Heracles Almelo

Heracles Almelo is a Dutch professional football club based in Almelo. Formed in 1903, the club competes in the Netherlands' second tier and is battling for a return to the highest Dutch league, 'De Eredivisie'. Its home stadium holds 12,080 fans at capacity.

Heracles was looking for new ways to engage with fans to drive sales of both seasonal and individual game tickets. The club traditionally used email and social media, but to generate more excitement it wanted to talk to new and existing fans on more channels. With the entire fan experience shifting to mobile, it needed to update its customer database with information about preferred conversational and personal channels like WhatsApp and Voice.

Heracles partnered with Adwise, a full-service digital agency, which recommended Bird, a global leader in omnichannel communications, to craft the vision for fan engagement and multichannel campaigns. Bird and Adwise recommended WhatsApp and Voice for fan engagement campaigns — delivering hyper-personalized, engaging messages from players on conversational channels with high usage and open rates across the fan base.

Adwise and Bird worked together to implement Bird's automation solution, Flow Builder, Inbox, and two-way WhatsApp and Voice channels to build a new communication strategy for Heracles.

Heracles used Bird's Voice channel and built customer engagement journeys with Flow Builder to send supporters an automated telephone call from one of their favorite Heracles players, thanking them for their season-ticket renewal and support. Bird's Voice API let Heracles make, receive, and monitor calls from a voice-enabled virtual mobile number, to and from any country. Voice automation meant the club no longer had to manually call customers — instead it could spend time optimizing campaigns and tracking engagement.

It was important for Heracles to reach fans on the highest-performing channels. On average, WhatsApp has a 75% read rate and 15% click-through rate, which meant the club could increase real-time fan engagement on the platform its fans use most. Bird's WhatsApp API helped Heracles send campaigns at scale with interactive content like personalized messages and videos from players. Fans were encouraged to forward messages to friends on WhatsApp, which helped the campaign go viral beyond the initial target audience.

Using the voice of players made the campaign personal and interactive, creating hype that spread across social media as fans commented 'who called you?' Those replies helped the club better understand the engagement of the campaign and interest in real time.

The close collaboration between Heracles Almelo, Adwise, and Bird enabled the club to quickly build campaigns that converted fans across channels. Launching WhatsApp and Voice as additional fan communication channels helped Heracles increase fanbase reach, opt-in coverage, and engagement with a larger audience. Adding interactive content like videos and personalized messages from players encouraged fans to engage more with the brand, leading to more fans renewing season tickets or upgrading their seats. Heracles is now trending toward an all-time high for season-ticket sales.