Most sports teams treat fan communication like a light switch. Game week? On. Off-season? Dark.
But according to Emily Flanigan, Head of Marketing in the Americas at Infobip, that habit is quietly costing teams fans, revenue, and loyalty – and the data backs it up.
In this conversation with CX Today’s Rhys Fisher, Flanigan draws on Infobip’s Sports Fan Engagement Report to make the case for always-on, two-way messaging.
Over 70% of fans want year-round communication from their teams, while 66% say they feel disconnected when contact is too infrequent or too generic.
The fix, she argues, is less about technology and more about mindset: stop broadcasting to fans and start having conversations with them.
Flanigan walks through two real-world examples that put numbers to that thinking. For the Haas F1 team, Infobip built a conversational experience across WhatsApp and RCS where what could have been a standard race week notification became an interactive quiz, exclusive content hub, and personalized follow-up flow – nearly 500,000 interactions, with a 76% engagement rate.
For the LA Chargers, an Apple Messages for Business integration gave fans a direct, two-way line to the team on game day, covering everything from stadium info to player news.
On the question of personalization at scale, Flanigan is direct: AI handles the timing and the targeting, but the storytelling and humor still come from humans. Strip either one out and the experience suffers.
For teams still sitting on the sidelines, she argues that conversational messaging has already driven a 60% increase in ticket sales and a 70% boost in fan engagement for early adopters.
Waiting is no longer a neutral option.
