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.
