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Josh
Nason
Business Development
I am in the midst of doing a study on the NFL and their various clubs' email marketing practices to be published here (and in whitepaper format) sometime in mid-March. While compiling information, I am beginning to branch out my studies and theories to other major sports entities, including the NBA, NHL and my favorite pastime, baseball. Unfortunately, I have to report the following information.
Major League Baseball has no idea what they're doing when it comes to email. Here are three reasons why.
1) We are in a template nation - I first noticed some strange coincedences when it came to merchandising emails, like the following I was sent today. One is sent on behalf of a Red Sox email list I'm on, while the other is an MLB house list.
Wow, they look so....similar? The only things that have changed are the teams on the physical items listed and the logos in the top header. That's it. Even the subject lines were identical. Most of the various newsletters the teams send out are like this, just with color and logo changes. If you sign up for several teams' lists, you get an almost identical email. How much fun is that? This approach seems very lazy to me and something that isn't indicative of each team being allowed to market themselves individually based on what each fanbase is looking for. What if I'm a Rangers fan? Do I care about outerwear right now? What if hats are a big seller in Seattle and not hooded sweatshirts? Let each team do what they do best: cater to their own fanbase.
2) Sign up for one, nearly impossible for all - I decided to head on over to http://kcroyals.com/ to sign up for their email list. After the first few minutes of being deluged with a cluttered site (like all of the ones Sun Media created for MLB using their 'one league, one look approach'), I found the signup at the bottom of the screen. Fantastic! All they do is ask for email address, password (okayyy....) and birthday, so let's hit 'Register'. Uh-oh...'An account has already been created with that email address. If that account belongs to you, please login.' As I have written here before, I am a diehard Red Sox fan and have never had the urge to sign-up for the Kansas City Royals' email newsletters. So what gives?
Using my keen, finely-tuned intellect, I clicked 'Help|Contact Us'. Surely, MLB Advanced Media and Sun didn't do the approach of one database with everyone's information, did they? I mean, that would seem pretty non-user friendly and very complicated if you didn't know what you were doing, right? Ding ding - you win! After sifting through several FAQ sections, I found a non-Royals specific page with the question: How do I add or cancel email newsletters or alerts? The answer is that when I registered for the Red Sox email years ago, I created an MLB account, not a Red Sox account. In order to sign up for additional newsletters, I need to log-in and choose to add other Club Newsletters and Email Alerts to my account profile. Why am I being made to do this? I'm in the business and even I'm confused. Don't make your users sign-up for accounts. Don't do it. You're a company, not the Pentagon.
3) Too many newsletters - Well, I'm finally in and I'm looking at 30 teams of which I'm thinking about getting information from. In clicking the drop-downs for the Los Angeles Angels, I have the options of Angels Auction, Angels Insider, Angels Post-Game  Update, Angels Ticket Alerts and Angels Shop. Whoa! Every team has five newsletters to sign up for, which is way too many. I used to work in pro sports and I'll tell you this: there's no need for this much information, especially when it resides on your site. In general, sports teams struggle with deploying to their databases and get frustrated when they don't see results, a side product of having too many non-qualified cooks in the marketing kitchen. When you send out several times a week for six months on end, you condition the market to not care about what they're getting. With so many outlets and resources for information, why throw more e-logs onto the fire?
Recommendation:
1) Break up the database. The idea of a single MLB account is archaic and completely impersonal from a team perspective. I don't want to deal with MLB; I want to deal with the Oakland A's. Let each team manage and manipulate their lists using Sun's software but when you sign up for a list, let each team approach the signup differently.
2) Different templates. A Pro Shop email from the Red Sox should not look identical to one from MLB, the Rockies or the Royals. Period. If you're going with a single supplier, at least allow each team to choose from up to 10 different looks. To not do this is lazy.
3) Inspire thought, not sheep. Sports marketers are very busy by nature with 1,001 different ideas, thoughts and objectives going on in their heads. However, I don't think Sun is doing MLB any favors by their email approaches and vice versa. Each team should be allowed to take their own approaches when it comes to email and not follow a mandate that enforces five different lists. Do research, ask for concepts and figure out to how to get the most out of email marketing.
Sports are passionate and inspire people to wear face paint, travel long distances to games and get inspired about their teams. Email is an amazingly effective tool in getting those fans to adopt these teams more into their lifestyle, which makes it even stranger that MLB has not truly educated themselves in this area. Luckily, they still can rally in the bottom of the ninth.
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