Introduction
The Jockey Club is the biggest commercial racing organisation in the UK
Racing is the UK’s second biggest attendance sport, and with over four million people a year flocking to their 15 racecourses for world-famous events including The Grand National, The Cheltenham Festival and The Derby, The Jockey Club have made a name for themselves as the biggest commercial racing organisation in the UK. A diverse business, The Jockey Club generates revenue via ticketed events, sponsorship, food and beverage, concerts and corporate entertaining, totalling over £214m (2018).
The Challenge
A need to gather first-party data in a secure, scalable way
Throughout the year, The Jockey Club attracts enormous numbers of people for the thrill of a day at the races. Not all of them are regular racing fans, in fact many of them will attend once a year.
When people attend in groups, typically only one person purchases the tickets. This means the organisation has little or no contact with the significant majority of its customers. In fact, only one in four customers was known to the organisation. With no way of gathering first-party data on the other 75% of racegoers, the opportunities to learn about those casual attendees and communicate with them would always be limited
Inspired by Monterosa’s success in the entertainment sector and reputation for scalability, speed and innovation, The Jockey Club Group Sales and Marketing Director Tom Manners approached Monterosa to explore what a ‘Connected Raceday' experience could look like, via a new interactive app.
In addition to solving the data problem, the senior leadership wanted to build a strategy that delivered new digital assets for brands, additional ticket sales, and most importantly to help the casual racing fan learn more about the sport, how to place bets and how to get the most out of their day.
Selecting a Partner
Choosing Monterosa / Interaction Cloud for speed, reliability and efficiency
With many ways to create an app available, The Jockey Club selected the Monterosa / Interaction Cloud™ and its Fan Companion native app framework for capability, speed, reliability and efficiency.
Unlike building an entirely custom app in-house, Fan Companion comes with most of the required functionality pre-built. With all customer solutions based on the common framework, it is maintained and managed continuously - avoiding re-invention, and unknown future maintenance costs.
Under the hood, M/IC Studio provides in-house content teams with a self-service, easy-to-use way to create and manage interactive content, while also integrating with the existing CMS to avoid content duplication.
The combination of SaaS and some customised modules made for a more cost efficient and innovative solution, delivered rapidly over several months.
Solution
Making the day better for all racegoers
The Jockey Club marketing team with support from Monterosa worked to craft a next-generation app that would be managed, maintained and evolved over the course of the next five years.
Together we created the vision for a premium, dynamic experience that would give racegoers one app for tickets, logistics and then a live “Raceday Companion” that would notify them of upcoming races, odds, and a convenient way to create betting selections.
The solution would be configured and content-managed by each course individually via M/IC Studio.
A phased implementation tied Fan Companion’s roadmap to Jockey Club needs and today the app boasts a unique way to share tickets, a daily fantasy game, location-targeted push notifications and an innovative bet-builder.
With an exciting roadmap of updates in the pipeline, the product is a core part of the organisation’s strategy for the future of direct engagement and marketing.
Results
Delivering on The Jockey Club’s goals
Over the last three years The Jockey Club has brought over a quarter of a million fans into their owned environment via The Jockey Club App.
Over 250,000 tickets redeemed in-app
30,000 tickets shared digitally, creating new data records
Over 45,000 game plays from 20,000 new users have enjoyed the My 5 game in the app
317k
Unique users
137k
Orders redeemed
“We use The Monterosa Interaction Cloud platform and Studio on a raceday basis to push out content and increase interaction from racegoers. The platform allows us to push out a multitude of content types, including tweets, Instagram posts and articles, including our raceday welcome note which you can usually find in the racecard.
The platform also allows us to easily generate form based ‘enter to win’ competitions which helps us to gather data from our target audience. We support these competitions by using the push notification functionality, which is also used to give racegoers an alert before each race is about to begin.
The interface of the platform is user-friendly allowing you to navigate around with ease. It has allowed us to create an App that is a digital alternative of a racecard. You can check the race times, plan your day, win prizes and find out all the latest information at ease.”
Sarah Haynes
VP Product, The Jockey Club
