It has never been more difficult for brands to engage with customers in a way that ensures relevance, secures conversion, drives loyalty, and maximizes lifetime value.
Sports streaming giant DAZN (pronounced “da zone”) was faced with this very challenge. The CRM team needed to be able to understand the significance of customer behaviors so they could tailor campaigns, communications, and messages, and send them at the right moment on the right channel.
In this case study, you will learn how DAZN overcame the challenge by transforming its event-led tactics into customer-led marketing with Optimove.
Key Takeaways:
Putting an end to rigid, event-led campaigns Before Optimove, DAZN had a CRM strategy in place that was comprised of rigid, event-led campaigns and limited segmentations, which were based on just one type of customer interest.
Reducing churn and increasing revenues This approach did not support their goals of improving customer retention and driving new revenue opportunities.
Understanding customer behavior & driving personalization The company needed a deeper and broader understanding of customer behaviors, so it could predict which campaigns would be most effective and know how to tailor communications to each customer’s needs and preferences.
Implementing a whole new, customer-led approach to campaigns The Optimove Customer-Led Platform was selected for its ability to power customer insight discovery, adapt in real time to dynamic customer behaviors, and orchestrate highly personalized marketing campaigns.
Enhancing customer loyalty, retention, and lifetime value Now, DAZN is creating multiple segmentation layers and micro-segments, identifying the optimal channel for execution, gaining visibility into new and updated behavioral trends, and more, enhancing engagement, experiences, and customer lifetime value.
“Our CRM plans are continuing to evolve, and Optimove is helping us to pivot away from primarily event led campaigns to a much more personalized, customer behavior-led approach,” Andrew Stewart, Senior CRM Manager, Technology, DAZN.
About DAZN
DAZN is a global leader in providing live and on-demand sports streaming services. Its platform is home to some of the world’s most popular and important sporting events, including the Super Bowl, El Clasico, Formula 1, and more, and is available in over 200 countries.
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A need for a new approach for new revenues
When DAZN started moving more and more towards multiple products, services, subscription models, and markets, it realized that it also needed a new approach to meeting their key CRM KPIs:
Increasing on-platform engagement whether by providing new information about content that customers are already aware of or by exposing them to new content.
Cross-selling new contents, products, and services.
Reducing churn and winning back customers who had cancelled their subscription.
Delivering the best possible customer experience.
Its long-time objective as a subscription company – to ensure that customer subscriptions remain active – could no longer be the driving force of the CRM team’s strategy and tactics.
Traditionally, the CRM team’s targeting strategy had been driven by behavior-based segmentation.
It entailed identifying the customer’s viewing activity and building segmentations based on engagement with one specific type of content, sport, favorite team, or event.
This approach presents a challenge because it is rigid and lacks the flexibility and adaptability required for segmenting customers beyond a single parameter.
DAZN needed a way to determine all the types of content that customers are engaging with on the platform, such as boxing, soccer, and basketball, instead of just Manchester United.
This is the only way to gain the insights required for increasing engagement and growing revenues.
Additional challenges included:
SQL for campaign set up was complex and required technical and analytical expertise.
Automated lifecycle journeys triggered at customer touchpoints such as cancellation along with event-led campaigns meant that granular personalization was impossible.
No easy access to insights into what was working with their campaigns and what wasn’t, kept implementing timely fixes based on actual performance out of reach.
The wish list
To help the team achieve its CRM goals, DAZN was looking to be able to create smarter segmentations for smarter targeting, and to do so easily and quickly.
They needed to be able to create customer profiles that are based on more than one dimension, to know when their customers prefer to receive communications, as well as to identify similar cohorts of users, and do all this fast.
In addition, the DAZN team also needed to make sure that they were sending the right messages to the right customers, at the right time, and on the right channel.
And finally, it was critical to empower CRM managers with simplified campaign build, management, and performance measurement.
In comes Customer-Led Marketing
“So, when looking at what we needed for our marketing CDP, we felt that Optimove provided the best fit for addressing some of the pain points of our previous stack.”
To help it upgrade its marketing stack DAZN came to Optimove. And now, with customer-led marketing, the team has overcome the main challenges to meeting its strategic KPIs, having implemented the five key building blocks of its smarter targeting:
A bespoke customer model for gaining a more granular view of both active customers and lapsed users.
Insights into purchase history, or in DAZN’s case ‘streaming history’, for easily understanding viewing behavior at the individual customer level, including what content they’re watching, how they’re watching it, and when.
The Optimove Mission Control dashboard for single-view monitoring and analysis of all marketing campaigns, with prioritization that enables targeting the right customers with the right messaging.
Intuitive target group creation, having replaced SQL audience builds, for ease and simplicity.
Campaign KPI definition with the ability to easily define both test and control audiences for gaining insights into campaign efficacy and making timely changes when required.
“We’ve made some big leaps forward in how we operate on a day-to-day basis.”
The Guide to Advance Customer Segmentation
Go in depth on advanced segmentation with this guide which was written based on analyzing tens of thousands of segments across Optimove’s customer base.
In just a few short months, more than 100,000 unique campaigns having been delivered across every stage of the customer lifecycle. And all of DAZN’s marketing and service communications, across email, push, in-app messaging, and social audiences are now managed with Optimove’s Customer-Led Platform.
Rob Wyse is Senior Director of Communications at Optimove.
As a communications consultant, he has been influential in changing public opinion and policy to drive market opportunity. Example issues he has worked on include climate change, healthcare reform, homeland security, cloud transformation, AI, and other timely issues.
