It was labelled a ‘game changer’ for sport in Australia, more than 86,000 people piling into the MCG to watch Australia defeat India in the final of the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup.

As well as making it the second-most attended women’s sporting event ever (falling just behind the 90,000+ crowd that watched the 1999 women’s soccer World Cup final in California), the final capped off a hugely successful – and well-attended tournament.

Working behind the scenes was CHE Proximity and Amazon Web Service (AWS), who partnered up to utilise data technology and bring more fans to the games.

Using Amazon Pinpoint – AWS’s marketing communications service – CHE Proximity and AWS were able to analyse data from past ticket sales to predict purchasing behaviours.

This enabled fans to be served “the right message at the right time”, explained AWS Australia director of enterprise Karl Durrance.

“Together with AWS, CHE Proximity created a custom-built platform using technology like Amazon Pinpoint which allowed them to cast their audience net beyond cricket fans by collecting more than two million audience signals such as interest shown towards matches, teams, and events to build a precise data model from sources such as Cricket Australia, My Cricket, and Ticketek,” Durrance told B&T.

While the ticket sales for the final were propped up by the overall anticipation around the match (and a live performance by Katy Perry), there were 22 other matches the tournament organisers had to sell tickets for.

It was this data-led approach that helped sell tickets to these lesser attended matches, said CHE Proximity CEO Chris Howatson.

“It’s not hard to focus a lot of media attention and PR hype around one game,” he said.

“But the success of a tournament is how it engages a community and how you can get that groundswell leading up to that moment.

“What this approach allowed us to do was sell tickets to those event games audiences who might have otherwise not spent money then and saved it for those later games.

“It allowed us to increase audience attendance across the entire tournament, rather than just the flagship games.”

The 2020 ICC Women’s T20 World Cup attracted an overall attendance of more than 136,000, making it the highest attendance for a women’s cricket event globally and the highest attendance for a women’s sporting event in Australia.

Throughout the tournament, certain matches broke other records, including the crowd of 13,432 for the opening match, which was then the highest crowd for a women’s international or domestic cricket match in Australia.

The approach taken by AWS and CHE Proximity also highlighted the ability for marketers to deliver targeted messages with a limited budget.

“Data is every organisation’s most valuable asset and strategic resource however oftentimes data is sitting in siloed environments that inhibit customers’ ability to deliver marketing automation, personalisation, and cross-channel orchestration,” said Durrance.

“Amazon Pinpoint unifies data that allows marketers to derive a single customer view that helps them understand and better serve their customers with timely and relevant experiences.

“Marketers are then able to easily draw from data-driven insights to deliver more targeted digital customer experiences and achieve greater cost-efficiency.”