How Upper Deck uses Lyris ListManager
to Win Big with sports and entertainment fans

Company Background

Founded in 1988, Upper Deck is the world's leading sports and entertainment collectibles company. As a licensee of all major professional U.S. sports leagues and many international sports organizations, Upper Deck thrives on turning memorable moments into prized collectibles as well as creating technological innovations that ensure the authenticity of its product line.

Known for its cutting edge photography and attention to detail, the Nevada-based company’s trading cards are considered highly collectible on the open marketplace. Recently, an individual card from one of Upper Deck’s high-end licensed NBA sets—NBA Exquisite—sold on eBay for $62,100 due to a unique insert that featured jersey swatches of LeBron James and Kobe Bryant.

In addition to its sports cards, Upper Deck has an entertainment division that makes official collectibles for a variety of pop culture phenomena such as Yu-Gi-Oh!—the world's most popular trading card game—as well as trading card games for Marvel and DC Comics.

Goals and Challenges

With thousands of avid fans wanting to stay in the loop about their favorite players and performers, Upper Deck was quick to leverage the power of the Internet as a sales tool. Throughout the 1990's, Upper Deck used a homegrown marketing software solution, which allowed the company to send email to its customers, but not much else.

"Our new business requirements called for advanced segmentation," says Toby Alfaro, Director of Technology at Upper Deck. "Baseball fans don't necessarily want offers about products related to basketball. Entertainment fans aren't interested in the same collectibles as sports fans."

Impressed with Lyris ListManager's advanced targeting tools, as well as its open database access and customizable API, Upper Deck purchased a ListManager software license in July 2003. The software was integrated with the company's SQL database, and allowed Upper Deck to manage twelve mailing lists based on customer interests that are automatically integrated with its other systems.

Demographic information, affiliation, and program participation are used to target customer interests even more closely. Upper Deck also relies on ListManager to make announcements and promote sales to its distributors and resellers.

And for hard-core enthusiasts— the ones who aren't satisfied with just hearing about the latest news—Upper Deck offers thirteen invitation-only discussion lists for the exchange of thoughts and information between seriously dedicated fans. The company also uses ListManager to create internal discussion lists which help to link its geographically disperse employees and affiliates.

We're extremely pleased with ListManager," says Alfaro.

"Since switching over, our opt-in mailing list has grown to hundreds of thousands of members, and we see a big spike in sales after every mailing," he says.

Given how instrumental ListManager has been to growing its business, Alfaro says he finds ListManager's granular permissions feature critical in controlling access to sending mail, editing members, and more.

"Many different internal business groups need read-only access to ListManager's reports, but they shouldn't be sending mail, or editing members. Using permission groups gives the right control to the right people."

Going forward, Alfaro reports that Upper Deck will step up its email marketing efforts by creating more customized content based using customer's demographic data and purchase history.

"We expect this to drive sales even further," says Alfaro. "Upper Deck has always catered to the passions of our customers, and we're excited we'll be able to give individuals exactly what they're passionate about."

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