Running a rugby club is not the same as running a business, but some software tools have a place in the final squad. Ian Campbellreports

SPORT MAY be big business but not many clubs show business acumen, and when they do they run the risk of falling out with fans who can end up feeling exploited.

Striking the right balance is something that Munster rugby club seems to have achieved with a customer relationship management (CRM) solution that builds better ties with its supporters.

When Glyn Billinghurst joined Munster as sales and marketing manager from PepsiCo in 2007, he knew that technology could benefit the club. The challenge was finding a business solution that could be shoehorned into the unique requirements of an Irish sporting institution with a catchment area of over a million people.

“I came from a culture where I would receive texts from 6.30 in the morning giving me sales information down to shop level, to a sports environment where sales are often based on whether a club wins or loses a game,” he says.

Green 4 Solutions came to the rescue, a UK- based software vendor that has carved out a niche supplying CRM and e-marketing solutions to about a hundred clubs, many of them in the English football league. The trick is to divorce the on-pitch performance from the revenues, according to company founder Peter Oliver.

“Good quality data is the big challenge,” Oliver says. “That means taking silos of information from different databases, websites and ticketing systems and turning them into a 360-degree view of the customer.”

With information managed more effectively, Oliver estimates that you can encourage a typical supporter to spend 25 per cent more by using targeted promotions. However, building a clean database of accurate information is the vital first step.

At Southend United football club, Green 4 increased a database of 3,000 supporters to just over 80,000 in four years. In the same period, crowd attendance for home games more than doubled.

Such statistics persuaded Billinghurst that Green 4 was the company to deploy a CRM solution for Munster. The club had a database of 50,000 supporters, but there were duplicate names, incomplete personal information and limited tools to make the most of the information available.

Green 4 sells a customised version of Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM package which was used by Munster to merge 45 different spreadsheets into a single database. The data was then profiled and segmented by Dynamics for use in targeted marketing campaigns. At the same time, there has been a successful drive to grow the database – it now exceeds 70,000 supporters.

Quality of data and interaction is what counts for Billinghurst. The club sends out a number of “e-zines”, e-mailed newsletters aimed at targeted groups of supporters. Their success is not measured by the volume but by the number actually opened, a figure that regularly reaches 40 per cent, much higher than most businesses will achieve.

One carefully targeted e-zine was opened by 87 per cent of recipients.

Supporters that provide more personal information receive a more personalised service. If they give birthday details, for example, they automatically receive a personalised eCard and a discount voucher to be redeemed in one of the three Munster Rugby stores.

Information from ticket sales bought through Ticketmaster and details of sales in the club shop are all pulled into the system within 48 hours. Opportunities for cross-selling are in the pipeline but they are not a priority at the moment.

“It is important to understand that our objective was to understand our customer base and not to use CRM as a selling tool. This will come later. We want to be able to sit down and know how we interact with people and how many supporters are actively involved with us,” Billinghurst says.

While it might not be helping to make money in the short term, he has no doubt it is helping to save some. By having a joined-up database and a 360-degree view of the customer, the marketing team can avoid costly errors.

“You might have a customer who opts out of a particular mailing list for seasonal promotions and removes themselves from the entire database.

“If they happened to be a high-spending supporter who occasionally bought a corporate box, it could be a costly loss of revenue. That wouldn’t happen with the new system.”

A lot of smaller clubs find it difficult to put a long-term CRM strategy in place, according to Oliver, because they are struggling with diverse responsibilities, from organising match-day travel to selling merchandise in the club shop.

“And, in the background, they may be fighting for promotion or against relegation,” he adds, “but, in the last three to four years, we are seeing a change as commercial directors come in from the commercial world and bring their retail experience with them.”