How do Mobility Solutions create personalized student experiences with the help of Data and Analytics in the Higher Education Industry?

Technology evolution has influenced all the industries. Amongst them, the education industry is going through vital changes at every point. Evolution of the internet, electronic devices, and mobile phones have accelerated this growth.

Mobility Solutions in Higher Education

The Higher Education(HE) institutions are undergoing massive changes in operations and communication with students, teachers, parents, alumnus, staffs and prospects. Because students demand more tailored learning journey, individualised attention, and services. To serve these demands, institutions must become more efficient and start to implement technological tools which shall make things easier, manageable, and support in decision-making with the help of data and analytics.

In today’s education ecosystem, students are energetic, mobile, and tech-savvy. They are always connected to the internet. Mobility solutions such as CRM, mobile applications, and cloud solutions, etc., helps to automate and manage communications with prospects, customers, staffs and teachers “on the go”. These systems must be implemented to meet the needs of the new generation in an efficient way while cost-effectively addressing the requirements of the college and everyone in their community.

With the help of mobility software’s, institutions can bring together data elements from various sources to create a 360° view of each student and prospects. It activates information access smoother, delivers a personalised experience, creates targeted campaigns and sends messages in a timely manner. Moreover, student management solutions can be used to predict student’s success rate by tracking their activity and performance.

Needs and Benefits

Mobility solutions in HE assist colleges/institutions to manage their students, staffs, teachers and prospects on a single platform efficiently. The various needs and benefits are -

1.    Student Life Cycle Management (Contact Management)

At present, students are neither connected nor engaged through any of the channels or touch points as part of their study life. This infers that there is no particular method to communicate and serve the students based on their progress in the course.

Mobility solutions are designed to impact on every connection in the student life cycle and flawlessly integrate with institution resources and systems. Also, it helps to track every aspect of an individual student life cycle. With the help of data and analytics, institutions can now predict the student’s failure or success rates.

 2.    Service and Communication

Faculties and students are exploring the applicability of mobility services that can enhance the learning experience and assistance with research.

Software tools provide faster communications like online resources access, streaming administrative tasks, notify students about class cancellations, grade allocation and etc.

3.    Automation

Emails, social media messages, student alerts and any other type of communications can now be automated in order to speed up the response time. Mobility solutions shall provide workflow automation that takes care of all the follow-up processes.

4.    Recruitment, Marketing and Operations

Recruitments and marketing features help institutions to create targeted recruitment campaigns and help in lead management. Email marketing tools and templates further optimise the student recruitment process. This allows for smarter marketing, forecasting and budget planning, by maximising the ROI of the marketing process.

5.    Help and Support

Any profile or student that is connected to the system can get a help at any time or even contact respective departments, whether it is related to online tutorials/training, email, live chat, fee and exam management, etc.

HE Mobility Solutions

The competition has gone up in the higher education market as the students started to demand more personalised and faster experiences. There are industry-specific and generic mobility solution providers compete in this segment. They are –

Target X

The system is an open source solution which was built on salesforce platform and It helps to manage the complete student lifecycle from inquiry to alumnus.

Data Harvesting - Student CRM

Student CRM is a student recruitment tool that specifically built for the UK HE market. The solution allows institutions to purchase necessary modules based on the needs as part of pricing strategy.

Simplicity (Ascend)

Ascend is made for the recruitment part of the SLC with multi-language capability. Pricing is based on the number of applications registered.

  

Admittor

Admittor is a simple system that offers white labelling option, high-level customization and a tagging system. It activates users to better manage and search the applicant pool with advanced execution options.

Jenzabar (SEM CRM)

Jenzaber is a cloud-based CRM system that has integrated with IBM “Cognos” software which helps from reporting to analysis and metrics. “Dotmailer” integration brings email marketing optimization.

Full Fabric

Full Fabric is popular with its appealing and easy to navigate design. The key features are real-time reporting and google maps integration with a great focus on prospect students.

Azorus

Azorus focuses on recruitment and retains “more of the right students”. The platform has the ability to engage students at all the touch points with the institution, and also have the options to manage lead generation and event creation.

Campus Management (Campus Nexus CRM)

Campus Management is a complete student lifecycle CRM comes with both on-premises and cloud based solutions for the maximum functionality.

Mira Network

Mira Network is a multi-lingual mobility solution market leader in the Nordic Countries that comes with an Office 365 and LinkedIn integrations.

Dream Apply

This solution is specifically designed to manage student admissions with a set of features, such as reporting, student exchange, and agent management.

Maximizer CRM (Student Relate)

The system comes with a lot of functional features such as staff performance tracker along with workflow automation, in-depth real-time reporting, Microsoft tools integrations, and online behavioural tracking.

Hobsons (Radius)

Radius is an admission and enrollment CRM that helps to manage processes from enquiry to application and enrollment by tracking all student connections. This system allows identification of at-risk students, student outcomes, academic advising and online payments.

Proretention (Enrollment CRM)

Proretention is a complete student relationship management solution that comes with various features such as multi-channel communication modes, vendor management, dialer integration and with inbuilt dashboards and reports.

Student Recruitment System (SRS)

The system is built for the Nordic education market. It offers offline access that allows offline data collection and automatic data synchronisation along with ROI insights from each marketing channel.

Future Trends

The importance of mobility solutions for the higher education industry is under continuous development to make learning more real-world & student oriented. The opportunities are higher in this market segment because of more enhanced demands and the popularity of “on the go” services. The Internet and digital transformation are the major causes of growth in the education industry and it is on the rise.

Research and surveys reveal that 59% of Institutions do not use any CRM because of the lack of knowledge on Mobility Solutions along with budget limitations. Surveys indicate that most of the colleges are considering to implement mobility solutions in the near future that opens up a whole lot of new opportunities.

How could sponsor brands get benefit from Club's fan base?

Over the past couple of years, the sports and event market has grown to a lucrative and hundreds of billion dollars worth business sector. Sponsorship became one of the main profitable channels of income to teams.

Sponsors pay millions every year to be associated with teams and events to increase the brand awareness and sales to a wide range of audience. Like other marketing activities, sponsorship is not 100% measurable. Now it's time for brands to look beyond reaching millions of clubs fans with brand names by making use of fan intelligence.

How do fan intelligence help brands to increase Revenue?

As part of  Club's data strategy, they started collecting data across ticketing, social, merchandise, retail, hospitality as well as its community and website. Clubs are building intelligence on this data to increase their revenue as well as to provide fans with a tailored experience.

Sponsors can now ask for additional marketing rights from teams to  use their fan data for brands targeted marketing campaigns. At present, sponsorship limited to things like Logo & Name on Team Jersey, Countable Social Media Mentions &  Press Coverages and Rights to Activate Marketing Campaigns with 2 to 3 players.  Apart from a global reach through club fans, the number of benefits is limited.

Sponsors have to sign specific deals to use clubs fan data. They can utilise the Data and Intelligence of Fans like it used by the team or any business. Because the price of media is increasing every year and the insights on fans help brands to optimise and execute channel specific marketing activities. This in-depth knowledge on fans allows brands to work on where they spend out ad budgets and whom to target as well as what markets to focus through club's channels.

The advanced level insights on fans help sponsors to plan and execute targeted and tailored marketing campaigns around the year that is even after the tournament gets over. Its helps brands to associated with team long term to achieve the scale.

The long-term association and relationship by brand increase the engagement, conversion and loyalty among fans and also helps to understand the behavioural evolution of people. This helps to build more detailed profiles of potential customers and gives an improved ability to monetization of fans in the local and global market.

Targeted messages to teams supporter database can lead to higher opt-ins and sales. This new system assists in utilising marketing budget properly and brings a greater valuation to the sponsorship deal.

"Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway." – Geoffrey Moore

In short, sponsors with intelligence on club fan base would be able to drive additional revenue through various touch points. It could be either through clubs or sponsor brands channels. Data and Analytics activates series of customized marketing and loyalty activities year around.

How does Fan Relationship Management(Fan Insights) helped Sports club's to drive better revenue?

Fan analytics are used in all phase of business to take better data-driven results as well as to meet specific business objectives. Fan Data and Analytics is widely implemented in sports business to improve the revenue and engagement.

The main reason sports brands and organisations started looking at the data is because of the reducing number of attendance for in-stadia games, merchandise and ticket sales, engagement and etc..

Till recent years, the data has been captured for the on-field game performance improvement. For example, Player performance analysis, on-field injury analysis,fitness analysis, game statistics,competitor players and game analysis etc. But the trend has changed now because it became important to generate higher revenue as important to win matches .

Most of the English Premier League, French League and MLB teams started looking at the fan data to increase their revenue by saving marketing and other operational budgets through proper analytics based decisions and finding out the various pattern to increase the sales. Also, teams use the help of analytics to improve the fan engagement and real-time game experience.

Let's start with English Premier League,

Manchester City

Manchester city has tied up with SAP to increase fan engagement and better matchday experiences. As part of driving engagement, analytics helped them to provide fans with behind the scenes player statistics, and real-time game insights,etc.,Analytics used to produce more powerful reports to evaluate how the club is connecting with its fans and partners.

Fan Relationship Management - Manchester City FC

Fan Analytics helped them to optimise teams operations while providing new opportunities to enhance fan experiences wherever they are- in-stadium, online, via mobile devices.

Fan relationship management helped MCFC to increase the average attendance to 47,000 fans per match and able to sell 85,000 "Clever Cards" (loyalty cards) during the launching year.

How big data gives premier league football clubs an edge?

Chelsea

Chelsea club heavily depended on Fan Analytics and relationship management to present fans better experiences along with building brand awareness. Chelsea one of the premier league clubs who use Big Data efficiently for the success of sports business.

Team collect the data and analyses to bring more sponsorship deals, new market penetration and much engagement apart from monetization context.

Chelsea uses Customer Relationship management system to interact

In-depth analysis on fans, helped them to launch new revenue services and open up partnerships with various brands.

Arsenal

Fan intelligence is a vital element that determines the success of sports business and helps to activate many deals. Arsenal bought statDNA, a US-based football data analytics company to do on-field sports performance analysis, in game preparation, in post-match analysis, and in gaining tactical insights.

Arsenal FC Case Study

Along with the on-field analysis, Arsenal also partnered with a CRM company to understand their fans and their preferences in-depth. Arsenal uses their fan intelligence for their sponsor brand marketing activations, creating a top notch on and off game fan experience and manage their marketing budgets effectively.

Arsenal used Fan Insights to sell more upper-class tickets and increased the ticket sales of their away games.

Emirates: 'CRM data key to £150m Arsenal deal'

French League - Paris Saint-Germain

Similar to EPL clubs, Paris Saint-Germain also used Fan insights to predict the club revenues through various streams and fan behaviour. They nailed down their fan data to know more about their fans behaviours and consumptions.

Case Study: Paris Saint-Germain Football Club Scores With CRM Strategy 

Like all other teams, club revenue came from ticket sales, merchandise, prize money and sponsorships etc., The last time PSG won a championship was on 1996, later their fans had nothing to feel great.

Using big data to create smart venues = happy fans

With the help of Fan Data, PSG managed to increase their fans in-stadia experiences, cross-selling, create new targeted campaigns, customer segments, measure fan satisfactions and etc.  Fan relationship management had given fans a whole lot of promotional discounts and benefits, at the same time club generated more marketing opportunities.


Major Baseball League - San Francisco Giants

Fan Relationship helped SFG also like other clubs in its operations. They were able to sell complete tickets in 140 games straightly. Though teams do a commendable work to deliver best experiences to fans, there is a decided difference with the help of Data and Insights.

In baseball, the small things and details which increase the fan experiences that brings fans back. It also supported the team's revenue production and efficient fan  monetization.

Data  and analytics become a valuable part of the sports business as it helps to run the business more efficiently, prove the value of their brands to potential partners, and to improve the monetization of fans in the global market.

All most all the top leagues and club's like Liverpool, Queens Park Rangers and etc started investing on various analytics and CRM tools to grab their fan data to increase the ROI through better fan experiences.

How does fan Analytics help business to generate better results?

Data and Analytics became the vital part of all business. We saw How Big Data and Analytics used for Data Driven Decision making. In this post, we look at “How does fan Analytics help business to generate better results? Before we get into details, it is important to understand a Fan and Fan Ecosystem?

Who is a Fan?

(Fan Definition: Wikipedia) A fan, or fanatic, sometimes also called an ardent follower or supporter, is a person who is enthusiastically devoted to something or somebody, such as a band, a sports team, a genre, a book, a movie or an entertainer. 

Fans express their passion or interest through certain behaviours like social interactions, wish to acquire objects, posting online, etc. So, understanding a fan in detail helps to communicate and engage with him well. 

Fan Ecosystem

Fan ecosystem is an environment that interconnects fans, their interactions, and any activities performed which related to the devotee.

What does really matters in a Fan ecosystem? 

For the success of any business, it is essential to understand their customers or fans voice, feelings and needs. Until brands are able to communicate with their fans by understanding them in detail, the sustainability is very low in the market even if there is a convincing value proposition.

So, how do we understand Fans better? The best practice is to listen to them, engage them and analyse. A Fan ecosystem basically includes three things, they are 

• Fan engagement
• Fan Relationship Management- Analytics
• Fan Activation (Monetization)

Business decision making depends on the results of the important strategy of social media called Engage, Analyze and Activate.

Fan Engagement

Engagement is nothing but Interacting (meaningful communication) with fans. At Present, engagement shrunk to social media updates or posts. Fans are needed to engage through all the mediums or channels they connect with a brand like social, ticketing, email, websites, shopping, direct and etc. 

Mass level engagement became meaningless and won't work anymore; Individualization is the new face of engagement which provides a unique experience to fans. Fan insight helps the customization of experiences by an understanding of likes, dislikes and behaviours.

Fan Relationship Management(FRM)

Fan relationship management is handling fans in individual level with the help of data analytics. As everything connected with digitalism, user leaves a footprint of whatever action they perform like shopping, transactions, search, visits, social media interactions (comment, share, posting.).

There is a clear saying now, "Facebook knows a person better than his/her best friend"

How does it possible? It is by analysing all the activities a person performs on Facebook which makes it easy to predict his behaviours. But Facebook does this analysis only with online data. What about offline activities? Fan relationship management is a solution that built over Fan Analytics, which collect and aggregate fan data from various online and offline and create a 360-degree view of fans with actionable insights to manage him better than ever. 

Fan Activation(Monetization)

        Fan activation is getting fans to do what you want them to do through a series of activation services with the objective of monetization. It is a multi-level process of converting a fan from unknown to an advocate fan. Activation enables brands to monetize fans through insights and predictive analytics.

How does Fan Analytics help in Decision Making Process?

At present, fans are in a disengaged state where most of the brands are depended on social media channels to stay in connected with them and it is done on the page level. Due to limited fan intelligence, brands and teams face hindrance in generating better results.

With the Help of Fan Analytics, brands would able to overcome their pain points and increase ROI.

Fan Analytics provides brands, an in-depth knowledge and 360-degree view of fans at an individual level. It drives better business decisions by effectively leveraging fan data and the resulting insights. 

Let’s now look at how does Fan intelligence helps in BDM,

1.   Higher Engagement Rate across all touch points

       Fan analytics helps brands/teams to understand fans likes, dislikes and behaviours based on their online and offline activities. Engagement is not something which has to be restricted with social media updates like I mentioned earlier. It is really important to engage fans through all the touch points because it increases the fan affinity and loyalty. Analytics helps to engage fans based on their preferences which basically increases the Response and conversion rates.

For example, sending a 10% movie discount coupon code after his purchase which induces him to book another or sending a thank you note directly to the fan by mentioning his name from the hero of that movie, etc.

2.     Loyalty management and rewards

Identification and managing of loyal fans help to increase the brand value and revenue. How do we find our loyal fans? Loyal fans are the not only group of people who continuously interact with your social media pages but also people who support your team endlessly purchasing tickets, watching the match on TV or stadiums, attending offline events, interacting through Fan contests, subscribing to email campaigns, etc.

Fan intelligence helps to find loyal fans by analyzing millions of data from various places and identify various patterns to convert them as advocate fans and increase the brand value. It also helps to activate these fans through cross selling and up selling.

3.      Fan Relationship Management

We know Fans are the biggest asset of any team or brand. Maintaining the relationship with fans are very much important for the success of any business as they are the largest group of revenue drivers and income deciders. FRM identifies the places where a fan is more active irrespective of channels, mediums- online or offline and enable teams/brands to connect with them based on their past and present activities and preferences.

FRM brings online and offline fans to one place and manage relationship. Individual fan insights help to cluster the fans, create and target the campaigns and review the results and increase the ROI.

4.      Independent predictable value and value generation

It is now possible to calculate the individual monetary value a fan generates and predict how much he is valuable he is for the business with help of Fan intelligence. The value is calculated based on past transactions, spending nature, household income level, interest and behaviour. This intelligence helps brands to plan and execute their marketing and advertising campaigns in an optimised way.

With the help of Fan analytics, brands can now create more personalised offers to monetize them better with the higher response and conversion rates.

5. Measurable and Optimized Marketing Management

Technology and digitalism help brands to measure anything that is executed. Most of the times,the measurement and optimisation on

the campaign level. Now it is passed the campaign level and analytics is performed on an individual level with the help of Fan Insights. 

Most of the brands fail to make profit because they fail to gather the advance insights that separate success from the fail.  Marketers and Brands are doing marketing activities based on brand level based on objectives and goals rather than understanding the fans. The goal is to understand the fans by walking into their shoes and generating creative ideas from those learnings and insights to take decisions that eventually take business to profit margin.

6.      Alignment of sponsor brands with fan persona's and demographics

Selling sponsorships or getting a sponsor for an event or team became very hard as there are no specific metrics for proper measurement and sponsorship value can calculate the % of sales gone up during that particular period. However, there are no mechanisms yet to find out whether the sponsor brand aligns with fans affinity. 

For example, let us say 70% of fans of a team “X” are using low-end hand phones and shows interest in mobiles and technology. So, team X can easily sell sponsorship to a mobile brand. Because the market opportunity to sell more mobiles are higher by associating with team “X” rather than sponsoring any other Team.

Fan intelligence enables sponsorship sales based on insights and drives better results. So, it is important to look at the advanced level fan insights from the team fan base like fan affinity, likes/dislikes, age group and gender with household income level, etc.

 

In short, Fan Analytics is a Fan based analytic driven approach that helps teams and brands to take better decisions with the help of advance level of Fan insights. Individual level insights make business people to make more result oriented decisions by not only generating money but also saving the extra cash that spent for marketing, sales or anything as well.

PS: My next blog showcases Real world Analytic implementations that helped sports business to achieve the Goals.

Big Data and Analytics for Better Data Driven Decision Making

Big Data and Analytics are the two most used buzzwords of 21st century. Data Analytics helps to understand things in detail and how something works. Use of analytics help to increase productivity, make better data driven decisions, and gain an advantage on competitors and market activities.

What is Big Data?

Big Data is the most overused and misused buzzword in the digital age. Big Data has various definitions according to the context it represent. For example, in business Big Data means Data Analytics but in technological terms it is a data set that is too big to be processed.

Big Data is a term used to represent extremely large data sets with unstructured, semi-structured and structured data that has the potential to mined for information, trends and patterns, especial relating to human behavior and interactions. 

Why is it Valuable?

Big Data is the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity. Success depends on measurement and understanding of something and it helps to improve the business and return on investment. 

Data is easily available from various touch points like Social(Facebook,twitter, Instagram..), email campaigns, websites, ticketing, merchandising, mobile app usage, etc; proper measurement and analysis helps to optimize the business performance by generating better financial results. It could be either for Saving the money by optimizing the existing process or making more money by understanding the new opportunities.

Analytics and Big Data

We will start with understanding the difference between Analytics and Big Data.

Form Wikipedia, "Analytics is the discovery, interpretation and communication of meaningful patterns in data". Analytics is built on the foundations of Statistics, Probability, Computer programs and operational research.

Analytics is the method used to find the meaningful information, trend and patterns from the large data sets and it can performed only if data is available. In simple, big data is useless if no proper analytics is performed.

Data can be captured from multiple touch points where a customer is connected with brands. It can then be analysed to make conclusions and patterns for deriving data driven decisions based on business objectives.

What are the Challenges in integrating Analytics into Business Decision Making?

The biggest challenges are setting up strategy, tools and technology and right talent to create business value.

Integration and Implementation of Analytics

Mapping out an analytics plan is difficult by creating the right strategy's based on analytics for business development and decision making. Also, the right people who understand the data and business to generate better results and value. 

What is working or not?

The other biggest challenge to find out what is working or not? Understanding the business in detail is critical for the success. 

It is important to find out what is working or not to improve the business, it depends on marketing, competition, operations, location and decisions etc. Data alone never shows what is working or not, but need analytics to find out how various categories of business can be improved.

Data Scientist is a new job role which is evolved as a result of these challenges. It combines the skill sets of business management, consultant, analyst and a programmer.

How to use Data and Analytics in Business Decision Making?

Big data calls for data driven decision making. Analytics can be used for decision making only if there is clear and present need,question,challenge.Until there is no crisp and clear statement or objective, analytics driven decision making is useless. 

Analytics is used in decision making based on the applicability of Analytics Frame work. Though data analytics used for Decision making process, the right decision has to taken and implement by business analysts or managers because data is just an element that make the BDM process more easier. 

At times, the data driven decisions can go wrong, only through the continuous analysis and understanding of the scenario bring out the better data driven results.

"Data will always helps to improve the performance but data alone never sufficient to show the best outcome in the biggest market"

Big Data and Analytics are the core part of any business decision making process as it helps to understand Needs, opportunities, performance, challenges and results. It can drive better outcomes by using the quantitative and qualitative methods. 

PS: Next blog is about how does "fan analytics" disrupt the business decision making. And, how does the implementation of Fan Analytics in the Sports and Entertainment Industry helped brands monetizing their Fans in a better way.

Brand Apps Are Dying,Don't Go Down with Them

As mobiles have taken over a major portion of the digital world, teams and associated brands started building their own mobile applications to connected with fans and keep them engaged. The below on people preference over individual Vs. aggregate apps.

All the Major league teams in the US sports industry have got their own apps along with the official League Apps. Leagues like NHL, NFL, NBA, and MLB have a larger fan base in and outside the country. Most of the Team have more than 3-4 million followers in social media, but the number of App downloads from Play store and the App store are exceptionally very low.

After analysing more than 125 team’s apps downloads in Google Play store and Apple App store to figure out how likely Fans are interested to download their favorite team's mobile apps was quite interesting.

Here’s how NHL fans digital preference in downloading Mobile Apps broke down…

Which Mobile Apps' are downloaded more by Fans?

NHL League App, theScore and NBC Sports Live Apps are the Top Downloaded Apps

After analyzing 30 team’s individual mobile app downloads in Play store and iTunes along with NHL, the Score and NBC sports Live Apps, it was clear that the Aggregated apps are Fans more preferred by fans. Even though NHL teams have larger number of loyal fan base, can’t seem to get that translated to app downloads.

Percentages of Mobile App downloads:

• 58% of Fans downloaded NHL app
• 20% of Fans downloaded theScore App
• 19% of Fans Downloaded NBC Sports Live
• 03% of Fans downloaded Individual Teams App combined of all the 30 teams

Number of Fans downloaded Aggregate apps from Play store and App Store

It is evident that the aggregate apps are downloaded more compared to team apps. 97% of total app downloads contribute to the aggregate category, which indicates fans/users are not interested to restrict themselves to a single entity though they prefer few or more.

Individual App Downloads

Fans are less likely to prefer installing individual apps until those applications offer something unique that is not available anywhere else. People like to grab whatever information they needed by accessing minimal resources which is more possible in connected platform.

Main features that influence the number of Individual vs. Aggregate App Downloads

In this case, the key features that differentiate Aggregate apps from individual apps are, Live game coverage, complete league wide stats with customization options.

The rights of leagues for live content is by far the most important reason for app downloads..

Aggregate apps have very high engagement rate and less churn rate which reduce the retention cost by increasing the Life Time Value (LTV) of fans.

 Anaheim Ducks is one of the NHL league team with a Facebook Fan follower base of 411K compared to 419K of NHL (as of 5th-June-2016). But, when it comes to app downloads the difference is 38% and Anaheim Ducks App download is 10% compared to their 90% social media Fan base.

NHL Mobile App has 3x extra downloads when compared with their Facebook Fan base.  

When it comes to Facebook vs Apps, an interesting factor is that Facebook medium is more intimate than App medium because it’s a connected platform which combines all user requirements in a collected manner.

Key Factors

• Access to a wide set of Information

         Fans wanted to stay updated on everything that’s happening in and around the league as well as about their team.

• More features 

     In aggregate apps, fans have more features like options for customization, detailed contents and stats; more over it brings all the requirements in a consolidated fashion.

• Promotion and Engagement

         Promoting an app and convincing fans to download is very challenging. Also, engaging fans by understanding their preferences makes things more difficult.

How to use your Digital Properties for managing Fans?

1.      Connect your fans on a common platform where they frequently visit and easily reachable to engage them rather than trying to bring them on individual platform until there is a specific USP and business model.

2.      Develop specific set of interaction methods to speak to fans and manage them. Building various assets are not enough to engage and retain fans for the success of business.

3.      Build mobile responsive websites to service fans who are not interested to download apps for accessing contents.

4.       Use Analytics to understand your fans preferences, likes and dislikes, past activities to build more competitive/ personalized campaigns and cater them by providing what they may actually prefer to do.

The best practice is, service fans on a platform where most of them are connected to rather than trying to bring them in to own platforms because the risk and marketing efforts are higher to hold them. Engagement rate will be less and Churn rate will be higher.  Facebook, Flipkart, freecharge are all the example of aggregate platforms.