Cody Haynes
Director of Business Development—Factoreal Sports
Tickets aren’t flashy like selling a sponsorship or luxury suite. You don’t even get a fancy ticket stub anymore as most teams have moved to digital ticketing.(The right move by the way.)
Without ticket sales your organization is in trouble. In some cases your ticket sales revenue can be more than your sponsorship or suite revenue.
If your venue is empty, optics are bad.
If there are bad optics and no eyeballs in the venue, sponsors don’t want to invest in your team. Ticket sales equate to so much more than just a butt in a seat.
With each ticket sale comes merchandise purchased in the team store, food and beverage purchased at concessions, and in most cases a parking spot.
A $50 ticket can easily turn into $200 spent at just one game.
Tickets are the lifeblood of sports teams when it comes to driving revenue across the organization.
Personalization
Personalization is key and I am not just talking about the “Dear <FirstName>” in an email.
I am talking about knowing and understanding transactional and behavioral data of your fan base so you can deploy tailored sales campaigns that resonate with your prospects.
Nothing bothers me more than receiving a “spray and pray” email blast with the most generic message.
As a married father of two, why am I receiving a “Singles Night at the ballpark”? I can tell you why…the team probably thought up this great idea, put marketing dollars behind it and sent to their entire database hoping enough “single” people would respond so they could say the campaign was successful.
More people came to the ballpark, right?
Well, yes.
But you won the battle and lost the war. Considering the percentage of fanbase that isn’t even single, and now doesn’t want to go to the game that night, the team might have broken even.
What should you do instead?
If your data is unified and you have a true 360-degree view of your fanbase, you can then create custom audiences and segments you can personalize.
Send the “Singles Night” offer to the segment in your database that is actually single and send a “Family Night” offer to the segment in your database that identify as families.
Now your message isn’t off target, and it will resonate to the target demographic. Not only will this help you sell more tickets by “speaking their language” it will cut down on unsubscribes.
Once someone unsubscribes, they aren’t coming back and that equates to lost long-term revenue.
Teams should spend their marketing dollars where it matters most. While email may be cheap, imagine losing SMS subscribers or losing followers on your social media channels where the spend is much higher.
Another scenario to consider is channel affinity. One fan may have a better engagement on email, while other fans may be predominantly mobile app users.
Target them where they are, rather than where you want them to be.
Lead Scoring
The goal of lead scoring is to arm your ticket sales team with as much ammo as possible, and take a data driven approach to your team’s sales process.
Customer data collection and unification must be top priority in your sales process. Customer data collection from your CRM, website, team app, social media, and online store will set up your ticket sales team for massive success.
For way too long, sports teams have relied solely on ticket-buying data for lead scoring. The assumption was, if someone spent a certain amount on a ticket for a single game, they must be a good lead.
While there can be some truth to this, by layering ticket-buying data in with other engagement metrics and transactional data like online store and concessions can only increase your chances of finding that hot lead.
The goal of lead scoring is to arm your ticket sales team with as much ammo as possible, and take a data driven approach to your team’s sales process.
Customer data collection and unification must be top priority in your sales process. Customer data collection from your CRM, website, team app, social media, and online store will set up your ticket sales team for massive success.
For way too long, sports teams have relied solely on ticket-buying data for lead scoring.
The assumption was, if someone spent a certain amount on a ticket for a single game, they must be a good lead. While there can be some truth to this, by layering ticket-buying data in with other engagement metrics and transactional data like online store and concessions can only increase your chances of finding that hot lead.
Website Traffic Retargeting
What is the most common data that teams wish they could collect but don’t?
That’s right…website traffic.
As a former Director of Ticket Sales in the NBA, website traffic data collection is GOLD!!
Currently the most common way to get website visitor data is to embed a form (ticket information, contest, newsletter signup, etc.) and hope someone submits their information.
Most people don’t because they aren’t sure how their information will be used, and don’t want to be contacted by third parties. How cool would it be if you could know who was visiting your website, how long they visited your website, which pages within your website did they visit, and much more?
For example, someone visits your team’s website, clicks on the ticketing page and they spend most of their time on the half-season page.
They spend the second most time on the mini-plan page.
Layer this in with the prior transactional data we know about them because we have a unified 360-degree view of our fanbase. This level of data and understanding is retargeting GOLD.
We know they are interested in half-seasons and mini-plans.
And because we are collecting online team store data, we know they buy a t-shirt jersey of their favorite player at the start of every season, and they prefer to be communicated via SMS.
The retargeting text message will include a half-season ticket offer at the top with a mini plan offer and a coupon code to purchase their t-shirt jersey for this upcoming season.
Couple the SMS with a real-time web browser push notification directly at the point of intent, leveraging those micro moments of interest, and we are utilizing best in class engagement strategies.
How Factoreal can Help
Factoreal can help your team sell tickets by unifying your data and giving your sales and marketing departments a true 360-degree view of your fanbase for a more personalized approach. To learn more, book a meeting with me right here.
It brings the best of CDP and omnichannel marketing automation to holistically drive hyper-personalized and targeted messaging.
Meeting the fan at the right time, on the right channel, with the right message.
Cody Haynes is Factoreal’s Director of Business Development for Sports.
He has a career spanning over fifteen years in the professional sports industry, having worked for the Arizona Coyotes of the NHL, and most recently twelve years with the Houston Rockets of the NBA as Director of Ticket Sales, where he oversaw membership sales, premium ticket sales, group ticket sales, and single game ticket sales.
