The Data and Digital Partnership with the Jumbo-Visma team
The Jumbo-Visma team is one of the largest, best-known and most successful sports teams in Europe. With nearly half a million cycling fans and fifty thousand speed skating fans on Instagram in the Netherlands alone, the Jumbo-Visma Team is an exciting sports brand with a large following of supporters. But how can we learn more about cycling and skating fans in order to become more personal and relevant for fans but also for the commercial partners of the team? This was the question that the Jumbo-Visma Team presented to Sports Cloud at the beginning of 2018.
The conversation that followed became the start of a great and successful collaboration, where the objective from the start was to not only have the best performances on the bike and speed skates, but to also become one of the best performing sport teams in the digital marketing world.
The first thing we did when we sat down with the Jumbo-Visma Team was to develop a digital roadmap for the organisation. The aim of this roadmap was to work towards full digital engagement of the cycling and skating fans with the team, in the process getting to know them better and then to build a deeper relationship with them.
Carefully considering the sporting and other commitments calendar of the team, the athletes, and the sponsors, we jointly developed a series of different annual campaigns around this schedule. All the campaigns were designed to interact and transact with target groups or to achieve outreach to new fans or (sponsor) customers. These included campaigns linked to the famous European cycling races such as the Tour de France or the Giro d’Italia, but also picking up on trends such as the growing number of cyclists in the Netherlands and creating connections between the team and this audience. At every point of contact with the fans, Jumbo-Visma learnt more about their existing and emerging fan cohort. Various marketing automations were then used to communicate with fans in a more relevant and personal way. Sending a message on a birthday or an automatically generated personal offer from the web-shop based on products bought previously, are examples of such automations.
Next to providing digital support to the team during busy periods, we also developed prize competitions, email campaigns, social media campaigns, and most importantly, campaigns that led directly to increased conversion rates and additional profiles in the fan database.
Finally, we continue to support the Jumbo-Visma Team in a number of marketing development activities. These include SEO optimisation, SEA campaigns and the roll-out of the web-shop to more marketplaces. But there also are other activities where something new needs to be developed digitally, such as automation flows, technical improvements to the web-shop, optimisation of messaging or the use of google shopping. Thanks to both our knowledge of the best digital marketing solutions and our experience in the e-commerce business we are able to run very targeted and successful campaigns for the Jumbo-Visma Team web-shop.
An excellent example of we help to maximise business results, given the prevailing market conditions, was the Tour de Kans (Tour de Chance) campaign. Because of the Covid-19 measures in the summer of 2020, fans were unable to go out and follow their favourite cycling races along the side of the road. That is when we collaborated with Jumbo-Visma to develop a digital approach to bring the Tour de France atmosphere into the home.
For twenty-three days, we took fans on a digital Tour de France during which they could take part in various games such as wheel of fortune, memory, snakes and ladders and in various quizzes. By playing games themed to the stage of the day, fans could win fantastic prizes offered by various partners. These included tickets to the Zandvoort F1 Grand Prix, a skiing weekend in Austria, Jumbo gift cards, Primož Roglič's bike and Gazelle e-bikes. The average participant joined in more than seven separate games and in total a cool 13,700 hours of games were played. Over the 23 days more than 1,038,000 emails were also sent. Not only to thank the participants and to provide relevant content, but also as daily reminders about a new game.
The Tour de Chance campaign was so successful that it was decided to keep the campaign going in 2021 and beyond, when spectators returned to the live event. It remains an excellent example of how to develop new digital campaigns.
When we set out to develop the digital strategy for Jumbo-Visma, the most important challenge was to acquire a better view of the Jumbo-Visma Team fans, to enhance this relationship, to increase loyalty, and indeed, to recruit new fans. Today's figures show that since our partnership with the team started in 2019, the email database has grown to eight times its initial size, providing more and deeper insights into the primary interests and preferences of millions of fans. Beyond these insights, the number of online followers, website visitors and web-shop transactions and revenues have all grown substantially.
Do you want more information about this Jumbo-Visma case, creative activations and enrichment of your database? Feel free to contact Sion de Jong.
Chief Information Officer
siondejong@sportscloudaustralia.com
