How a World-Famous Soccer Team Uses Lyris ListManager
to Energize its International Fan Base

Background

Founded in 1886, Arsenal is one of the most successful and famous soccer teams in the entire world. Based in North London, the team—more commonly known as a "football club" to international fans—is the winner of 12 League Championships, as well as 14 other top-tier domestic and European titles.

Goals and Challenges

Though the team enjoys a long-standing reputation for embracing new technologies to promote the game, it was still sending news to fans by traditional post as recently as the late 1990's. Arsenal’s marketing and IT groups realized it was time to bring things up to date.

"We needed to be able to keep our supporters up to date by the quickest and easiest means," explains Paul Farmer, the team's IT Manager.

With such a large international fan base, Farmer knew the team needed a solution that could fulfill its need to publish at high volume and in a variety of languages. Other must-haves included fast sending capabilities, automated list administration and seamless integration with the team's Oracle database.

The Solution

After evaluating a number of candidates, Farmer says he chose Lyris ListManager for its lightening-fast delivery, ease of use, and outstanding international language features. In 2001, the team purchased a platinum pro-level license, and has never looked back.

"ListManager's features are extensive and almost unlimited," says Farmer. "It has everything we were looking for: ultra fast mailing speed, compatibility with all email formats, mail merging, list subsets, detailed reporting, automatic bounce handling, foreign language support and strong security."

The Results

Since they first began using ListManager in 2001, Arsenal's in-house list has quadrupled in size from 40,000 members to over 161,000.

Subscribers receive club news and special offers, as well as the extremely popular "Manager's Email," an in-depth post-game analysis written by the team manager, Arsene Wegner—whose nickname is “The Professor.” It features Wegner’s instant reactions and views on how the team played, including analysis of individual performances and thoughts on how Arsenal will approach its next match. Fans love the publication, and respond enthusiastically to the well-placed promotional offers included within it. In addition to Wenger's post-game analysis, Arsenal marketers take full advantage of ListManager's segmenting and one-to-one features, which has helped to energize its fan-base at both a local and an international level.

Last-minute ticket deals are sent exclusively to fans within driving distance of games. Promotions are often tailored to the recipient's age and gender, resulting in significantly stronger responses. News reports are routinely customized to different geographic regions, which has bolstered readership and clickthrough rates.

"Now that instant global communication is a reality," says Farmer," Arsenal wants to be at the forefront of information distribution. We have found the perfect solution with Lyris. We envision using ListManager indefinitely."

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