The Industry Column – Peter Mcneile
Peter McNeile, Director of Sponsorship at Cheltenham Racecourse, discusses the dilemma of balancing results and relationships in sport.
I read an opinion piece recently where an editor complained that football – as a whole – has been slow to implement effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Reading further into the subject, it transpired that the team in question had been using CRM but had not yet fully integrated social media data into its CRM system.
It’s an interesting point. Social media is becoming increasingly important in how and when brands interact with their customers, but it is also fair to say that not all consumers are active users of social media – yet. If a sports venue or team were to pay more attention to views expressed via social media, is it being more responsive to its fans or just to a particular cohort of its fanbase? There is no match for actually doing proper research among as wide a sample as possible of your customer base – but it’s equally important to be responsive to those views and change your proposition to satisfy customer requirements.
At Cheltenham, we have had a CRM system for over twenty years, although I must stress we have upgraded the systems and our approach during that period. By coincidence, we are about to undertake a new upgrade (so this topic has particular resonance), but the current system has served us well.
Adopting best practice, we run integrated marketing campaigns and use purchasing history data from our CRM system to send targeted offers and reminders to encourage customers to purchase and to upsell other products (such as travel or hospitality) and additional events.
The success of this strategy is evident: we have grown total footfall across our fixture list by over 10% – or 44,000 additional visits – in the last five years. The number of season ticket holders has grown by 50% in the same period – and this is in the context of a largely unchanged fixture list, over just 16 racing days. And often, the people on our database will purchase a number of tickets, bringing new spectators with them. So while we want to tease out value from our known customers and drive home that commercial advantage, it’s just as important that we ensure those people remain ambassadors of our sport.
In terms of CRM, our biggest challenge lies in the fact that racing – predominantly – is still a cash business. Spectators can turn up and pay cash to enter at the gate; they can spend cash at the bookmaker, the tote and the bar. As a result, the majority of our customers and the exact nature of their spending patterns remain unknown to us. Of the six million people who watch racing, most make only one visit to a racecourse. If we could get 50% of these people to come once more during the year, it could make a huge difference to racing’s attendance figures and revenues.
Certainly, we aim to do more to capture these people and are identifying new strategies to help us do this; implementing wi-fi across the racecourse could help us implement some of the strategies. But in the meantime we just need to ensure that spectators keep coming back. For a football team, that typically means delivering success on the pitch. Horse racing enthusiasts don’t have a team to support per se, so to attract customers, racecourses need to keep investing in the course, prize finds and facilities so spectators have a comfortable and entertaining time, watching the best horses and the most exciting races. As such, perhaps we have had to think more carefully about presenting and marketing our offer – and ensuring we meet customers’ needs – than those in the Premiership.
