Until a few years ago, Major League Baseball's Web presence left plenty of room for improvement. While the league and most of the 30 ballclubs had sites, their online efforts were inconsistent and not drawing fans the way they should have. That's because baseball fans don't just love their favorite team; THEY LOVE BASEBALL.

So in 2000 Major League Baseball's biggest players - the owners - decided to take a swing at a league site and launched MLB.com, baseball's field of dreams for the Information Age.

Part baseball encyclopedia, part ticket line, MLB.com proves that if you build it online, they will come - by the millions. In 2003, MLB.com provided 4 billion page views to 650 million visitors. "We want to respect the fans as much as they respect the game," says Kristen Fergason, marketing director for MLB Advanced Media, the interactive media and Internet company of Major League Baseball. "In order to give them the best experience possible, we need to understand their behavior better."

For help with that, MLB.com relies on SAS Marketing Automation. SAS provides sophisticated reporting capabilities and the newest generation of predictive analytics, offering MLB.com state-of-the-art data management and data discovery capabilities.

Here's the Windup ...

The goal is to get more of those millions of visitors to register - registration currently stands at 9 million - so that MLB Advanced Media can properly target offers for subscription services, tickets, the MLB.com shop, auctions and fantasy baseball. Then MLB.com can increase retention rates among users who subscribe to various online services, including real-time stats and 40,000 minutes of live action on MLB.TV and MLB.com Gameday Audio.

"Someone once asked me what we know about the average baseball fan, and the answer was that we know they like baseball - and that's about it," says Justin Shaffer, MLB Advanced Media's director of operations. "But with a solution like SAS, we realized that we know much more."

SAS helped MLB.com learn more about the fans visiting the site, thanks to the diverse range of data coming from both the clubs and MLB.com - online and offline. Customer information runs the gamut, from merchandising and ticket sales at the ballpark to everything MLB.com collects via clickstream that shows what each customer is doing on the Web site at any given time. The goal is to learn how to target fans with the right offer at the right time and place via personalized e-mails and instant messages. It also helps with cross-selling and up-selling efforts by enabling MLB.com to suggest products based on what's in a fan's shopping cart at checkout.

"We chose SAS because we wanted a solution that could bring all this data together and provide us the best interface for real-time analysis and to handle predictive modeling," Shaffer says. "SAS helps us figure out the best way to view our fan data and customer data to improve their experience at the ballpark and online."

... And Here's the Pitch

MLB.com uses SAS to warehouse and analyze data relating to Web traffic and purchasing behavior, which serves as snapshots to make it easier to spot new visitors with similar tastes. That way, MLB.com can guide them through the site in a way that they're likely to find rewarding.

"Fans don't have to spend money; we want them to interact with us daily no matter what," Fergason says. "We can learn more about behaviors while still being able to share opportunities with them based on what we know they're interested in, such as a customized jersey or that their favorite players are going to visit their town on a specific day."

On a typical day during the Major League Baseball season, the site posts 150 original news stories. But MLB.com also takes additional steps to encourage fans to visit the site daily instead of, say, weekly. Automatically targeting specific audiences to let them know about information that might interest them is one way to keep them engaged. Instead of sending an e-mail blast to New York Yankees fans with the latest news about third-baseman Alex (A-Rod) Rodriguez, Fergason says she'd rather target anyone who's ever read an A-Rod story or bought A-Rod merchandise. Specifically targeting those fans increases the likelihood that they'll respond.

"One of the reasons we chose SAS was so we could access our in-house information," Fergason says. "Before SAS, it was literally me asking our tech guys for this kind of information, and it would take three days to get an answer back. On the Internet, everything can change in the blink of an eye, so you can't run a business with a three-day lag in information. With SAS, we have online access to real-time information."

Shaffer and Fergason hope their marketing automation efforts with SAS will pay off through increased ticket sales. In fact, they say, MLB.com will see a return on investment if the site can get just 1 percent of all ticket buyers to purchase one more ticket apiece. "Our SAS consulting team helped us come up with that number, and we were pretty shocked by it," Fergason says. "We hope we can help every single team identify that same type of ROI and encourage them to join us in this solution. Long-term, if we can find a niche like that every step of the way, we can only continue to increase our revenue and growth."