Fans are your biggest asset, so how do you leverage their data?

Fans are the biggest asset for teams, leagues, and venues. Not just because they buy tickets and paint their faces on game day, but because fans are the reason the sponsorship market exists.

Brands and other partners with something to sell want to get in front of these loyal crowds cheering for their teams. Team, leagues, and venues want to generate as much revenue from these brands, so they need to know who their fans are to successfully attract the best matching partners and ensure contract renewals. Their ability to know exactly who their fans are is not only paramount to providing value to their sponsorship partners, but also contributes to their ticketing, marketing, and other business strategies. When these organizations understand their fans, they can put the right brands in front of them, sell them the right tickets, and send them relevant content.

However, fans aren’t just in the stadium. They’re also at home, at a bar watching the game, and likely engaging on digital platforms. So, how does a team dig deep into their fan base when interactions can happen at any time across multiple platforms and channels?

This question motivated us to develop Helix – KORE’s new fan intelligence platform. From our work with hundreds of global organizations, we kept hearing the same reoccurring challenges. They needed help bringing all their fan data into one place, unlocking it to reveal who their fans are, and making it actionable so they could personalize fan engagement beyond the stadium.

Our industry experts designed Helix specifically for the sports and entertainment industry. It unifies first-party fan data across disparate sources, then standardizes, cleans, and enriches it to create a single customer record. With a simple user interface and intuitive drag and drop functionality, your entire organization – not just data analysts – are empowered to confidently build fan segments to personalize engagement and maximize returns across your business.

Your fans at your fingertips

Fans are evolving and so are their expectations for engagement. Yet, until now, the sports and entertainment industry hasn’t had a standard platform, processes, or best practices to aggregate and clean fan data for tailored campaigns. While there are a wide range of tools for managing consumer data, like customer data platforms, managing fan data that needs to be united, deduplicated, and then made actionable has remained a challenge.

Helix was developed and purpose-built to be that platform for the sports and entertainment industry. It provides a framework but is still flexible enough for your business intelligence team to tailor the platform to the way your organization operates. The features within Helix, like Golden Records, enable you to collect and deduplicate data from numerous sources into individual customer profiles.

A common use case of Golden Records is triggering personalized actions. Let’s say you create an event for when a fan signs into your venue’s Wi-Fi. First, Helix would identify the fan by checking if the information they provided (e.g., name and email address) matches anyone already in your system. If yes, then Helix pulls together the details to inform your next action such as add tags, spend levels, and retention score. If there’s no match, Helix creates a new Golden Record for the fan.

Once the fan is either recognized in your system or a new Golden Record is created, you can take automated personalized actions such as:

• Do they have a low spending history? Send them a discount coupon for team merchandise to encourage them to shop.
• Do they have season tickets and a low retention score? Send a service representative to visit them in person and ensure they have a great experience today.
• Is it their birthday? Help them celebrate it with an e-voucher for a free beverage.

With the best data for every fan in a single record, your entire organization has access to the information they need most to build tailored and effective campaigns and outreach.

Not a data analyst? No problem.

Marketing, Sales, and other departments frequently ask Business Intelligence (BI) or Analytics teams for targeted campaign lists because they don’t know SQL to easily segment fans themselves. However, fulfilling these requests requires manual processing and is time consuming for BI and Analytics. So, if Marketing and Sales can’t get targeted lists in time, campaigns are sent to broad audiences with no personalization. This randomness reduces campaign effectiveness and affects the tickets, merchandise, or food and beverages being promoted. 

With Helix, programmers don’t have to spend all day pulling lists. Instead, non-coding users, like Sales and Marketing teams, are empowered to build their own targeted lists with an easy-to-use interface and features.

The customizable tags and attributes let you select a set of fans that have certain traits in common. You can create tags for criteria that are used frequently. For instance, you can ask “Does this fan have any children?” and create a “Yes” or “No” tag for a set of fans.

Similarly, attributes help you group fans together when there’s a longer list of possible answers. For example, someone’s education level could be: “high school or lower”, “some college”, “college degree”, “graduate degree”, or “doctorate”. Instead of configuring five different tags which each require their own SQL query, you could set up a single attribute using just one query. In addition to being more efficient in these cases, it’s also easier to find any records where the attribute’s value is unknown.

After you have enough tags and attributes created, Marketing and Sales teams can use Audience Builder to create their own targeted marketing lists. The drag-and-drop tool allows them to combine tags and attributes into detailed selection criteria without writing any additional SQL, then view all the matching Golden Records. The criteria can be saved for future use, empowering them to always have up-to-date results.

With the tools to build their own segmented audience lists, BI and Analytics teams no longer get bogged down with repeat requests. Additionally, Marketing and Sales can make every campaign targeted and strategic which improves engagement and drives deeper fan relationships.  

 Sync the best data so it’s available where you need it most

We also heard from teams that it’s hard to act on their data because it doesn’t connect to their CRM or other marketing systems. They have different platforms that only contain parts of a fan’s information, so campaigns aren’t always accurate.

Understanding this challenge, we added the capability to sync the clean and enriched data from Helix to your CRM system. With the ability to sync daily, your CRM is always populated with only the most up-to-date and actionable data. The sync also has the capability to automate marketing campaigns within your CRM. Once you input tags and attributes in Helix, the native automation in CRM can create activities and opportunities as soon as that data is synced. For example, every time you add a tag to a fan’s profile indicating if they have children or not, your CRM syncs that information and automatically adds them to an email campaign you’ve already set up. Now, every campaign you create in your CRM is accurate and targeted for improved fan engagement.

We’re currently working on completing this feature and it’ll be available by end of Q2 2022.

Personalize fan engagement & maximize returns 

Helix enables your entire organization to truly know and understand your entire fan base. Leveraging this knowledge improves not just your sponsorship strategy, but also ticketing and marketing strategies. Your data centralized in an easy-to-use fan intelligence platform makes it simple for every team, not just data analysts, to personalize every engagement, improving campaign accuracy and returns across your business.

Ready to learn how to simplify fan segmentation in your organization? Request a 30-min demo here.