Premiership Rugby
Showing Premiership Rugby the lifetime value of a fan
Background
The most sophisticated consumer-facing industries have data-driven models to understand how much a customer is worth over the course of a lifetime – used for commercial and financial planning, and to direct and measure tactics to increase customer spend. This strategic work is critical insight in helping deliver commercial growth in the sports industry.
What did PTI do?
In 2022, PTI were commissioned by Premiership Rugby, the organising body for the Gallagher Premiership, England’s top-flight league for rugby union to build a Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) model to enable it to better understand its customer base and make better, insight-led marketing decisions.
Using its proprietary data models, PTI created a bespoke CLTV model, incorporating all key insight on a Gallagher Premiership Rugby fan including demographics, interests and behaviours; media consumption and engagement; and product purchase history.
PTI dovetailed the design of the model with a wider survey being developed by Clear, part of M&C Saatchi, allowing the model to integrate first party data with information on a universe of fans it had no data on.
With the PTI CLTV model, Premiership Rugby now has a tangible insight of how much each individual customer is worth over their lifetime, allowing them to inform commercial decision-making. This includes a more detailed insight into the impact of marketing campaigns on targeted segments both in terms of growth and spend, giving them a real-time ability to measure and improve marketing efficiency.
Results
Over the course of 2023, using insight from the PTI CLTV model, Premiership Rugby increased the average predicted lifetime spend of more than a quarter (27%) of known fans.
One key insight was that the more touchpoints Premiership Rugby has with a customer, the higher the customer’s lifetime spend was. This allowed them to make the case for cross-fertilisation of platforms and greater investment in channels through which fans can transition from “free” touchpoints such as newsletter sign-ups or app downloads to a paying customer.
Another insight showing the greater spending power of those opted-in versus those opted-out also led Premiership Rugby to review its privacy policies, taking a more commercially-balanced approach.
The model has also been used to identify and target “lookalike” profiles on social media, based on the demographic information and media consumption patterns, reducing customer acquisition costs.
