Melbourne Football Club, a historic team in the Australian Football League (AFL), stands out for its member-owned structure, which fosters a strong bond with its supporters. Traditionally, the club has been associated with an older fan base, influencing its engagement strategies. However, the club has seen significant growth in recent years, especially after winning recent premierships in both the men’s and women’s comps. This growth has been carefully managed by a dedicated team, including Libby Blampied, General Manager of Marketing & Digital, and Jimmie Martin, IT Manager. These leaders are pivotal in connecting the club with its fans, ensuring that both long-time and new supporters feel valued and engaged. The club’s dedication to understanding and meeting fan needs gives it a unique edge in the competitive AFL landscape.

Tackling Data Challenges to Enhance Competitiveness

Melbourne Football Club faced significant data challenges that limited its ability to fully engage with its fan base. The club’s marketing team was forced to rely on technical teams to access customer data from their data warehouse, and an outdated marketing platform further restricted their ability to deliver personalised and meaningful communications. Jimmie explained, “Previously, we couldn’t get the data into our customer engagement platform to achieve the outcomes we wanted. Now, we can ingest and activate our data at a much quicker rate, which has been game-changing.” This transformation was essential for the club, enabling them to better understand and retain their expanding membership. The club could finally integrate and utilize its data effectively by adopting a comprehensive consumer data strategy, including a transition to Iterable and Snowflake for data warehousing. This set the stage for improved fan engagement and sustained growth.

Seamless Data Ingestion and Activation With Smart Ingest

Leveraging Iterable’s Smart Ingest, co-developed with Hightouch, has transformed how Melbourne Football Club activates customer data from their Snowflake Data Warehouse directly within Iterable. With Smart Ingest, they can seamlessly ingest and activate relevant data in a no-code environment. This eliminates their reliance on technical teams, allowing their marketing team to take full control of data integration, ingestion, and activation. 

The key benefits of this setup for the club include:

• Automation and personalisation unlocked: Smart Ingest enhances personalised fan communications by syncing data on memberships, ticket sales, and fan interactions, enabling prompt and effective engagement with their fans. This unlocks more relevant, timely outreach, boosting fan loyalty, satisfaction, and engagement, leading to a 66% unique open rate and a 7% unique click rate.

• Marketer-friendly tools to save time and reduce dependency on other teams: By automating data ingestion with a streamlined process, the marketing team can access and utilise this data directly, saving 5 hours of time per week per person— compared to the prior manual process of onboarding new members. Previously, creating audience segments required collaboration from three separate teams, leading to a minimum three-day turnaround to welcome a new member.

• Productivity improved: The shift to Iterable has transformed the marketing team’s productivity, enabling faster segmentation, experimentation, and execution of personalised campaigns. With these intuitive, marketer-friendly tools, the need for technical assistance has been greatly reduced, allowing the team to fully manage data syncing and activation. As a result, they can now respond to membership purchases within days instead of weeks, leading to a productivity improvement of up to 40% and enhancing overall agility and responsiveness without relying on engineering or other teams.

Now that Melbourne Football Club can fully activate its data, they are better positioned to drive deeper personalization and engage fans more effectively, all while lowering resource costs by 12.5% (based on efficiency savings per week) and streamlining operations.

Transforming Member Engagement Through Automation

Iterable has transformed how the club automates and manages customer communications by streamlining operations for more efficient and immediate member messaging. Jimmie explained, “We now have an automated process flowing into Iterable. Our marketing team is brimming with ideas because they can handle segmentation themselves within the system.” This capability has freed the team from manual tasks, allowing them to focus on creativity and innovation. “With Iterable, new membership purchases are processed overnight, allowing us to send communications immediately after purchase versus having to wait several days with our previous solution,” said Jimmie. 

The marketing team is now able to automate their AFL women’s confirmation journey, which is triggered by a membership purchase event. Based on data nested within the event, they send three distinct types of member communications, including targeted campaigns for non-access members, adults, and juniors. This prompt and personalised engagement has strengthened the club’s connection with new members and fans.

Non-Access Purchase: These are memberships that are not defined as adult or junior. The campaigns are focused on thanking them for their membership purchase and welcoming them with a membership guide.

Adult: When an adult purchases the membership, they focus on a “festival-type atmosphere” as a drawcard to drive game attendance from adults as a fun weekend activity.  

Juniors: For new members that purchase tickets classified as juniors, communications spotlight star players like Kate Hore, the top goal kicker, and Paxy Paxman, their star defense. They also promote the Junior Membership pack, which includes merchandise available for purchase, encouraging fans to opt for delivery or pick-up on game day.

Fostering Creativity and Innovation

Freed from outdated, cumbersome processes, the team can now focus on its core mission. Jimmie emphasised, “The marketing team can now focus on being creative and doing what they’re supposed to do—marketing.” This shift has sparked enthusiasm and new ideas, empowering the team to explore innovative fan engagement strategies. Libby reflected, “Technology and resourcing are no longer pain points for us. Looking at how far we’ve come over the last 12 months is something we’re really proud of.” This transformation has not only enhanced their ability to connect with supporters but also laid the foundation for future growth and success. The club’s leadership is excited about the potential to explore new engagement and retention strategies, ensuring they remain at the forefront of the AFL landscape while continuing to build lasting relationships with their supporters.