Why should sports clubs unify fan data in their CRM?

TL;DR

A unified fan record is one profile per fan in your CRM, built from everything the club knows about them.

It lets you make offers based on how each fan behaves, reach members before they lapse, and use your own first-party data to grow ticket, merchandise and sponsorship revenue. At many of the clubs we speak to, membership is the one thing the CRM can't see because it sits inside ticketing, so putting it at the heart of the fan record is the quickest route to a full view of the fan.

Why is fan data so scattered?

Ticketing knows who comes to games, the club shop knows who bought this season's shirt, catering knows who grabs a pie and a pint at half time, and the CRM knows who opens its emails. Yet ask most clubs to bring all of that together for a single fan and they can't. 

We've had this conversation with a lot of clubs this season, and it came up again at Leaders Week London. In most cases the gap is the same: clubs can't see who joins, upgrades or lapses, even though those members are their most loyal fans, and that's where we'd start.

What is a unified fan record?

It's a single profile for each fan in your CRM, kept up to date by every system that fan comes into contact with. For a football club, that means the CRM can see:

• When they became a member, which tier they're on, and whether they've upgraded or lapsed

• Which games they come to, and how often

• What they spend in the stadium on food, drink and merchandise

• What they buy from the club shop and online

• Which emails they open and what they watch on the app

Most clubs already hold all of this information, but it's spread across five different systems.

Why should clubs unify fan data in their CRM?

A unified record lets you speak to each fan based on how they behave: a member who buys food and drink on matchday gets a kit offer, a fan on the basic tier who hasn't missed a home game in two years is invited to upgrade, and a member who stops coming in March hears from you well before their renewal date.

With membership at the heart of the fan record, every other revenue stream becomes easier to grow. Ticketing can target the members who come to most games, retail can time kit offers around what fans already buy, and the commercial team can show sponsors who the club's fans are and how they engage, all using first-party data the club owns.

The bigger prize is becoming less reliant on matchday. As one Premier League CRO put it at Leaders Week, clubs "need to make money while we sleep, not be so dependent on match day". A membership that fans pay for and use all year round does that, and a unified fan record is what keeps it relevant to each of them.

Fans have come to expect this. McKinsey research found that 71% of consumers expect personalised interactions and 76% get frustrated when they don't receive them, while the same research puts the typical revenue lift from personalisation at 10 to 15%.

There are internal benefits too. Once membership data sits in the CRM, you can show the board what members spend across the club, which makes the case for investing in membership far easier to put together. And because every sale lands in the same place, you can see which campaigns and journeys bring in new members and put more budget behind the ones that convert.

Why is membership usually the missing piece?

At many clubs, membership still runs through the ticketing system. That made sense when membership was mostly about priority access to tickets, but ticketing platforms are built to sell seats for individual events, while today's memberships are relationships that renew every year.

This leaves the CRM unable to see who joins, upgrades, renews or lapses, so the fans paying you every year end up being the ones you know least about.

A dedicated membership platform such as Limio runs membership as a subscription and sends orders and changes into Salesforce, keeping the fan record up to date. Fans also get a self-serve account where they can upgrade or change their membership, and each of those changes reaches the CRM too.

How are leading clubs approaching this?

Those furthest ahead use Salesforce as their CRM, with specialist partners connected for membership and payments, which gives them one place to bring fan data together and makes membership part of the same record.

In practice, that means running membership on a platform like Limio that's connected to Salesforce, so membership data lives in the CRM rather than in ticketing. From there, clubs can link membership with stadium spend and make relevant offers to the members who spend on matchday.

How do you build a unified view of the fan?

Salesforce's guide to building a single customer view sets out five steps: set clear goals, connect your data sources, clean the data, add richer detail and then act on what you learn. For a club, we'd add one more: check membership early, as it's the source most likely to be missing.

1. Set a clear goal, such as reducing membership churn or growing matchday spend from members.

2. List every system that holds fan data and what each one stores, then connect them to your CRM.

3. Check whether your CRM can see membership joins, upgrades and lapses, because if it can't, that's your biggest gap.

4. Clean the data so each fan has a single record across every system.

5. Start with one use case, such as a kit offer for members who spend on matchday, then measure it before adding the next.

Ready to connect membership to your CRM?

Most clubs already have the data they need to know their fans properly, and membership is usually the piece that's missing.

Want to see how Limio connects membership to your CRM? Talk to our team.