The Canadian Football League Scores Big by Personalizing Fan Experience Through Customer 360

Turning faces in the crowd into key players

There is no shortage of ways to describe sports fans — casual or diehard, bandwagon or multigenerational. Ranging in age, gender, income and level of involvement, fans no longer fall in line with historical stereotypes; they are as diverse as our communities.

That is precisely why sports leagues and organizations like the Canadian Football League (CFL) are turning to a more modern, data-driven approach to understand fans and consumers. The CFL – a nine-team football league with alums such as legendary quarterbacks Doug Flutie and Warren Moon – has largely relied on traditional marketing practices and broad-strokes messaging strategies en masse, rather than personalized communication with individual fan segments. Limited in ways to associate consumer behaviors with specific fan profiles, marketers were forced to rely on software teams to orchestrate sophisticated campaigns, which proved to be successful, but inefficient at times.

When the CFL pivoted to data-driven marketing strategies to increase personalization for fan experiences, they turned to Snowflake to lead the play.

Story highlights

• A 360-degree view of fans developed through a fully integrated marketing tech stack: League-level customer 360 profiles, built in Snowflake with RudderStack, include 120+ unique data points for each fan. These profiles add approximately 10% more value to the CFL’s sponsorable digital marketing assets by enabling the league to more easily retain fans by targeting them with relevant messaging. 
• An accessible, easy-to-use platform that levels the playing field across the league: With data centralized in Snowflake, every CFL club can easily access fan profiles to develop personalized marketing messages that better engage fans, drive ticket purchases and boost revenue.
• Personalized experiences to retain more fans: By reaching relevant fans with personalized, real-time messages on their most used channels, engagement rates rose up to 9x on products like Fantasy and Pick ‘Em on the league’s online free-to-play platform, CFL Game Zone.

Snowflake, RudderStack and Braze: A winning roster to convert more fans

The number of ways fans can interact with sports teams and leagues has proliferated in recent years, extending far beyond watching games on TV or attending events. Social media, streaming platforms, online betting and merchandise purchases all bring people closer to their favorite CFL teams and players. Every click, tap and swipe creates an influx of data — data that is only valuable if it can be used.

To manage it all, the CFL tapped Snowflake and two of its ecosystem partners — customer data platform RudderStack and customer engagement platform Braze — to create a 360-degree view of its fans that uses data centralized in Snowflake. With more than 120 data points, such as website session behavior and geotargeting information, the CFL now has the power to segment fans, personalize content and track conversions with ease. It can, for instance, email Toronto Argonauts supporters located in-market with a link to buy the jersey of their favorite player, or message away team fans to show their support at the game when their team comes to town. They will also know exactly how well those messages performed.

The league has seen as much as a 9x better conversion rate when fans are presented with content specific to their favorite teams, compared to control groups that receive generic variants. Enhanced personalization has also contributed to increased customer lifetime revenue, yielding tremendous business value for the league.

Extending the marketing playbook with a sophisticated stack of tools

Beyond additional revenue, the powerful combination of Snowflake, Braze and RudderStack also helped change the mindset around marketing for the CFL and its clubs, shifting from a reliance on intuition and gut feeling to one driven by real, tangible data. Teams can turn to RudderStack's easy-to-use UI to pull customer profiles, which are all housed on a single table in Snowflake, and push the right data to Braze without having to write code or build complex models.

“We’re able to craft one event, which can be deployed across the league and teams, that scales trackable fan behavior for all clubs, instead of developing nine unique solutions,” says Hadzaman. “With the ability to share these features — whether it’s a data point in our 360 model, an event orchestrated in RudderStack or a Canvas cloned to another team’s workspace in Braze — we’re exponentially accelerating our efficacy when it comes to generating revenue, engaging fans and boosting productivity.”

The trifecta of Snowflake, RudderStack and Braze has also significantly widened the league’s marketing reach, presenting more options to engage customers — from emails and web to texts and device push notifications. “We’re building a true omnichannel experience,” Hadzaman says.

By understanding customer preferences through historical engagement data, the league can concentrate its efforts into messages and channels aimed at each particular fan.

The change has, in some instances, doubled the number of total conversions through an expanded omnichannel strategy, rather than relying on single marketing channels to reach fans.

Opening the field to more partners and sponsors

Vastly improved reach and the ability to accurately segment audiences have also allowed the CFL to pursue more opportunities with partners and sponsors. For example, sports betting companies, which have been hugely active in Canada since single-game betting was legalized in 2021, must adhere to distinct regulations in each province in terms of gambling-related marketing messages. The CFL can now accommodate those needs. The league can target only those of gambling age in specific geographic locations, while also isolating for those who have played on CFL Game Zone in the past 10 days, or those who have engaged with betting messages in the past.

The retention of marketable fans has been nearly three times better through the league’s content personalization efforts, with opt-out rates dropping as low as .08%.

The future of sports fandom — where digital and physical experiences merge

After seeing its customer 360 dreams become reality, the CFL can now think even bigger. With more data from fan purchases, Game Zone and CFL+, the league’s free direct-to-consumer streaming platform — the league is also looking to communicate with fans in near real time, like sending an alert if their team has the ball at the three-minute warning of a close game. As part of this effort, the league will look to Snowflake to help acquire and retain subscribers with the ultimate goal of creating more engaging and more personalized fan experiences. After all, so much of sports fandom is rooted in being part of a larger community.

That’s part of the reason teams and leagues worldwide are looking to combine the convenience and personalization of the digital experience with the thrill of in-person events. For example, the CFL recently developed a digital companion product for the Grey Cup Festival using Snowflake and the geolocation features in Braze to better understand attendee experiences and guide them to all the event had to offer.

“In many ways, the festival served as a pilot for creating blended digital and in-person experiences at scale, and we look forward to building upon that success at more events across the league,” Hadzaman says.

That’s the beauty of meeting fans where they are — and the payoff of putting a data-driven mindset into action.

CFL Data Stack

Destinations: Snowflake, Braze, Salesforce, S3 Datalake
Sources: Javascript, Snowflake, Webhooks
Warehouses: Snowflake