve to get started with their digital transformation journey.
Sportz Interactive has partnered with some of the leading sports organizations across the globe to jointly evolve their unique strategic roadmap for Fanalytics - an end-to-end lifecycle management suite for fans. Building engaging products for the fanbase is the first step along the path so as to create opportunities to interact & over the course of the last 20+ years, we have ably demonstrated our expertise in delivering technology, data & content driven digital activations. In doing so, we’ve engaged 500M+ global sports fans, driven more than 2x retention vs earlier, generated 8M+ new registrations and thereby unlocked $50M+ in total commercial value. Much of the same was made possible only through deep integrations with various CDP partners, ensuring that the tracking of most of the elements of Fan Profiling is largely automated requiring minimal resource bandwidth. Through rigorous vetting, we’ve also ensured that our CDP partners are at all times compliant with global privacy laws & data security best practices in general. The reality of the times as we see through our lens is truly that fans have digitally evolved much faster than sports organizations have over the course of the last decade & it’s high time that this expectation gap is narrowed through CDP-led Fanalytics solutions.
- contributed by Aaditya Ranade (Manager, CEO's Office)