Premiership Rugby (PRL) has kicked off the 2024/25 season with record-breaking success, attracting over a million new young fans and hitting all-time viewership highs on marquee weekends. InCrowd has been at the heart of this momentum, working closely with PRL to maximise engagement, driving new marketable users through the funnel and turning growth into long-term value.
InCrowd is dedicated to helping Premiership Rugby achieve unprecedented growth by accelerating marketable user acquisition, strengthening fan relationships to drive deeper engagement and unlocking new commercial revenue opportunities.
InCrowd’s strategic approach not only drives large-scale data acquisition but also ensures its relevance and quality - unlocking meaningful activations, substantial audience growth, and ultimately, commercial revenue.
We developed sophisticated marketing and communication strategies to attract new fans and re-engage inactive ones. Through advanced segmentation, tailored content distribution, and strategic use of third-party platforms, we reached 94% of the marketable user target and 93% of the email audience target - within just the first half of the 24/25 season.
“InCrowd are a fundamental part of Premiership Rugby’s digital ecosystem, helping us understand our fans and improve experiences. We now have the ability to capitalise on our new, first party data to deliver personalised marketing campaigns that engage our fans across all channels, driving key revenue streams and offering partners a more sophisticated sponsorship proposition.”
As fans increasingly turn to “on-the-go” digital platforms, the PRL app has seen a surge in downloads compared to previous seasons, with average session duration rising by six minutes.
Direct communications have also delivered strong results - targeted push notifications achieved an average click rate of 5%, well above the industry benchmark of 3.5% to 4%. Priority ticket messages tailored to fans’ favourite teams saw the highest engagement at 15%. Meanwhile, direct email communications recorded a 25% year-on-year increase in unique opens by the halfway point of the 24/25 season.
We’ve driven a 25% year-on-year increase in average clicks on PRL promotional assets, alongside a 65% rise in partner-branded content clicks. This has resulted in a 5x return on investment to date, compared to 3x ROI for the 23/24 season.
At the 24/25 mid-season break, Premiership Rugby’s commercial partners have achieved 63% of their impression targets on average, with all on track to meet or exceed their goals by year-end. Additionally, sponsored emails have an impressive average open rate of 70.2%.
Integrating the InCrowd Digital Ticket Wallet into the official app, we helped PRL create a more cohesive user experience from purchase to gate. We delivered a scalable digital ticketing solution that, paired with sales focussed managed marketing services, drove a sell out audience at the 80K seated Allianz Stadium Twickenham for the 2024 final.
In addition, the introduction of the Ticket Wallet offers PRL a new way of capturing valuable transaction and behavioural fan data to improve personalisation of content and messaging across their digital ecosystem. At the 2024 final, 57% of ticket wallet users were fans who had received a transferred ticket from the purchaser, who would not have previously been known to PRL.
