Building the Ultimate End-to-End Fan Experience

Cricket is an amazing sport. The passion for the game on the international stage is intense and players and fans alike love to be at the game, whether playing or watching it happen.

The European Cricket Network (ECN) has built a fantastic and growing league experience across Europe and the reception from both players and fans is tremendous. That is why Daniel Weston and his dynamic team at ECN have been taking a hard look at how to deliver the ultimate end-to-end fan experience for cricket fans across the globe.

ECN has built incredible experiences at the oval and they were looking to extend fan engagement beyond just the onsite game day experience. They identified three use cases specific to their marketing capabilities that they wanted to improve in order to magnify their reach and effectiveness. After they identified what tech capabilities they needed in the near term, they looked for a partner that could deliver all of them in one platform. They found one in HCLSoftware.

Use Case #1 – Communications & Outreach

ECN’s use cases started with the need to make their pre-match communications with fans faster and more efficient. Within the hour between the coin toss and match start, the ECN team needed to prepare match infographic images, deploy the images to the website and send pre-match emails to all subscribers and registered fans.

HCLSoftware answered this need for speed, ease and accuracy by leveraging:

• Campaign execution and delivery automation.
• Powerful and easy to create drag-and-drop UI email templates within the HCL email delivery engine.
• Marketing operations management tools to flexibly configure (custom) user interfaces for optimal user experience.

All of these solution components were put together to provide a streamlined email execution experience for ECN’s marketers. Their team now only needs to fill out one send request screen with the selection of available target lists/segments and URLs for infographic images. Automated and scheduled campaign flowchart processes send requests, extracts email parameters, prepares target lists, and initiates Deliver mailings.

Use Case #2 – Managing Fan Profile Acquisition

As ECN goes through a period of continued rapid growth, fan acquisition and organization of fan profiles is imperative. After outreach campaigns are put into market, web registrations come fast and furious. Having one system that can collect, organize and make available all of the profiles for additional engagement is a must.

To solve this massive scaling complexity, HCL turned to its journey orchestration capabilities to use REST APIs to ingest all digital registrations from ECN’s digital properties, define and organize all the registration records, and structure them in a usable fashion that they can then be reviewed, corrected and made available for targeting. Now all ECN fan data is uniform and data errors are eliminated, making it super simple to access all fan records and eliminate fan churn due to bad data collection and organization.

Use Case #3 – Surveying fans

ECN is in the sports world and fans ALWAYS have an opinion to share. Because of this, ECN engages in a lot of survey opportunities where fans can share their preferences, opinions and predictions about the games and players. ECN needed a way to collect and organize their fan feedback to make it useful in their marketing campaigns

HCL once again utilized their marketing operations UI configuration capabilities that offer ECN a view for filtering, counting, sorting and analyzing fan’s digital response data collected via emails and landing pages. By incorporating direct fan input, the entire ECN engagement strategy will become more effective and will get more fans than ever before actively involved in European cricket.

Beyond these specific use cases, ECN also needed their tech solution to be provisioned very quickly and be cloud-native. HCL used their managed-hosted HCL Now offering to stand up ECN’s marketing environment in their cloud of choice in under two months.

ECN went from hoping for the best partner, to best-in-class fan engagement in record time. Learn more about the partnership here.

For all you cricket fans, that’s a solid boundary six.

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