Ticketing data has always been a crucial source of information to help teams target and retain their most valuable fans. Traditionally, activating this valuable data has been limited to email and other established channels. However, teams have found it challenging to bring this level of marketing sophistication into their mobile apps, despite their most loyal and engaged fans using these apps for their fan experience.
By utilizing Rover's Ticketmaster Integration, teams can now easily segment and target their fans based on ticketing data with the same level of sophistication previously limited to other channels.
Do you want to send priority content to season ticket members? Increase ticket sales for tomorrow's game? Re-engage fans who attended last week's game? Or provide promotional content to fans who attended last night's win?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, there is good news! It can now be easily accomplished through your team's mobile app.
Rover has partnered with Ticketmaster through their Nexus Partner Program to help teams leverage their ticketing data for more personalized push notifications and app content. With more teams transitioning to mobile ticketing, there are more opportunities than ever to improve the fan experience, boost ticket sales, and explore partnership opportunities through a club's mobile app.
Here’s how:
1. Engage Your Season Ticket Members
Ticket sales are crucial to a sports team's financial success. Since season ticket holders generate a significant portion of the revenue, it is essential to communicate with this valuable segment in a relevant and effective manner.
Season ticket holders are among the most loyal and dedicated fans. Regardless of the team's performance, they consistently show up at your home venue. Improve their experience by utilizing the Rover platform to send engaging content that welcomes season ticket members, invites them to exclusive events, offers upgrade opportunities or presales, and provides access to exclusive app content. While having a competitive team certainly helps, personalized communication strengthens the bond between season ticket members and your team, increasing the likelihood of renewal.
Renewals are crucial for the team's success. Ticketing data can provide valuable insights to effectively engage fans and encourage them to return. One approach is to re-engage lapsed season ticket members with fresh content and promotions. Alternatively, you can follow the example of teams like the San Antonio Spurs by offering additional incentives to those who renew early. By delivering tailored content and targeted promotions, you can expect to see increased traffic and clicks on the 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.
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.”
Nathan Brunzie
Kansas City Chiefs’ Digital Media Manager
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.