How the CFL increased fan conversions 9x with RudderStack's customer data infrastructure

Key results at a glance

• 9x higher conversion rates when fans receive team-specific content
• Doubled total conversions through omnichannel campaigns
• 3x better retention of marketable fans
• Opt-out rates as low as 0.08% for targeted segments
• New sponsorship and sports betting revenue enabled through precise, compliant segmentation
• Grey Cup Festival piloted real-time, location-aware fan experiences at scale

Most sports leagues sit on a lot of fan data. The harder problem is that it's usually scattered: website behavior in one system, streaming engagement in another, ticketing in a third, merchandise purchases somewhere else. For a nine-team league like the Canadian Football League (CFL), that fragmentation is compounded across every club, making unified fan profiles nearly impossible to build and personalization nearly impossible to scale.

The CFL's marketing team knew what they wanted to do. They had the engagement tools. What they were missing was a reliable infrastructure layer to collect fan events consistently across every touchpoint, connect them to a single profile, and deliver that profile to the tools that needed it, without requiring engineering support for every new use case.

That's the problem RudderStack solved. This post covers how the CFL built that collection and delivery layer, what it made possible, and why the architecture they chose is worth understanding for any organization trying to move from disconnected data to consistent personalization at scale.

The challenge: Fragmented data across nine teams

Before RudderStack, the CFL had no unified view of its fans. Data from the website, app, streaming platform, ticketing, and merchandise systems lived in separate silos, with no reliable way to connect them. Marketing teams made decisions based on instinct rather than behavior, and measuring performance across the full league was nearly impossible.

Solving this at scale meant building something that could work for all nine clubs without creating nine separate data pipelines.

As Aaron Hadzaman, Senior Manager of Marketing Automation and Acquisition, said, the CFL “needed a solution that could scale trackable fan behavior for all clubs, instead of developing nine unique solutions.”

How RudderStack fits into the architecture

The CFL's stack has three distinct layers:

1. RudderStack for collection and delivery
2. Snowflake as the system of record
3. Braze for campaign execution.

Each layer has a clear job, and RudderStack's role is to make sure the right data gets from source to warehouse reliably, and from warehouse to activation tools without manual engineering work in between.

Using RudderStack's Event Stream, the CFL captures fan behavior across every digital touchpoint: website, app, CFL+, Game Zone, ticketing, and merchandise. Events are standardized at the point of collection and streamed into Snowflake, where the league builds 360-degree fan profiles with 120+ data points per fan. Those profiles are then delivered directly into Braze for campaign execution.

Before RudderStack, moving enriched profiles from Snowflake to Braze required custom ETL work and engineering involvement for each new campaign or audience segment. With RudderStack handling the delivery layer, the marketing team activates profiles in Braze directly, without waiting on a developer to build a new pipeline every time.

The CFL team was able to "craft one event, which can be deployed across the league and teams, that scales trackable fan behavior for all clubs, instead of developing nine unique solutions," according to Hadzaman.

That single-event model is significant for a nine-team operation. It means a tracking implementation built once at the league level works consistently across all clubs, with team-specific data flowing into each club's context automatically. Features built in RudderStack, data points in the Snowflake 360 model, and campaign canvases in Braze can all be shared across the league rather than rebuilt nine times.

Results: Personalization that moves the business

With a complete view of each fan and a direct path to activation, the CFL shifted from broad campaigns to one-to-one messaging based on each fan's team, behavior, and preferences. The results were measurable almost immediately.

• 9x better conversion rates when fans receive team-specific content
• Doubled total conversions through expanded omnichannel strategies
• 3x better retention of marketable fans
• Opt-out rates as low as 0.08% for the most targeted segments, reflecting improved content relevance

As Hadzaman told us, “With RudderStack, we're meaningfully accelerating our ability to generate revenue, engage fans, and boost productivity across the league.”

Beyond marketing: Unlocking new sponsorship and betting revenue

Better data created commercial opportunities the CFL couldn't pursue before. Sports betting companies operating in Canada require precise audience targeting: fans of legal gambling age, in specific provinces, with demonstrated interest in game-related content. Imprecise segmentation isn't just a marketing problem here; it's a compliance risk.

With RudderStack powering its segmentation, the CFL can now:

• Target fans of gambling age in specific provinces
• Identify users who have recently engaged with CFL Game Zone
• Track interaction with betting-related content
• Enforce provincial compliance rules through data, not manual review

As Hadzaman put it, "We are able to increase the value of sponsorable digital assets through sophisticated segmentation, while preserving more value and health for our database by being much more one-to-one to minimize marketable fan churn."

Real-time fan experiences: What comes next

With the infrastructure in place, the CFL is now exploring use cases that weren't possible before: sending alerts when a fan's team has the ball in the final two minutes of a close game, or dynamically surfacing content based on a fan's location during a live event.

The league recently used RudderStack's geolocation capabilities to build a digital companion product for the Grey Cup Festival, guiding attendees through the event based on where they were and what they'd previously engaged with.

This festival ultimately became “a pilot for creating blended digital and in-person experiences at scale,” according to Aaron Hadzaman. “We look forward to building upon that success at more events across the league.

The infrastructure lesson

The CFL's story is often told as a personalization story, and the results justify that framing. But the underlying enabler is an architectural decision: treating fan data as infrastructure, with a dedicated collection layer, a warehouse as the system of record, and a delivery layer that connects profiles to tools without custom engineering for every use case.

That separation of concerns is what made everything else possible. Marketing didn't need to wait on engineering to launch a new segment. Compliance rules for sports betting could be enforced through data rather than manual process. Real-time use cases like the Grey Cup Festival digital companion could be built on top of the same foundation without rebuilding anything.

For any sports organization, entertainment brand, or multi-team operation thinking about a similar shift: the personalization capability is downstream of the infrastructure decision. Getting the collection and delivery layer right, consistently and at scale, is where that work starts.

Want the full story? Read the CFL case study to see how Snowflake, RudderStack, and Braze work together end to end.