Activate Your Ticketing Data to Increase Ticket Sales, Enhance the Fan Experience, and Boost Partnership Revenue Through Your Mobile App
Ticketing data has long been one of the most important sources of information to help teams target and retain their most valuable fans. Traditionally, the ability to activate on this valuable data source has been limited to email and other more established channels. Despite the most loyal and engaged fans living and breathing their fan experience through a clubs mobile app, it has been difficult for teams to bring this data-centric level of marketing sophistication into their apps.
By leveraging Rover’s Ticketmaster integration, teams can now easily segment and target their fans based on ticketing data with the level of sophistication that has been limited to other channels — until now.
Want to send your season ticket members priority content? Increase ticket sales to tomorrow’s game? Re-engage fans that attended your game last week? How about providing partnership promotional content to fans who attended last night’s win?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions — we have good news — it can now be easily done through your team’s mobile app!
Rover has partnered with Ticketmaster through their Nexus Partner Program, to help teams leverage their Ticketing data to send more contextual push notifications and app content to their fans. With an increasing number of teams moving towards mobile ticketing, there are more opportunities than ever before to use a club’s mobile app to improve the fan experience while driving ticket sales and partnership opportunities.
Here’s how:
1. Engage Your Season Ticket Members
Ticket sales are core to a sports team’s bottom line. With season ticket holders accounting for a majority of that revenue, it’s important to ensure relevant and effective communication to this high value segment.
Season ticket holders are some of the most loyal and dedicated fans. Win or lose, they typically find their way into your home venue. Enhance their experience by using the Rover platform to send engaging content that welcomes season ticket members, invites them to member-only events, upgrade opportunities or presales, and provides them with exclusive app content. While a competitive team is guaranteed to make your job easier, more contextual communication enhances a season ticket members’ connection to your team, making them even more likely to renew.
Renewals are crucial. Ticketing data can provide a team with a lot of information to speak to fans at the right time and encourage them to come back. One way to do this would be to engage lapsed season ticket members with new content and promotions or, like teams such as the San Antonio Spurs do, to provide them with additional incentives when they renew early. Push fans the right content tailored with the right promotions and you’ll be looking at increased traffic and clicks on on that coveted “Buy Now” button.
2. Increase your Ticket Sales
Ticketing data provides teams with valuable information about fans that can inform marketing strategies that drive repeat purchase.
This starts with creating the right content. Many teams leverage Rover to deliver game previews, quizzes, and other game-day content that contains a “buy now” button for tickets to an upcoming game. Some teams are more direct, and create stand-alone ticketing focussed campaigns.
Delivering these campaigns to the right fan at the right time comes down to a teams ability to create smarter audiences. For instance, in this example, a team may send a campaign to everyone except those that already have tickets for the game. While this ensures those with tickets aren’t pushed irrelevant content, it also provides an opportunity to create more personalized variations of an existing campaign. In a matter of seconds, messaging can be adapted from a ‘Buy Tickets’ CTA to other messaging such as a seat upgrade offer, shop discount or sweepstakes entry.
Layering in other app data, teams can take their segmentation even further. From a fan’s preference for a specific opponent or ticket type, their current location, or their device language, there are plenty of options for you to further personalize your communication and entice fans to attend another game.
For example, the Boston Celtics have a Ticket Tuesday promotion where tickets are more affordable for Tuesday home games. Fans who have attended this in the past would be more inclined to take advantage of this promotion again if targeted with a similar offer. Moreover, if a fan has purchased tickets to see Lebron and the Lakers in the past, there’s a good chance they may do so again.
Many other high-value use cases emerge when this data is leveraged. Keep track of fans who purchase numerous tickets each season to push them mini packs or season tickets. Send “We Miss You” re-engagement content to fans who haven’t attended a game recently.
3. Engage Fans After They’ve Attended The Game
Once the ticket is sold, the priority shifts to enhancing the game experience and driving in-venue revenue. A pleasant experience at the game is one of the key drivers of repeat purchase.
By segmenting targeted app content to all of those who have tickets, teams can provide fans with a variety of content, including seat upgrades, parking passes, food and beverage offers, and other game-related information.
The Kansas City Chiefs did a great job last season ensuring that their fans’ experience getting to the game, using mobile ticketing, and entering the stadium was seamless and enjoyable.
“One of our favorite use cases for Rover’s Ticketmaster integration is its ability to enhance our fan experience,” said said Nathan Brunzie, the Digital Media Manager for the Kansas City Chiefs.
“Being able to push segmented content to users we know are attending the game is something we weren’t able to do through the app until now. A good example of this came this past season when we switched to a mobile-only ticket experience. By segmenting to ticketed users versus non-ticketed users, we were able to send targeted content to help ticketed users streamline their new stadium entry method, while avoiding sending irrelevant content to our non-ticketed users. It’s one use case of many that will help us continue to ensure that we are always putting our fans first.”
The Memphis Grizzlies have a Fan/Den Item of the Game, where they provide a discount on a special item in their shop. With the promotion only available in the Grizz Den at FedExForum, the team could send these promotions solely to fans attending the game. This of course works for any of your in-game promotions. Have a promoted food item, jersey, or other offer? Send it to fans in real time while they are at the game.
4. Enhance Your Partnership Opportunities
In addition to the impact ticket sales, merch and concessions have on revenue, better mobile communication creates unique partnership opportunities as well.
While sold out games maximize exposure for partners, the value of activations can be further enhanced by providing fans with partner content and promotions that fans want and benefit from. The best partnerships are ones that happen organically and enhance the fan experience.
Do you have a partnership with Uber or Lyft? Provide your game-day ticket holders with sponsored content or stand alone campaigns that make getting to and from the game easy.
First, segmented push campaigns allow teams to tailor the message to a specific audience in specific locations. By leveraging these location-based features, a segment of fans within 30 miles of the stadium can be created so that only local fans would receive the content. By using Rover’s app to app deeplinking capabilities, fans can be presented with a clear CTA to book their next Uber or Lyft ride, with the “Let’s Go” button taking them directly into the ride sharing app with the stadium’s location set as the destination.
I’ve always said that the way to a fan’s heart is through their stomach. And this year, sports teams have not disappointed. Almost every team has a partnership with local restaurants and vendors, providing coupons and promotions based on attendance and game performance.
Through your app you can reward your fans for watching last week’s win by pushing app content of your partner promotions. Who doesn’t love free and discounted stuff, right? With Rover, you can provide these partnerships to solely those who attended the game — AND you can provide them on the days they are being activated on — no need to remember promo codes for days on in!
Partnerships we’ve seen that have worked include the Cincinnati Bengals partnership with a 50% discount Papa John’s order on Thursdays after a win. The Tampa Bay Lightning provide a free Wendy’s hamburger if they shut out the opponent or score more than four goals. And the Arizona Cardinals provide a free Dunkin Donut coffee after wins. All of these activations can be created as templated experiences in Rover and can easily be pushed and segmented to your attending fans at the time of the activation!
These are just some of the ways you can activate your partners in ways that increase the fan experience. But the reality is that these app campaigns are more than just logo placement, they are put into an overarching campaign that benefits fans and partner alike!
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Rover is incredibly excited to have partnered with Ticketmaster to unlock these powerful mobile segmentation capabilities for teams. Through this integration, teams will be able to use data like never before to create more relevant mobile messaging and app content that increases ticket sales, enhances the fan experience and boosts partnership opportunities on mobile.
