Eredivisie: partner and client

With our partner KORE, we helped the Eredivisie organise their data to create highly personalised target campaigns for their fans and partners. Read all about how we worked together to accomplish this.

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About the Eredivisie

Since 1997, the eighteen Eredivisie clubs have united in an independent legal form. The Eredivisie CV is mainly engaged in the interests of the Eredivisie clubs at both national and international levels. Our mission is to promote the quality of football in the Netherlands under a common name and account.

Creating a Plan

We created a Data Strategy in 2021 together with our partners that would help us to interact with fans, retain current fans and grow towards a database that is of value for clubs, partners, sponsors, and tv-broadcasters.

The main objectives:

Increasing (direct) reach
Increasing engagement
Creating value for Eredivisie, clubs & partners
Improve skills and know-how.

To be able to create such a database, KORE was brought in to supply the Orange Box as the data warehouse, together with Single Sign On for the website and the integration with Maileon. From that point on, we worked on adding more data sources to fulfil their goals. Each data source requires a different approach to onboarding, welcoming or segmentation.

With the data strategy in place, the next step was to integrate the data strategy into the marketing strategy. This is where the power of a data warehouse together with an omnichannel email tool would come into play. Our marketing strategy has all the elements of an omnichannel strategy where Social media, the website, data capture tools and email all work together to create great campaigns that resonate with fans. The marketing funnel works with the HHH-model: Hero – Hub – Hygiene. These campaigns all work together to grow, maintain, and activate fans in the database all year long.

For this case, we’ll focus on the Line-up and Round-up campaigns which are in the Hygiene part of the funnel. Hygiene – Match round-related campaigns (every match round) to keep fans engaged around match days. With campaigns like the Line-up & Line-up Quiz and Round-up campaigns. With the data organised, strategy in place and Maileon ready to go, the next phase is to connect the design and elements to content. This is where Maileon has proven its value with its blocks, and integrations.

Challenges

The next step is to create engaging and personalised content for each fan. As a football fan, generally, your favourite club is the only club that matters. So, limiting the number of items about other clubs is a priority. But with 18 clubs, 9 matches in a weekend and a whole lot of statistics and news, that is a huge challenge. This is where KORE and Maileon are making a difference for us, combining all capabilities of data segmentation, personalisation, and content into our weekly campaigns. Our approach to each match round is to have a personalised introduction with attention to the fan’s favourite club in every email. Meaning that the email will be different for each fan when they open it.

Managing all the statistics in an email can cause a lot of headaches and mistakes are easy to make. That is one of the challenges for us, there’s so much to tell and so many statistics to pick from. We also work with Opta Sports, Tracab and SciSports to deliver all kinds of statistics to their website and app. But this is also where an opportunity was born, what if we could display those statistics in the email as well?

Goals of integrating data into the Eredivisie campaigns:

Easy to use in the editor
Up-to-date and without mistakes
Odds and URLs to the website of the betting partner
Powerful enough to handle 200,000 emails/requests per dispatch

With this in mind, our web developer (TDE), KORE, and Maileon worked together on getting the feeds integrated into the emails to enrich the Eredivisie campaigns with valuable statistics about upcoming fixtures, results, and players.

Solution: Maileon X:APPS and preformatted blocks

This is where KORE introduced the X:APPS platform, a platform to handle and manage all kinds of complex requests like the JSON feeds with statistics. These feeds are transformed by the platform into a workable format for emails within Maileon and meanwhile handle caching, admin functionality and statistics of the feeds.

The end result of the statistics and design is a collection of stunning-looking, easy-to-use blocks that contain all statistics and information about the upcoming or last round of matches in the Eredivisie, including links to our website and opportunities to generate more clicks. The blocks are using Maileon Scriplets, scripts that enhance Maileon’s functionalities. By adding scriptlets to the blocks, they transform the data feeds into usable content.

We believe that every fan is valuable and unique and that they should be treated that way, especially from a League perspective. The Maileon platform, together with KORE and TwoCircles, enables us to do just that. Creating better and more personalised email campaigns that continue to resonate with our fans and partners.

– Saoed Habieb, database manager at Eredivisie

For the Fans

These are all blocks with Eredivisie-focused content. But the challenge was to create emails that resonate with all fans, thus making them as personal as possible. By using the favourite club of the fan from the Orange Box, we could generate a block per fan with the upcoming match that is relevant to the fan.

For the Partners & Sponsors

One of the email campaign’s goals is to promote partners & sponsors of the Eredivisie to the fans. As soon as Holland Casino became our official betting partner, there was an opportunity to promote betting on a match of a fans’ favourite club. But as part of the Eredivisie & Holland Casino’s ‘Responsible Betting’ initiative, limited access to betting to anyone below the age of 24 or to fans that have no date of birth registered in the database. Because we are keen on promoting safe betting.

Results

The challenge was to keep fans entertained. A key marker for us and our partners is the number of opens. That is the indicator for us that fans are interacting with the Eredivisie brand and the clubs.

The blocks are mainly used in the line-up campaign for the games to come and in the round-up campaign with highlights and results of the match round. These emails contain the blocks with information about upcoming fixtures and the results after a match round, generated with the feeds from the X:APP Platform.

In the 2021-2022 season, we worked hard to get the right frequency, content and target audiences for the line-up and round-up campaigns. With regular A/B testing, we managed to slowly but steadily increase the open rates of both campaigns. By the start of the 2022-2023 season, we were using the blocks in every match round.

The open rates went up from 41% to 51% for the Line-up campaigns, while the Round-up campaigns went up from 72% to 80%. Stunning results!

Contributing factors:

More relevant content – personalising the items in the email;
More and accurate statistics – integrating the data feeds;
More interactive elements – make the campaigns fun to read and interact with;
Better segmentation – keep selecting the right audience for the right campaign.

Overall statistics:

Total of: 276 campaigns
With approximately in total: 2.760+ content items
Total Emails Sent: 20.200.000 emails
Average List Size: 62.000 fans
Average Open Rate: 52%
Average Click to Open rate: 2,84%
Highest Open Rate: 90%
Highest Click to Open rate: 28%

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