As a brand built on riding the emotions of sports fans at their most intense moments, online sports merchandise retailer Fanatics aimed to bring some predictive and personalization power to bear by implementing the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
In the last year alone, Fanatics used Marketing Cloud to strengthen its email campaign capabilities by:
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Generating 27,000 personalized campaigns;
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Sending 3.8 billion messages; and
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Building a product recommendation section that generates between 15% and 20% of overall click-through rates, making it the brand’s second-largest contributor of customer engagement.
As an example of the campaign personalization in action, when professional football player Peyton Manning announced his retirement in March, Fanatics was able to send custom emails targeted to fans who had expressed interest in Manning in the past, including Denver Broncos fans, Indianapolis Colts fans and people in Tennessee, where Manning went to college.
“We’ve known for a while that our business is in large part driven by really special moments, whether it’s a particular play or a player crossing a milestone or a team winning a championship,” said Matt Smith, VP of CRM at Fanatics. “The same things that we see on TV or at a game that drive excitement also drive interest in our product and our industry. Our ability to capitalize on those moments when fans are feeling some of their deepest feelings towards their own teams is really important to us.”
Fanatics is leveraging numerous tools within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, including Audience Builder, Journey Builder and Predictive Intelligence, to make decisions on future campaigns.
Buying Time In A Fast-Changing Environment
“Whether it’s anticipating a championship game, be it in football, baseball or basketball, our ability to find audiences that have an affinity for those teams and be able to set those audiences up ahead of time before the game starts is a great advantage for Audience Builder,” Smith said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “In Journey Builder, a marketer can think about an experience they want the customer to have over the next two-to-five weeks after the moment of purchase, and build out campaigns in the quiet of an afternoon rather than five minutes after the end of an intense, pressure-packed game. Predictive Intelligence lets us pick up on trends in terms of product recommendations that we wouldn’t be able to see with the naked eye.”
The unpredictability of sports forces the Fanatics team to go beyond intuition when deciding how to market campaigns to specific audience members. Players can get traded, teams can go on hot streaks in the blink of an eye and records can be set in individual games, meaning that data tools are required to keep a close tab on immediate trends within professional and college sports.
Fanatics also benefits from the fact that the Salesforce Marketing Cloud doesn’t require the commitment of a large number of internal people. In fact, the retailer only has five employees specifically dedicated to working directly with the cloud solution to execute and deploy campaigns. The Fanatics team also has paired its marketing strategy and creative resource teams with the developers to supplement the effort.
As the online retailer continues to leverage the Salesforce solution and learns more about its consumer base as new champions are crowned and special moments occur, it gains further understanding of how to market through multiple phases of an event, whether the campaign is released before, during or after.
“Each year is a little bit of an improved iteration on the past,” Smith noted. “We get a little bit better at building our audiences more accurately. We’re good at this point at finding people that we believe are interested in the outcome of a game, and we’re pretty good at shielding people that we think actually aren’t interested — whether they happen to be fans of a losing team or just happen to not be interested in that sport. The more we can refine that, the better experience it delivers for our customers.”