For sports clubs, the traditional sources of income are ticket sales, sponsorships, merchandise sales, and broadcast rights. But are there additional growth opportunities? How can their portfolios be expanded? Germany’s FC Bayern Munich was confronted with this challenge.
For the club, the answer was clear: Opportunities lie in the close connection between club and fans, and digitalization makes it possible.
It is all about being able to offer the fans an all-around satisfying experience beyond the sport itself. To achieve this, the club must also build a bond with its supporters outside the stadium and create additional experiences for them. Software solutions are the ideal tools to help clubs understand and service the needs of their fans.
360-Degree View of the Fans and Comprehensive Analysis
It was not an easy task for the team from Munich to consistently align all existing processes to ensure a great fan experience. The previous approach of using the best possible IT solution in each of the various areas had resulted in customer data within FC Bayern being scattered in over 50 different systems and not being integrated with each other. The first step was therefore to bring together member, customer, and fan data in a uniform environment.
This was made possible by customer experience solutions based on SAP HANA.
“All our customer data is now combined in a ‘Golden Fan Record.’ This provides us with insight into more than 250 fan attributes and enables us to create target group-specific content, services, and marketing campaigns, for example, for fan merchandise,” explains Stefan Mennerich, director of Media, Digital, and Communication at FC Bayern Munich, and CEO of FC Bayern Media Lab. In this way, Germany’s best-known football club comes closer to a 360-degree view of its fans.
The team from Munich also relies on SAP Analytics Cloud to enable comprehensive analyses of customer data in a single click. The company is provided with real-time heat maps and dashboards containing the key indicators for all relevant customer groups and business areas.
Win-Win: Anticipating Fan Wishes and Utilizing Existing Capacities
The club uses the insights gained to offer its fans attractive deals. “Cross-marketing in real time is made possible by SAP solutions,” reports Mennerich. “If a product is currently unavailable, the fan immediately receives a suitable alternative offer. And, for example, our members receive a fan shop voucher on their birthday.”
An additional advantage for club members is that, thanks to digital solutions, they can maintain their master data independently and without having to make a detour via the club’s call center. Within one year, FC Bayern registered over 160,000 online updates by members that would have otherwise had to be handled by employees, who can now focus on other tasks.
For Mennerich, the advantages of digitalization are obvious: “In the online shop, the revenue from new customers, the shopping cart value, and sales via mobile devices have increased significantly. With SAP, we are both inspiring the fans and expanding our business.”
Top image via FC Bayern Munich.