Football Leaders Reveal Data is Key to Winning Loyal Sports Fans

The way we watch, engage, and interact with our favourite sports clubs is undergoing a seismic shift. Cheetah Digital’s recent report for sports teams and associations reveals 55% of fans will share psychographic data points like purchase motivations and product feedback with sports brands. Even more, half of all fans surveyed said they desire incentives like coupons, loyalty points, or exclusive access in return for their data.

The sports clubs to watch

Arsenal Football Club (F.C.) and the FA are now leveraging a fully-fledged, zero-party data strategy to connect with fans on every digital channel and collect the preference insights and permissions required to drive personalisation initiatives.

​Adam Rutzler, Senior Campaign and Insight Manager at Arsenal, says the most crucial aspect of his team’s work is ensuring that fans receive the best content that’s most relevant to them.

“We get a solid understanding of our fans by taking the combination of these three things and hitting the sweet spot in the middle. What are our fans buying, who are they, and how do they engage with our football club – that’s when we really get the power of understanding our fans, what they want from us, and how we can best give that to them,” he says.

Adam says he’s excited about all the possibilities data opens up for the club.

“We want to understand the fans’ attitudes, aspirations, and personalities. That will allow us to find out what motivates them to engage with certain communications of ours. If we understand that, it would provide us with some very powerful insights,” he says.

The Football Association (FA)

​The FA has a grand ambition to double its contactable CRM database by 2024. In terms of value exchange, the club is achieving above-average conversion rates, using a diverse set of tools like team sectors, man-of-the-match polls, and score predictors for upcoming FA Cup competitions.

According to Paul Brierley, CRM & Membership Lead at the FA, the reason the FA’s strategy has been so effective boils down to its value proposition and relevance.

“Cheetah experiences, in particular, are helping us to drive an incredibly effective value exchange with fans. The combination of sought-after prizes, relevance and timing of that prize, and a compelling gamification experience is producing a highly successful channel for fan experience and data growth,” he says.

Future success

According to Mark Taylor, Senior Strategic Account Executive, Cheetah Digital, there’s no other way for a sports club to be successful without understanding its fan base. It’s paramount to capture their motivations, intentions, and preferences at scale to provide a truly personalised experience.

“By leveraging Cheetah Experiences and offering a value exchange, fans will tell all – the products they desire, what they look for in a loyalty program, and what motivates them to engage. And that information translates to a hugely successful club both now and into the future,” he says.

Cheetah’s new sports campaign guide is packed with examples from leading sports brands and associations that are delivering engaging, interactive experiences in return for fans’ opt-ins and preference data, and then using this data to deliver true personalisation.