1. Introduction

The Premier League is the top level of the English football league system. Contested by 20 clubs, it operates on a system of promotion and relegation with the English Football League (EFL). The Premier League is also the most watched football league in the world.

Premier League releases it’s fixtures for the new season in June every year. In 2022, Fixture Release Day was on 16th of June and millions of fans worldwide tuned in to see who their favourite team is going to be pitted against and in what order.

2. Objectives

• Pre-promote Fixture Release Day by directing fans toward their digital calendar, powered by ECAL. This helps to build excitement ahead of the new season and drive new subscribers throughout the week.
• Launch Premier League’s new season football fixtures using the digital calendar, powered by ECAL, to connect and engage with football lovers and sports fans worldwide.
• Drive fan engagement and tune-in by delivering localised broadcast details into a user’s calendar within Premier League game entries. This helps to support major broadcasters across 200 countries and lets fans know where they can watch the games.
• Deliver important event information, including broadcast details, social media platforms, and club’s online stores. This drives sales, tune-in, attendance, and engagement.
• Aquire highly-valuable customer data and behavioural insights from their huge, worldwide fanbase.

3. Strategy

The project would target a cohort of bank customers who were prone to payment default and prone to entering ‘collections’. For the sake of the test, customers would receive an SMS with a feature link to sync payment reminders to their mobile calendar.

NB: In a full integrated rollout, the feature is integrated into the mobile banking app, and online banking portal.

4. Solutions

Pre-Release

• Created multiple ECAL button and ad displays. Alongside this, Premier League also produced a number of high-impact creative assets across multiple platforms including website, mobile, social media, app and email.
• Pre-promotion of Sync to Calendar feature in the week prior to Fixture Release Day via the aforementioned creatives, displays and a website splash page. This helped to build excitement among the fans and increase the window of opportunity for new acquisitions
• Informed all existing subscribers that their calendar will automatically populate with the new seasons fixtures and so therefore, there was no need to complete the sign-up process again.

Fixture Release Day

• Connect – their multi-platform marketing approach led to a huge number of new subscribers connecting to Premier League’s various schedules, including all 20 teams’ fixtures, Fantasy Premier League, and the ePL. The PL2 and u18s schedules were also added in this year.
• Activate – with a huge, connected audience, Premier League can now deliver important information directly to their highly engaged fans to stimulate sales, social engagement, tune-in, and attendance.
• On the day promotion – Premier League hit all platforms on the day, marketing their digital calendar via social media posts, a dedicated eDM, and push notifications. They also did a website takeover including splash page on site entry, homepage banners, button displays and an article. This all resulted in a huge new subscriptions figure. Additionally, Premier League continued their promotion in the days following to ensure that they continued to grow their subscriber-base.

5. Outcomes

• 153,000+ new subscribers within the 10-day campaign period
• 60,000 new subscribers on fixture release date alone, all seamlessly connected without incident
• 14,000+ in-calendar clicks illustrating a highly engaged audience, with fans visiting the Premier League website, checking out TV scheduling and visiting team and league social media platforms and online stores.
• Most popular links included ‘Visit Premier League website’ (10,752), ‘Match Centre’ (1,449), ‘TV Schedule’ (555), club’s online shops (345) and clubs’ Twitter platforms (173).
• 57% opt-in to receive further communications from the Premier League. This subscriber data automatically syncing to the Premier League’s CRM on a weekly basis for targeted marketing purposes.
• Worldwide engagement – The two maps highlight the worldwide audience Premier League commands.
• Data acquisition – ECAL’s Data Delivery Service provides Premier League with direct and frequent access to their customer data so that they can segment audiences and use a targeted approach in all their marketing efforts.