Background
The challenge
The club wanted to be in the best possible position to sell every season ticket for the 2017/2018 campaign. To do this, Everton FC first needed to clearly identify its supporter groups and the Season Ticket Holder (STH) retention risks.
After creating a single customer view of their STHs using FastStats®, Everton FC achieved an enhanced level of insight and reporting capability never seen before at the Club. With their bespoke and broad use of the Apteco FastStats® software tools, they also performed a detailed analysis of ‘churn’ risk. This included examining retention levels in previous seasons across a multitude of factors, including proximity to the stadium, tenure, ticket class, seat position within the stadium and purchase date.
The platform also enabled Everton FC to understand and segment their fans into attitudinal groups. This allowed personalisation of marketing efforts designed to appeal to the attitudes and behaviour of each fan segment, which increased open and conversion rates. The data intelligence derived from the Club’s use of FastStats also led to the introduction of new pricing models to retain younger fans.
Prior to FastStats®, Everton’s knowledge of STHs was limited as it gave no indication of risk factor. How likely a STH was to renew (or not) and driving influences behind buying decisions were a relative unknown.
The Apteco software was incredibly useful. With a few days to go, we had 10,000 tickets to sell to hit target, but we knew most of these fans were low risk meaning vital marketing resources were not used needlessly.
The Apteco solution
The insight team called on Apteco partner and leading data solutions specialist Qbase, to support their implementation of FastStats®.
Working closely with Qbase, Everton FC’s data scientist has developed powerful uses for the Apteco marketing software. Using the Apteco software, Everton accessed an enhanced level of insight, producing a risk analysis highlighting challenges to fan retention including high churn rates amongst new STHs, late purchasers (demonstrating potentially lower engagement with the club) and younger supporters moving to higher price category.
Apteco FastStats® was used to delve into a host of metrics, with results never seen before by the club. With the insight Everton gained through utilising the Apteco marketing software, a record-breaking marketing campaign for retention was conducted.
The impact on the business
Explore some examples of how companies currently benefit from Apteco marketing software.
16% increase in retention
Based on risk factor and segmentation data, marketing initiatives were introduced to reduce churn risk.
85% of high risk fans renewed
With the insight gained using the Apteco marketing software, communications were targeted to fans increasing the number of individuals wanting to purchase a season ticket by 12,500.
£300k increase in revenue
Supporter segmentation information allowed personalised communications to be sent to appeal to the attributes and behaviour of different groups of Everton fans. Open and conversion rates also increased as a result.
94% overall retention – a record
With the insight Everton gained through utilising Apteco software, a record-breaking marketing campaign for retention was conducted for 2017/2018 Season Ticket Holders.
Apteco marketing software is not only a critical part of our insight analysis, but a driving force behind personalised communications, supporting the Club’s goal to be “The People’s Club” for generations to come.