#112 How to sell more merchandise using Data Talks’s 4 Fundamentals

Sports CDP Crash Course - Data Talks

In previous episodes, we had a re-introduction to the 4 fundamentals of selling tickets and merchandise and negotiating sponsorship agreements of higher value. Thereafter, we looked at use cases for increasing ticket sales using the 4 fundamentals, in particular, how a Swedish Hockey League club generated 2.5 million Swedish crowns in revenue in the space of only two weeks, how a football club playing in the highest division in Greece, manage to more than double their average ticketing order revenue from €19 to €42 in less than a year and finally how a professional rugby union club in the UK sent an email campaign to a target group of 250 people that generated a revenue of £5,000.

In today’s episode, we will continue down a similar path of discussing more use cases of how sports organisations successfully use the 4 fundamentals to meet their business goals. As always, we use real-life examples. The emphasis for this episode is on using the 4 fundamentals to sell more merchandise. So, how have some of the world’s most successful sports organisations used the 4 fundamentals to sell more merchandise?

1. One club wanted to leverage matchday performance to increase merchandise sales. They had just played a very dramatic match which resulted in victory at the very last minute. So what did they do? They created a social media campaign based on the pitch's success - they promoted the jerseys of the player who had scored in the last minute. Thereafter, they reached out to the fans with a special offer directly linked to the campaign. The results were a 66% increase in sales, their best-ever e-store sales results, at the time. They also saw sales increase by 91% compared to the day before the game.
2. Another club did not just want to increase their merchandise sales, they also wanted to how they should approach their targeting when it comes to said merchandise sales. So they created a campaign to sell more shirts with name prints and compare the results of targeting smaller vs larger segments. The first segment they targeted was current shirt owners with merch order values higher than 90 euros. This segment consisted of 1200 recipients. The other segment was anyone who bought a ticket in the last two years and this segment comprised 38000 recipients. The results were a combined 60% open rate, 6% click rate and 110 items sold which generated 8800 EUR in revenue. When analysed proportionally, the smaller segment had 7 times better results than the larger segment.
3. Another club wanted to sell limited edition alternate away jerseys so they targeted club members with pre-order offerings. They thereafter extended the campaign offering the jerseys to non-members. The initial phase of the campaign achieved a 61% open rate and a 7% click-through rate, resulting in a revenue of 21,100 AUD. The collective revenue generated from campaigns targeting both members and non-members amounted to 45,329 AUD. This particular case shows the power of iterating the same campaign with different segments.

From these three examples, it is evident that the 4 fundamentals are a powerful tool to use when wanting to increase your merchandise sales. Let’s conclude this episode by revisiting the 4 fundamentals. The 4 Fundamentals is a groundbreaking process innovation and transformative approach that empowers sports organizations of all sizes, across seasons and regions, to harness the power of their data. By seamlessly integrating all supporter data into one place, the result is not just increased sustained revenue streams, but a genuine commitment to placing fans and supporters at the heart and centre of every initiative. These four fundamentals are:

1. Grow your contact database, continuously
2. Collect supporter data with contact information and merge it with your other data
3. Find out which supporter segments you should target with your campaigns
4. Send relevant offers to those segments in a way that your supporters will appreciate

Thank you for joining me on today’s episode. Join me again next week when we discuss the other 4 fundamental use cases intending to inspire you to achieve similar and even better results. I have been your host, Lorraine Moalosi.