Speaking to Marketing Week at Dreamforce in San Francisco, the club’s online marketing director David Ball said experiments to sell tickets direct on Facebook and Twitter haven’t ended in success, which he puts right down to consumers not being inside the right mindset for ecommerce on those platforms.

He said: “Whenever we push ecommerce directly to our [social media] fans it doesn’t resonate. This can change over time the image of with email marketing when initially people failed to trust the [the platform] to buy from.

“But we discover email is the correct marketing platform for direct marketing, we see great conversion because individuals are used to it. They will delete it in the event that they aren’t interested but when they’re they know they are able to get a coupon to a game of their city because they’ve registered with us.”

Instead, the club has learned from these experiments and plans to make use of social to construct out its CRM database to help its email campaigns.

He said: “This year i need to get to grasp our customer better and segment and target the best messages at them, whether it’s a chit, tickets or our summer schools. Our email subscribers tend to be our ticket purchasers – parents and grandparents – and social has a far younger demographic.”

Harlem Globetrotters is to start experimenting with using Facebook’s recently launched Custom Audiences tool and the Salesforce platform to supplement the info it holds about its customers. 

Ball said: “I think Facebook Custom Audiences is super cool, especially because we’re only in a city per annum or a world once every three years, so It’s important for us to remain in touch up to we will and feature a true relationship with those fans to get them interested by the following time we come by their city.”