Conor Higgins, Manchester United’s manager of research and analytics, at Horizon Summit. (Courtesy of the San Francisco 49ers)
Sports teams and leagues have come to find that no other resource can be as valuable as consumer data. But in May 2018, the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation law to change the rules for how businesses could collect and use consumer data.
GDPR meant that teams such as Manchester United F.C. now had to get fans to “opt-in” in order for them to continue to receive commercial communications, such as marketing emails, from the team. To prepare for GDPR, Manchester United launched a “Stay United” marketing campaign in December 2017. The six-month campaign included a fan-information survey, where participants had the opportunity to opt-in to receive continued marketing communication. ManU was looking to learn details about its fans’ purchasing behavior, products owned, and household or family composition.
“Essentially if any supporters didn’t give permission to us to continue to communicate with them, we’d know that we wouldn’t be able to communicate with them after the deadline,” Conor Higgins, Manchester United’s manager of research and analytics, said at Horizon Summit on Friday.
The outcome of the campaign was a 113 percent increase in engaged marketable records on Manchester United’s customer relationship management database. Stay United won an award for Best Club Marketing Initiative at the 2018 Football Business Awards.
The club has found success with other marketing campaigns, too. According to a 2012 survey conducted by Kantar, most of the English soccer team’s fans are in Asia, totaling 325 million compared to 90 million in Europe. To more directly reach Chinese fans, Manchester United launched “Wake up the Devil Inside You.”
Data collected by the club had showed that Chinese soccer fans identified with three main topics: soccer, Chinese manga, and video games. (Manga is a type of comic book or graphic novel, and is aimed mostly at adults.) So the campaign used mobile interactive storytelling and featured manga-style visual animations of ManU soccer stars.
The campaign was promoted across Manchester United’s social channels in China on platforms such as Sina Sport. According to Higgins, it exceeded expected targets with 343,000 users, 1.9 million hashtag impressions, and a 25 percent lower than expected cost per action.
This content is part of our coverage of the San Francisco 49ers and SportTechie Horizon Summit. SportTechie organizes regular events that bring together innovators, investors, and key decision makers from across the world of sports technology. Find out more about future events here.
