By Rick Ferguson
For a loyalty marketer, sports fan marketing represents both a compelling opportunity and a unique challenge. On the one hand, engaging with sports fans is easy; sports fandom is a core identity for millions of Americans. Sports scores are the first thing they check in the morning, a key topic of conversation with family and friends, and a reason to connect and celebrate with other fans.
On the other hand, engaging with sports fans is also hard. How do engage with them in the off-season? How do you overcome the negative emotions associated with a losing team? Kansas City Chiefs fans might be eager to connect with you and respond to your offers—but what about Carolina Panthers fans? Many sports fans have a love-hate relationship with their favorite teams. How do you emphasize the love and mitigate the hate?
That’s the challenge for Douglas Glazer, Vice President of Loyalty and Gift Cards for sports marketing firm Fanatics. Fanatics is a holding company comprised of three lines of business: Fanatics Commerce, Betting and Gaming, and Collectibles. Glazer leads loyalty in the gift card program for the Commerce division, which is in turn comprised of hundreds of web sites in partnership with sports leagues, teams, associations, and media properties.
The good news: Glazer has developed robust loyalty capabilities to build relationships with sports fans at every stage of their fandom. Recently, I had the chance to chat with Glazer in-depth about this loyalty journey. From that conversation, here are Glazer’s Five Takeaways for loyalty marketers looking to turn their own customers into loyal fans.
1. Use rewards to drive specific behaviors
Fanatics’ core loyalty offering is FanCash, cashback rewards that Fanatics MVP members can earn online, in select sporting venues, through partner-funded rewards, and via spend on the Fanatics private-label credit card. Glazer’s team leverages those cashback rewards to drive purchases and other lifecycle behaviors beneficial both to customers and to the business. FanCash rewards also help drive existing commerce customers into the betting and gaming business and drive gaming customers into the commerce business.
2. Deliver experiences that drive emotional connections
On its own, sports fandom delivers memorable experiences on game days. Fanatics builds upon those emotional ties by delivering branded experiences outside of the Sunday morning tailgate. Fanatics plans to double down on experiential rewards by building an entirely new business vertical to produce events on a large scale; that investment will allow Glazer to leverage those events as rewards for best customers to get closer to the athletes and experiences most valuable to them.
3. Leverage unpublished rewards for maximum flexibility
By offering a relatively low published value proposition, Glazer’s team can leverage their loyalty program as an ongoing experiment by offering more robust rewards behind the scenes. They can devise experiments with bonus offers, keep those offers that move the needle on incremental behavior, and reject what doesn’t. This approach gives Fanatics tremendous flexibility to optimize offers and campaigns both for customers for the business.
4. Have a clear value roadmap for customer data
Like most companies attempting to build loyalty with millions of customers, Fanatics has access to much more customer data than they can effectively action to build business value. For Glazer’s team, prioritization is critical. Fanatics’ 2024 priority is to move away from running campaigns by building a state-of-the-art offer platform that leverages AI and machine learning to deliver trigger-based, criteria-driven, and personalized offers that drive cross-vertical behaviors at scale. Doing so will require the company to combine the right data attributes with the right customer segmentation to deliver the right offers seamlessly across the organization.
5. Choose the right tools for the job
Fanatics combines provider technology platforms with custom-built personalization and recommendation solutions that deliver on the business value expected from investment in loyalty management. Sophisticated in-house analytics leverages external business intelligence and email optimization platforms to drive desired customer behavior. Key 2024 initiatives include rolling out a sophisticated email scoring algorithm intended to help Glazer’s team better understand customer interest and preferred communication channels. By focusing on desired outcomes, Glazer’s team can buy or build the right technology for the job.
As if all of these initiatives weren’t enough to keep a loyalty leader busy, Glazer also heads an exciting next-generation initiative: A roadmap to develop a single Fanatics coalition loyalty program across all three lines of business. That initiative might also include a co-branded credit card to complement their private-label card.
The end goal: To fulfil the Fanatics brand promise of delivering a broad fan ecosystem that enhances the joy of a winning season and mitigates the sorrow of a losing one. After all, there’s always next season—and Fanatics hopes to take that journey with sports fans everywhere.
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