Tottenham Hotspur FC drive life-long loyalty with hyper-personalized automation

Off the pitch, Tottenham Hotspur has a strong and successful business model centered around building a platform for long-term success, which includes a new world-class stadium. The Club always aims to provide fans, members, and partners with unforgettable digital experiences. With email as the key channel for ticketing and membership, as well as partner, retail, and soccer school operations, finding a platform powerful enough to meet the Club’s high demands was crucial.

Challenge

Arriving through multiple sources, supporters and followers that enter the Club’s database can be volatile, with initial engagement often difficult to achieve. They can also arrive in high volumes at different times throughout the season or pre-season periods.

Tottenham Hotspur needed to create a strong first impression to capitalize on these early opportunities. This meant choosing a platform that had the power to handle vast quantities of data and deliver tailored customer journeys from the very beginning.

Solution

The welcome program was immediately identified as essential. Tottenham Hotspur’s previous welcome program delivered an open rate anywhere between 5% and 20%, and fans who failed to open would then be classified as unengaged. As a result, they wouldn’t receive soft-sell campaigns such as weekly newsletters. To maximize this opportunity, Tottenham Hotspur launched a strategic two-month program, specifically designed to engage unopened welcome emails. The new program offered fans six additional opportunities to open emails before they were categorized as completely unengaged.

To guarantee the success of this new program, the Club utilized Dotdigital’s dynamic personalization capabilities to spur a highly emotive response from their audience. Combining attention-grabbing subject lines with hyper-personalized images in the email body, Tottenham Hotspur wanted to create an extra-special bond with fans, no matter how they entered the database.

Results

Introducing hyper-personalized content was a game-changer. Triggered once fans entered the database, the improved welcome program enjoyed a consistent open rate of 36% since launch. The number of engaged fans has exceeded expectations, meaning Tottenham Hotspur is now retaining the 20% of recipients it was losing as part of the previous welcome program.

Thanks to this boost in fan retention, the brand’s mailing list for soft-sell campaigns has grown, leading to a massive 233% increase in retail revenue attributed to these email marketing campaigns.