Case study

The challenge

As a new and growing sport, SailGP is eager to build the robust revenue streams and commercial partnerships it needs to thrive via a broad strategy of boosting revenues from ticket sales, merchandise sales and broadcast rights. By anticipating changes in the sports marketing landscape, the league can take rapid, responsive action to inspire new engagement with fans and stay ahead of audience interests. As an official partner, Cognizant worked with SailGP to lay out priorities for reaching its goals of building a single repository of fan data to integrate disconnected audiences from the eight international sailing teams in the league. Other goals included enhancing and localizing the SailGP website to attract investments and fans, and building in marketing and automation capabilities that streamline email, social, mobile and web outreach, enabling the league to act with insight and speed.

Our approach

We began with a discovery phase to understand the needs of SailGP’s fans and identified how technology could help determine the origin of their interest. With data-driven insights into fan interests and behaviors, SailGP can personalize its email, social and web interactions with fans, engaging with them more intuitively. We also proposed a customer-first, experience-driven website that better delivers on SailGP’s brand promise of “adrenaline”. Informed by user testing insights, we updated the website’s information architecture in a way that senses an audience’s needs and helps them discover information. We defined and validated the new website concept in six weeks. 

Today, a new marketing technology stack, centered on Oracle Marketing Cloud, enables SailGP to increase awareness of the sport, acquire new customers and boost user engagement onsite. By engineering software and cloud into its business, we’ve helped the league cultivate an early awareness on how to attract customers—and the real-time insights needed to deliver the experiences that will make them lifelong fans.

Automated marketing for targeted engagement

With the new 1.0 enhancements in place, SailGP is better equipped to attract and convert fans to its new championship. The new enhancements include an optimized fan database that is ready to support automated social, mobile and web programs; a redesigned homepage; improved site structure and navigation suited to audiences’ unique needs; a localized website to reach international audiences in four countries; redesigned upcoming event pages that track customer journeys while engaging and educating visitors. In the next phase, more initiatives are forthcoming for the web, with the addition of Oracle CX Unity and Customer Data Platform, and a formal CRM system.

0.4% to 1.6%

Increased average monthly (email) community growth

01:53 to 02:24

Raised average session duration

11% to 14%

Boosted average monthly share of returning visitors