Challenge:
Sportsnet struggled to answer simple questions about user behavior and engagement due to disconnected, hard-to-access data. 

Solution:
Thanks to Domo, Sportsnet can access all its data in a single location for unmatched insight. 

Impact:
Self-serve analytics allows business users to reduce churn and cost per acquisition thanks to a richer customer understanding.

Sportsnet scores winning customer insights with Domo.

As Canada’s number one sports network, Sportsnet connects Canadian sports fans with their favorite teams and leagues across hockey, baseball, basketball, and more by delivering thousands of hours of live games, news, and original content each year across regional and national TV networks, radio networks, digital audio, and online streaming. 

All this programming across all those fans produces a massive trove of data that the network can use to improve the way it connects with its most passionate consumers. One of Sportsnet’s fastest-growing products is its direct-to-consumer streaming platform, SN NOW, which provides on-demand access to live events from NHL, NBA, MLB, WWE, Bundesliga, and more.

Sportsnet uses Domo to better understand what each fan wants so they don’t miss a moment of the action.

Playing from behind.

Before Domo, Sportsnet struggled to answer questions about user behavior and engagement due to data spread across nearly ten different data sources that produce 40 to 50 tables of data daily, such as subscription sales, usage, and product analytics. “Because the data was fragmented across the organization, we would have to work with multiple IT teams just to land a new table, which was really time-consuming,” Grunwald said.

In addition, the team worked with a suite of Excel files that showed the numbers, but didn’t provide the context or understanding that would give business users any understanding of how the business was actually performing.

Finally, the network stores their data in SQL databases, which meant that business users needed SQL skills in order to do even simple data pulls, often resulting in additional request for support from the data team. “We spent a lot of time dealing with one-off requests, which meant we couldn’t focus on analyzing data or doing bigger things,” Grunwald said. 

Taking the lead.

Thanks to Domo, Sportsnet was able to bring all its data together in one powerful visualization solution so business users could access the information they need without effort. “Domo’s data connectors, compared to other visualization tools, enabled us to seamlessly integrate all our data sources,” Grunwald said.  

With all their data in one place, Sportsnet was able to create a single dashboard to replace all of its daily, weekly, and monthly dashboards. “This new dashboard tells a more detailed story of how the business is performing,” Grunwald said.

One of the biggest game-changers for Sportsnet was the fact that they could now provide business users with self-serve analytics instead of basic reports, saving the analytics team more than 40 hours a month that used to be spent building manual reports and overseeing data pulls. “Domo lets users answer questions on their own, which lets us focus on being more scientific and running complex data experiments,” Grunwald said.

Creating a champion.

Sportsnet’s business users now have access to a robust dashboard in Domo that presents customer subscription and viewership data over any applicable timeframe. Business users can slice and dice data by a specific team or sport to create customer clusters to better reflect what fans truly want.  

“We can segment customers by subscription plan, home province, favorite team, favorite sport, subscription tenure, revenue, and overall spend throughout the years,” said Kirby Lin, sports data analyst at Sportsnet. “Domo helps us identify which fans are most engaged, which allows us to focus on who we market to.” 

Using this data, business users across Sportsnet are able to reach customers using targeted emails and digital ads to keep fans watching and bring back lapsed viewers when their favorite team is on a hot streak. “Our marketing team can use Domo to create highly targeted customer lists within seconds without any knowledge of SQL or data analytics,” Lin said.  

By creating highly-targeted customer segments, Sportsnet has used Domo to identify customers with a high propensity to churn, allowing them to test retention-focused email campaigns that reduced churn by 10% among those who received the messaging. In addition, the company created lookalike segments of their most valuable customers to find more viewers like them, enabling Sportsnet to achieve a 15% improvement in its cost per acquisition when running targeted customer acquisition campaigns.  

“The big benefit of Domo that we’ve seen is that people now use data to drive better and faster decisions across the business,” Grunwald said.