Enhancing interaction with fans
4 August 2004

An e-commerce initiative builds closer links between 75m supporters with their favourite teams, reports Chloë Veltman.

On the face of it, the National Football League (NFL) makes customer relations looks as natural as kicking a ball. America’s most popular spectator sport, American football, boasts more than 75m fans in the US and inspires great customer loyalty. According to statistics by Nielsen/NetRatings, the internet analysis company, during the football season last year NFL Enterprises was the number one US entertainment advertiser, scoring much higher than competitors such as like The Walt Disney Corporation and Major League Baseball Properties.

The NFL website, NFL.com, receives 14m unique visitors per month, a figure only bettered by online sports monolith ESPN.com. Nielsen/NetRatings data also shows ESPN.com to be the top website for American football content, receiving more than 15m unique hits per month.

Attracting millions of fans is one thing, but knowing who they are is another. Despite the popularity of the sport, the NFL, until recently, had little idea about who its fans were and how to use that knowledge to increase brand awareness and develop “sticky” relationships with its patrons.

“We used to have a relatively impersonal relationship with our fans,” says Bob O’Keefe, the NFL’s senior director of fan relationship marketing. “Because fans mostly watch games on TV, we didn’t know who they were and how engaged they were.” Indeed, with about 95 per cent of the estimated 75m million US fans never attending a game in person, the customer relationship management (CRM) challenge is about more than driving ticket sales – it’s about leveraging brand potential across many channels.

The first big step for the NFL towards improving its CRM strategies was to consolidate its sprawling database systems. In 2002, the NFL had no less than 75 different data sources. Major information sources (which still exist today) included NFL Shop, the NFL’s retail arm; NFL Sunday Ticket, a subscription-based DirecTV service which allows fans to purchase television coverage of all games; NFL.com; the NFL’s credit card business which boasts 1m million customers; and, of course, the 32 teams.

“All our data was spread across different databases which didn’t talk to each other very well,” says Mr O’Keefe. “Getting a single view of our customers was a priority.”

That same year, the NFL hired E.piphany, a California-based CRM solutions provider, to build what Mr O’Keefe calls a “database warehouse” which, for the first time, allowed the NFL to gain insights into its vast fan base. E.phiphany’s software has at its core an analytic and marketing engine. The database is accessed via a web-based interface and allows for the segmentation of customers according to a variety of criterion, from geographic location and favourite team to purchasing history and products owned.

“NFL executives aren’t interested in doing database queries and writing code,” says Steve Schultz, director of corporate marketing for E.piphany. “We provided them with an easy way to understand issues such as the correlation between customer behaviour and purchasing codes.”

From analysing data through the central database, NFL executives discovered that only 11 per cent of the 15.1m million unique fans on record came from multiple sources, meaning that some 13.4m million fans were interacting with the NFL in only one way. Thus, cross-pollination has become a major CRM goal for the NFL. “We saw a big opportunity to drive fans into interacting with the NFL in different ways,” says Mr O’Keefe.

Alongside E-piphany solutions, which allow the NFL to create, send out and track targeted messages to individual fans, based on their particular interests in multi-wave campaigns, the NFL is also implementing a new e-commerce platform from consumer e-business solutions company ATG to make it easier for fans to shop and for the NFL to promote particular products to specific customers.

The e-commerce initiative goes hand-in-hand with the NFL’s plans to expand its product portfolio using knowledge of fans’ product interests culled from the database.
One of the biggest priorities for both the NFL and individual clubs, is to engage fans who live remotely from their favourite team. According to Mr O’Keefe, 75 per cent of all fans are located outside geographic fan-base areas.

The New England Patriots, for example, has 100,000 fans across the US. Because even local fans have trouble interacting with their team directly – Jessica Gelman, the Patriots’ director of new business development, reports 100 consecutively sold-out games and a 50,000 person waiting list – the club relies heavily on CRM tools such as the NFL’s central database and its own website and marketing efforts.

“Our CRM initiative is driven by our effort to increase fan loyalty and engage fans who are not able to have the game experience,” says Ms Gelman. “We want to create a virtuous cycle where engaging with the Patriots as a fan not only gives you a team to support every Sunday but also provides benefits for your loyalty.”

© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2004 .