Cricket Australia is the national governing body for the game in Australia. They oversee professional and amateur cricket including operation of national representatives, organising test tours and running over 3,500 clubs throughout the country. Their vision is for cricket to be Australia’s favourite sport, and a sport for all Australians.
A rough season: Lack of coordination and disconnected data presents a challenge
Cricket Australia engages its fans in ways ranging from direct marketing to digital channels, grassroot participation and ticket sales at matches.
They set a goal to “be Australia’s favourite sport through world class fan engagement”. However, the reality was that when this strategy was written, Cricket Australia had immense difficulty engaging with their fans in a personalised way.
Australian cricket is administered by one national body and its members – the six state and two territory associations. Their systems had evolved independently and the business couldn’t easily share data.
This meant there was no coordination in fan engagement. There were different marketing approaches across the associations with customers being engaged across a dozen platforms. There was risk of breaching spam and privacy regulations, and they were not getting good return on investment from platform expenditures.
Cricket Australia themselves had invested in a marketing engine but it was not being fed the right data. It was not possible to accurately identify new and returning customers, and develop strategic upsell or cross sell campaigns.
To achieve their goal of world class fan engagement, Cricket Australia needed to:
- Unite their data assets and automate the process
- Create a complete view of each customer
- Leverage the intelligence to improve marketing campaigns and fan engagement
A solution that drafts a personalised, single view of the fans
In alignment with its cloud strategy, Cricket Australia chose to work with Profisee – a Master Data Management system – paired with Microsoft Azure which it could natively connect with.
Bringing everything together with Golden Record Management
At this point, they had visibility of only around 1.3 million individuals. Using the powerful Golden Record Management engine within Profisee, this data was brought together from 12 disconnected, fit-for-purpose systems used by Cricket Australia and its associations. This included several marketing and external ticketing systems.
It was quickly apparent that a lot of information was collected across all the platforms – there were 7.5 million duplicated and unconnected individuals.
The rules for matching configured within Profisee, identified similarities across data sets and distilled the data back to 2.9 million unique and mastered individuals – with 1 reliable “Golden Record” per person.
Having a single Golden Record meant having a complete view of each customer and their most accurate contact details captured and streamlined across the organisation.
From an immediate level, this enabled Cricket Australia to improve and tailor the fan experience – they knew how to best market or upsell, and to whom. They also gained an understanding of each person’s propensity to take up certain offers.
It enabled their efforts to market the right offers to the right customers at the right time, and encouraged growing viewership and club participation.
Cricket Australia was also able to build a view of each household. By connecting family members, they could provide tailored offers (for example, buy two tickets and a child goes free) and nurture at the grassroots level to drive long term growth in the sport.
All in all, this improved the strike rate across Cricket Australia’s dataset. This was done solely through taking advantage of the data they already had.
“Heading down the Golden Record Management path has been a success. There is no doubt that benefits have already been realised, both tangible and intangible. As our business matures in how it uses the data, the benefits will outstrip the investment.”
– Cricket Australia
As of Day 1 go-live, Cricket Australia had increased its marketable database by 27% – and this is an ongoing process.
The clean customer data also integrates back to downstream systems in the SQL Data warehouse and Dynamics CRM.
The ultimate assist: A pro-level system
Now, 17 businesses and 6 internal business units are on one system for marketing and managing fan data. Cricket Australia and its associations can:
- Reduce marketing burnout caused by irrelevant and excessive content
- Leverage intelligence to create customised marketing campaigns
- Reduce spam and privacy risks
- Be on the forefront of the digital marketing space
There is greater transparency in how they manage the fan impact, value realised in economies of scale through centralised licensing and email spend, and greater intelligence and analytics from working off the same complete data set.
Within Cricket Australia itself, having a central shared service means they are able to standardise a process of doing outbound marketing. They share resources and skills across associations and get more value out of their marketing spend.
“This whole process has allowed us to know our fans, and we can now start offering experiences to our biggest fans.”
– Cricket Australia
Impact for Cricket Australia
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