You've Got
Mail: How to Use Email More Effectively to Sell Tickets
4/1/2005
With cost savings and the potential for immediate results, ticket sellers are quick to realize the obvious benefits to e-mail sales campaigns.
However, there are some valuable lessons that any team should learn from to maximize sales results while minimizing subscribers requesting to be added to the dreaded unsubscribe list.
The objective of this Report is to showcase successful e-mail ticket strategies from major league, minor league and collegiate organizations.
Fly-mail
For the Philadelphia Flyers and their parent company, Comcast-Spectacor,
e-mail ticketing campaigns are a compliment and not a stand-alone tactic
to traditional sales efforts.
"E-mail marketing, to be successful, has to be part of the overall mix," said Shawn Tilger, Vice President of Marketing and Communications for the Flyers. "You can't abandon other efforts but you have to use e-mail to in order to fully understand and succeed in the entire sales process."
The strategy seems to be working as the Comcast family of properties, which also includes the Philadelphia 76ers, has collected more than one million e-mail addresses and roughly four out of every five tickets they sell are online.
Even though the end goal is to make a ticket sale,
the Flyers e-mail ticketing strategy depends largely on what really amounts
to an "anti-sale" strategy that helps fuel ticket sales.
At the core of their plan is to position all e-mail messages as having
value propositions in lieu of a sales message. To have a value proposition,
the e-mails are positioned more as newsletters with legitimate subscriber-only
offers that are distributed, like a publication, during specific time
periods.
Each e-mail is sent out on Tuesday and contains information on events and games that is not available anywhere else. Included in every newsletter is a legitimate sales offer.
"Scheduling the emails is important as consistency is very critical in the consumer's eyes," Tilger said. "You want to send them something that they look forward to rather than dread receiving. The more time and effort you put into an e-mail campaign the more successful you will be."
The effort in terms of the visual e-mail sent out is obvious but the Flyers take an important step internally prior to clicking the send button that further customizes the offer.
The Flyers work with SmartDM, a Nashville-based CRM (customer relationship management) software provider, to create a profile of each e-mail subscriber that allows them to customize each message to specific target group's needs.
"The e-mail address is actually the last piece of the puzzle for us," Tilger said. "By understanding and organizing the customer's interests we can maximize the value to our fans and our potential to sell more tickets."
Tilger recently coordinated an e-mail message that included a special offer for a Jimmy Buffet concert that was sent to season ticket holders of the Comcast teams that netted 30,000 tickets sold in four days without any advertising expenditures.
"E-mail marketing is not rocket science but it is important to remember there is still a science to it," Tilger said. "The more we can remember this and act on it, the more successful we will be."
Duck Hunt
The University of Oregon ticket department has only 30,000 e-mail addresses
in their e-mail database and they want to keep it that way.
Rather than lumping every imaginable e-mail address together into one larger database, Oregon maintains a separate e-mail database from their marketing department. The reason is to maintain the value for the recipient.
The marketing department sends out e-mails involving public appearances or a news clip stating that a softball player was named player of the week. This is one of the reasons the ticket department wanted to separate the two to remain free from clutter and to have recipients only be ticket buyers.
"We look at it as a reward system for them being existing customers," said Tim Messa, Box Office Manager for Oregon. "We don't want to necessarily send ticket specials out to everyone and anyone. It's very important to us to remain selective in who we send it to."
For example, the school promoted a pre-sale of football tickets available only to the e-mail database. The offer touted the opportunity to purchase tickets 48 hours prior to when they were available to the general public.
As a result, 77 percent of the tickets sold were online purchases.
Another example is how the school uses the database to sell last minute available tickets a day or two before a game. This inventory is typically tickets that were held back for administrators and visiting team returns.
This effort helped Oregon sell an estimated $18,000 worth of trackable returns for ticket sales.
The results of these offerings have helped the Oregon staff to realize the potential of e-mail campaigns without being greedy.
"If I had one message it is don't overdo it," Messa said. "As tempting as it is, it is the worst thing you can do because it will dilute the value of it and they will skip over the offers that you really want to push."
Crunch time
When the AHL Syracuse Crunch created an e-mail newsletter, the "Crunch
Alert," six years ago, they did not expect the level of success it
would bring as a marketing tool.
"We are very proud of 'Crunch Alert,'"
said Crunch Vice President Jim Sarosy. "There hasn't been one program
run in the past six years that we haven't run through 'Crunch Alert.'"
"Crunch Alert" was originally viewed as an information piece
for diehard fans, giving them the ins and outs of the Crunch. In the past
two years, Syracuse has focused on utilizing the "Crunch Alert"
as a marketing tool. The database includes just fewer than 5,000 subscribers,
1,500 of them season ticket holders.
Sarosy said that "Crunch Alert" has helped improve walk-up numbers. The newsletter gets the word out for various promotional nights, such as Beach Night. Fans who wore shorts to the game received a ticket discount. The Crunch also sends out coupons through the newsletter for $5.00 off a ticket.
"Crunch Alert" helps to get the word out to fans. Recently Syracuse had an auction for game worn jerseys. "Eighty percent of the bids came online," said Sarosy. "After we sent out a 'Crunch Alert' reminding fans of the auction, we got 50-60 bids within 24 hours."
Syracuse does not have a team policy requiring a certain number of alerts to be sent out. Depending on scores, time of season, and player transactions, multiple could be sent out in a week. However, Sarosy said that they will not send out more than three a day because they do not want to overload people.
"Timing is the key because it is what leads to effectiveness which ties to dedicated fans," said Sarosy.
Related links:
http://www.goducks.com
http://www.philadelphiaflyers.com
http://www.syracusecrunch.com
This story was originally published on April 1, 2005.
