Overview

In April, we launched Helix—our new fan intelligence platform built to unify first-party fan data across disparate sources. It standardizes, cleans, and enriches data to provide a single customer record at your fingertips. With a simple user interface and drag and drop functionality, non-coding teams like sales and marketing can confidently build fan segments for personalized engagement, improved campaign accuracy, and maximized conversions.

Now, we’re making Helix even more powerful— integrate Helix with your CRM so that the best data is synced daily and available where you need it most.

What is it?

While developing Helix, we knew that consolidating data was just one part of the equation. Teams told us loud and clear that it was still hard to act on their fan data because the Golden Records didn’t connect to their CRM system. With so many platforms containing disparate bits of fan information, campaigns weren’t always targeted or accurate.  

Understanding this challenge, we added the capability to sync the clean and enriched data from Helix to your CRM system. Now, every Golden Record, tag, and attribute is in your CRM for easy access by your entire organization.

How Does It Work?

Golden Records represent the best information you have about an individual fan, pulled from multiple data sources. You can use the Audience Builder to select the Golden Records that have enough information to be useful and then sync them into your CRM. This creates or updates the CRM record for each individual fan, ensuring everyone in your organization has access to the best data. Helix will update the data in your CRM each night, so you always have the latest updates.

Syncing this data to your CRM also drives automation. With configurable and extensible mapping of any data point in your data warehouse onto a contact record, person account record, or custom CRM field, you can build automated customer journeys.

For example, you might sync ticket retention scores to your CRM and create an advanced journey mapping in your email marketing system. Then if a season ticket holder’s retention score drops below 30, a service case would be automatically generated for a ticketing service rep to contact that customer about renewing.

Why Does It Matter?

With the ability to sync nightly, your CRM is always populated with the most up-to-date and actionable data empowering sales and service reps to personalize customer interactions. The sync can also help automate marketing campaigns within your CRM. Once you input tags and attributes in Helix, the native automation in your 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 whether they have children or not, your CRM receives that information and automatically adds the fan to an existing email campaign. Now, every campaign you create in your CRM is accurate and targeted for improved fan engagement.

The Sync to CRM feature also automates previously manual tasks such as lead imports, opportunity creation and assignment, and customer journey actions (e.g., phone calls, emails, and texts), saving you time and freeing you to work on other priorities.

How Do I Get It?

This feature is now available for all Helix customers. Reach out to your Customer Success Manager for more information. If you don’t have Helix yet, request a free demo here.

Did we put you to sleep with “analyze historical data” in the title? We know it sounds boring but hear us out – data snapshotting can help you identify some pretty cool insights! Trying to figure out how many more customers signed up after your latest marketing campaign? Want to know exactly when your customers are renewing their season tickets and why? How about digging into your sales pipeline bottlenecks? Then definitely keep reading. We promise this blog is interesting (and to the point).

Quick overview of data snapshotting before we dig into a few cool use cases

The Data Snapshot feature in our DWA product allows you to capture and view a “point-in-time” copy of a dataset. It periodically snapshots the data from a data set you choose and stores it in a table for historical report creation, comparison, and period-over-period analyses. You have total control over the logic and data sets, so you capture only what is important to your business. Setting up an automatic snapshot in DWA also eliminates any manual snapshotting you were doing, saving you time and effort.

Track the Growth of Your Customer Database

As a marketing manager, you want to measure the growth of your customer database before and after new lead-generation campaigns and understand which leads are coming in through which channels. However, your campaigns are multi-channel and generate new leads from multiple sources such as search, social, and email. You also get leads from in-person events and your partners. Further, some of your sources make it difficult to track when a new customer was created or when it first appeared in your database.

You need the ability to capture the size of your customer database at a specific point in time and summarize which sources leads are coming from so you can compare them before and after each campaign.

With the Data Snapshotting feature, take a snapshot to create a custom report that summarizes how many customers you have per source before and after each campaign. Then, compare both reports to assess the growth of your customer database and the effectiveness of each source. Understanding this information will provide insight into what is working and what is not so you can improve the next campaign and grow your customer database.

Optimize Your Secondary Market Ticket Pricing Model

You’re a ticket pricing manager and you want to refine the dynamic ticket pricing model to include the fluctuations of the resale prices in the secondary market. Secondary market ticket prices constantly change and sometimes the changes don’t trigger the listing to update in your database. This makes it difficult to track the day-to-day movement of price changes. You could use the historical information at the individual seat level but aggregating and comparing all those prices slows down reporting.

Instead, use the Data Snapshotting feature to capture the individual seat listings by section and event and then compare the current state to what the database looked like the past few days. This approach provides an accurate way to compare day-to-day pricing and understand inventory, so your ticket prices accurately reflect demand.

Understand Your Ticketing Renewal Trends

Another example for ticket pricing managers is the need to understand ticket renewal trends, specifically when customers are renewing their season tickets in the renewal cycle. Season ticket renewals are already captured in Ticketmaster, but ticket forwarding, and ticket reselling make it hard to actually know when a customer renews. Plus, there’s no easy way to track season-ticket upgrades and downgrades. For instance, if a customer upgraded their season ticket, it would look like they didn’t renew because it’s not a like-for-like price and your system wouldn’t catch it. However, if you set up a data snapshot then it would let you capture upgrades and downgrades to count them as renewals.

With data snapshotting, you can capture ticket renewal data at a granular level to compare and analyze it year-over-year. By understanding exactly where your customers are in the renewal process, you can inform marketing and sales strategies, so your outreach campaigns and messaging are more relevant and effective.

Identify & Address Sales Pipeline Bottlenecks

If you’re a sponsorship manager, you may want to see your pipeline, know the status of your contracts, understand what stage they’re getting stuck in, and correlate this with their close rates.  However, as your contracts move through the different sales stages, there is limited visibility on how long they spend in each stage and how revenue is affected at different points in the pipeline.

Leveraging data snapshots allows you to capture your pipeline at different points in time so you can easily track changes and the status of each deal and compare it with historical data. Comparing your pipeline also provides insight into the length of stages and if there are any bottlenecks. Addressing any pipeline issues in real time improves sponsorship revenue and partner satisfaction.

I need the data snapshotting feature right now! (we told you it was cool)

Data snapshotting is now available. If you have DWA and would like to start using this feature, reach out to your Customer Success Manager.

Don’t have DWA and interested in learning more? Request a free 30-min demo here.

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.