Fast cars, fast marketers: How NASCAR builds rapid, targeted campaigns

12 premier racetracks in 11 states from coast to coast. 100+ races and events per year. 30+ drivers per race. 100,000+ fans at many events and millions more watching on TV. An ever-growing number of marketing partners and affiliated brands. Thousands of items of merchandise. Dozens and dozens of marketing channels. 

Damian Arbuckle’s mission was to get all those numbers to add up to 360 — or rather, a 360-degree view of each NASCAR fan.

So much data, so many data silos

“There’s always something new to communicate to our fans, whether it’s a discount for college students or a message from their favorite race car driver,” said Damian, NASCAR’s senior director of consumer intelligence, in a recent GrowthLoop Live session. “and we want to target audiences quickly to capitalize on fan excitement.” 

But implementing that kind of rapid, targeted marketing can be a long drive when each race track has a different way of capturing data about ticketing, merchandising, fan demographics, and race-day information. “With all our data in silos, personalizing our messaging, and keeping it cohesive across channels at scale, was an insurmountable challenge,” he added — a challenge that was limiting the impact of NASCAR campaigns and the revenue they generated.

NASCAR’s homegrown process for assembling their customer data was a coding-intensive speed bump reliant on an alphabet soup of data pipelines, from FTP servers to API scrapers to ETL, ELT, and their mirror image processes. That slowed the velocity of their campaigns, introduced errors that resulted in mistargeted messaging, and made data management difficult. So Damian turned to Snowflake for help. 

Breaking open silos to create accurate customer profiles

Snowflake’s cloud-native enterprise data warehouse aggregates structured, semi-structured and unstructured data from any source, then readies it for activation by parsing it into distinct, attribute-rich profiles of every NASCAR fan who interacts with the brand (a process known as identity resolution). Unique automation and optimization features keeps data imports fast, and default encryption keeps data secure. Because Snowflake adapts to data in any architecture, it prevents NASCAR from being locked into any one system.

“Snowflake eliminated our data silos while enabling us to use the frontline systems we’d already invested in,” reported Damian. “We already have more than 60 different data sources flowing into our Snowflake data warehouse, and we’re planning to add at least 20 more — everything from email and SMS to customer relationship management (CRM), website, and digital advertising platforms.” 

Putting data into action: Targeted, omnichannel marketing in minutes

In order to activate that data, NASCAR uses the GrowthLoop composable customer data platform (CDP). which sits on top of their Snowflake data cloud. This enables NASCAR to remain in complete control of their data and have access to new or updated data immediately. 

GrowthLoop’s intuitive, no-code interface uses drop-down menus, predictive type-ahead text, and drag-and-drop tools that empower NASCAR’s marketing team to leverage the data for audience building and journey orchestration without relying on their data team. 

“We have more than 200 data points on each fan that we’ve been building out over time in Snowflake, and we use them to create segmented audiences and personalized messaging which is then pushed out across the channels we choose,” Damian continued. “We’re now getting the right message to the right person at the right time on the right channels.”

Among the campaigns, or “series,” NASCAR runs regularly are:

• The Welcome Series, which targets fans upon their first appearance in the database and introduces them to NASCAR across a series of preset touchpoints.

• The Post-Purchase Series, which targets recent customers with venue-specific info about upcoming events, rewards opportunities, upsells, and offers from NASCAR partners.

• The Fan Interest Series, which targets engaged fans with content related to their expressed interests, such as sports betting, as well as merchandise offers and reminders to download the NASCAR app and follow their social channels.

• The Renewal Series, which targets subscribers with offers to renew for the following year.

NASCAR also sends “follow” invites from their favorite driver’s social channels — and even invites to live, interactive pre-race Q&As with them. 

“GrowthLoop enables a level of sophistication in lifecycle marketing far beyond the old spray-and-pray tactics, and provides our fans with the personalized, contextual messaging they expect, and value-added experiences we could never have provided previously,” Damian said.

Building audiences and activating targeted multi-channel campaigns yields bottom-line results, such as ticket and merchandise sales, as well as additional quantitative data: response rates, click-through rates, view rates, and so on. GrowthLoop aggregates that data and provides insights on all marketing touchpoints in a single interface. 

An assist from AI: Future-thinking with generative marketing

Looking ahead, NASCAR is investing in more marketing speed by leaning into the generative AI capabilities built into their GrowthLoop composable CDP on Snowflake. The Loop combines data from ongoing campaigns with the organization’s enterprise data. The AI can suggest new audiences or tweak existing ones and even recommend the best channels for reaching each audience. Because each fan profile is so comprehensive, the data available for audience building is granular, making targeting more precise.

GrowthLoop’s Marve can accept natural language prompts describing business goals and personas and proactively suggest new audiences based on those prompts. NASCAR marketers will then be able to use the same intuitive GrowthLoop interface to edit and refine updated campaigns before they go live, retaining control over the artificial intelligence. 

“It creates the ideal infinite loop of real-time data that we can activate across all our channels with precision,” said Damian.

Customer 360 adds up to some very impressive numbers

“Using Snowflake and GrowthLoop have produced powerful results for NASCAR,” Damian stated. “We’ve built nearly 1,900 distinct audiences at scale — more than we ever could have previously, and many launched in under a minute. And because we’re no longer writing lines and lines of code, we’re saving about two hours of work per audience.”

That translates into more than 3,800 hours — or a whopping 475 workdays — per year, time they can now spend on building out predictive models, perfecting their customer 360 profiles with additional data sources, and honing Marve’s AI-generated segment suggestions.

Because content and offers are now accurately targeted, NASCAR’s opt-out rates have decreased by nearly 15%, while their click-through rates have increased by 0.5% year-over-year. 

“We’re keeping our fans more engaged with our brand, our tracks, and our sponsors, even in real time, all while increasing the size of our database,” Damian reported. “We have what amounts to two-way communication with our fans, and there’s no better way to learn more about them.”

As diehard NASCAR fans know, there are races nearly every weekend — everything from short track to speedway — as well as a host of affiliated events. 

“We needed a way to leverage all of that fan data, regardless of where it originated or what format it was in,” Damian concluded. “With Snowflake and GrowthLoop’s composable CDP, we can build granular audiences and target them accurately and consistently, measure the impact of those omnichannel campaigns and optimize them continuously in real time based on that impact.”