How BallerTV used multi-channel personalization to up-level their marketing
Meet BallerTV, the leader in youth sports coverage with live streams, replays, and highlights of top youth sporting events. As a rapidly scaling business, BallerTV needs to reach various targeted audiences with precision timing across multiple channels to continue their growth. That’s where Customer.io comes in.
Centralized message personalization
After migrating from Iterable and Mailchimp, the BallerTV team was looking for a single tool to centralize their multi-channel messaging and personalize communication to athlete’s family members (and potential subscribers) based on attributes like game location, sport, game times, and more.
Personalization is key to BallerTV’s customer engagement strategy since their audience is diverse, and messaging is only effective when it targets the prospective subscriber’s athlete’s team and games. Customer.io’s segmentation builder is a game changer, enabling BallerTV to create an extensive library of contact attributes that unlocks the personalization they need in their campaigns to drive conversion.
Since consolidating their martech stack to use Customer.io exclusively, the team has seen a 30% increase in total email click-through rates. Something BallerTV’s Director of Growth Marketing, Brendan Baker, attributes to how easy it is to segment audiences and personalize campaigns.
Building a multi-channel messaging strategy
The BallerTV team needed a multi-channel messaging approach to reach busy athletes and family members. While email is a core channel for their audience, the timeliness of SMS and its ability to catch people on the go yields consistently higher conversion rates.
Building a multi-channel messaging strategy has been key to ensuring BallerTV reaches as many potential subscribers and athletes as possible. As we shared in our State of Messaging Report, campaigns that use multiple channels consistently perform better than those only using one channel. In fact, two channels perform 67% better than a single channel.
The BallerTV team is an example of the strength of a multi-channel approach. Adding SMS as a consistent messaging channel in 2023 has contributed to an 9% incremental increase in paid subscriber conversion throughout the year.
“Expanding past email and incorporating the SMS piece of the campaign is important to us- customers are on the move, and we need to reach them effectively.”
— Brendan Baker, Director of Growth Marketing, BallerTV
Doubling down on testing and automation
Brendan saw an opportunity to improve BallerTV’s marketing strategy using Customer.io’s full suite of testing functionality. He aimed to shift their approach from what he described as “random acts of marketing” to a more personalized and automated set of campaigns focused on specific goals like building athlete’s profiles and converting paid subscribers. BallerTV prioritized testing campaigns to improve engagement and conversion metrics.
BallerTV is transforming their approach to customer engagement based on campaign optimization features in Customer.io, like engagement and conversion metrics for in-flight campaigns, the ability to easily run and automate A/B testing, and to optimize the timing of message sends. One campaign they recently revamped was encouraging athletes to engage with BallerTV. They saw a 37% uptick in average conversion rates, which they attribute entirely to the ability to test and optimize their campaigns easily to ensure their messages are effective.
“The visibility around metrics has unlocked the ability for us to run campaigns with a level of granularity and specificity that we didn’t have before. The optimization we have put in place, especially around the timing of messages, has not only boosted conversion rates, but the level of control we have over our campaigns to continuously improve them.”
— Brendan Baker, Director of Growth Marketing, BallerTV
Strategic support to guide success
BallerTV came to Customer.io with lofty goals and complex marketing needs to reach their audiences. Although they found Customer.io’s platform intuitive and easy to use, they had big projects to tackle and needed help figuring out where to start. That’s where Customer.io’s Customer Success team made all the difference.
BallerTV’s Customer Success Manager (CSM), JP, started the relationship by educating BallerTV users on Customer.io’s feature-rich platform, making it more approachable. Since then, he has continued to serve as a strategic partner, working alongside the team as they revamp their customer engagement and messaging automation strategies.
The Customer Success and Technical Support team’s deep platform and industry knowledge sets Customer.io apart. The ability to add value, guide strategy, and help adopt the platform quickly has improved campaign results and helped BallerTV reach their goals.
“I’ve used a lot of tools and services throughout my career, and I can say without hesitation, JP has been the most helpful account manager I’ve ever worked with.”
— Brendan Baker, Director of Growth Marketing, BallerTV
Customer.io has enabled BallerTV to implement multi-channel messaging within a single platform, automate campaigns, and test to optimize every message they send to their customers.