KFC won’t reveal their secret recipe for their delectable fried chicken. Neither will Coca-Cola reveal their secret recipe to their drink, which is truly just happiness in a bottle! But we, as people who pride ourselves on being true fans of sports, are revealing our secret formula for how you can make real revenue in sports today. Why? Because there is so much success and revenue to be made in sports. But unfortunately, not everyone knows this. Neither do they know what to do about this information? But all of that is about to change.
In today’s blog post we will discuss:
Our formula for making real revenue in sports today
Why this formula works
The kind of results you can expect with our formula
How you can get started today (we have different options to fit different needs)
Before we dive right in...
Subscribe to our blog today to ensure that you never miss valuable posts such as this one. We are passionate about helping sports organizations deliver a world-class fan experience, because better fan experience means better business. So why not use this opportunity to the fullest?
Our formula for how you can make real revenue in sports today
Here’s how you can make real revenue in sports today:
- Grow your contact database, continuously
- Collect supporter data with contact information and merge it with your sales data
- Find out which supporter segments you should target with your ticketing campaigns
- Send out relevant ticket offerings to those segments in a way that your supporters will really appreciate
See! No beating about the bush. And it’s as simple as ABC
Why our formula works
Let’s just break down the formula so you can get a clear understanding of why something this simple works.
Grow your contact database, continuously
In just one year, these are some of the changes that your supporters can make in their lives:
- Move homes or even relocate to different countries
- Change credit cards
- Change phone numbers
- Unsubscribe from your email list
- Get married
- Start a family
- Get a promotion at work and start earning more money, or vice versa
- Develop a new hobby such as theatre
So much can happen in the space of a day, let alone a year. For this reason, it is important to grow your contact database, continuously. Because what was true for your supporter last year might not be true for them this year, your contact database should be as up-to-date as possible.
Your contact database is the foundation of all your marketing campaigns. So, growing your contact database continuously is key to making real revenue in sports because:
- This simply means that you can contact your supporters as and when you want
- If your club gains new supporters, you will have their contact information almost immediately
- In the same vein, if your supporters change their contact information, you will have their new information as soon as possible.
Let’s look at an example of the importance of growing your contact database:
Your supporter, Frank, just got promoted
Situation: Frank is a die-hard supporter of your club. He has been coming to as many games as he can. But he has never bought season tickets. Recently, Frank got promoted and as a result, has bought season tickets for the first time this year. Not only that, but he has moved to a different part of the city, changing his postal address. You know this because his online purchases are now being delivered to a different address.
What changes: Because Frank is now in a different tax bracket, it means he has more to spend. Where before he would have been a low-medium spender in your club, he is now in a position to become a high-spender.
Challenge: Unless you know Frank personally, and the rest of your other thousands of supporters – you wouldn’t know about the promotion.
Solution: You have to first collect as much information on Frank as possible, the address change, and the new purchasing behavior. Then piece it together to form a clear and complete picture of the type of supporter Frank is. You still won’t know that Frank was promoted. But you will definitely know that he has higher disposable income by the way he suddenly buys season tickets and more merchandise.
Key takeaway: When you grow your contact database continuously, you will never miss any changes in your supporters’ behavior. Therefore, putting yourself in a better position to make real revenue. How? Let’s look at this in the next section.
Collect supporter data with contact information and merge it with your sales data
Let’s refer to the Frank example once again here. The solution we discussed in that example was:
Solution: You have to first collect as much information on Frank as possible, the address change, and the new purchasing behavior. Then piece it together to form a clear and complete picture of the type of supporter Frank is. You still won’t know that Frank was promoted. But you will definitely know that he has higher disposable income by the way he suddenly buys season tickets and more merchandise.
Collecting information about Frank was step 1 of our formula. The second step, collect supporter data with contact information and merge it with your sales data, is in the second sentence of the solution above:
Then piece it together to form a clear and complete picture of the type of supporter Frank is.
Knowing how to contact Frank but not knowing Frank’s buying behavior is a bit like calling someone and not really knowing what to say to them. You have to know what Frank is interested in. Since Frank has just bought season tickets for the first time, this is a clear indicator of what Frank is interested in. And why does this matter?
This leads us to step 3 of our formula which will help you make real revenue today.
Find out which supporter segments you should target with your ticketing campaigns
Let’s expand our Frank example a little bit here.
Situation: It is now a year later. You want to sell more season tickets. So, you want to sell these tickets to high-spenders i.e. supporters who have bought season tickets before.
What has changed: Frank is now one of your high-spending supporters. But he was not the year before that.
Challenge: In your new season ticket sales campaign, you want to target all your high spenders, so that you can sell out all season tickets.
Solution: Because you have grown your contact database, and it contains up-to-date information, and you have also merged the contact information and sales data, you will not miss out on Frank when trying to sell more of your season tickets. If you had missed the above steps, growing your contact database, continuously and merging contact information and sales data, you would have probably missed Frank in your new season tickets sales campaign.
Key takeaway: It is not enough to just grow your contact database if you want to make real revenue. You have to also merge your sales data with your contact information. This will help you find out the supporter segments you should target with your ticketing campaigns, down to the individual supporters.
To see how this would look in action, explore the Data Talks CDP demo >>
Send out relevant ticket offerings to those segments in a way that your supporters will really appreciate
Last, but certainly not least, we are down to the last step of our formula for making real revenue today. At this point, your contact database is growing continuously and is up-to-date. You have merged your contact information and sales data so you know what each of your individual supporters wants. Now it’s time to send out relevant ticket offerings to those segments in a way that your supporters will really appreciate. Here are some of the things that could go wrong if you try to jump to just sending out ticket offerings without first making sure that your supporters will appreciate it:
- You keep sending the wrong offers to your supporters, Frank being one of them, so they get annoyed and unsubscribe from your email list. Meaning you are losing contact with Frank and the other supporters. This will make it incredibly difficult for you to communicate with them and get them to buy more tickets from you.
- Because you are sending the wrong offers to the wrong supporters, no one is really buying. So you are not only getting poor results but you are wasting resources such as time and your teams’ energy
The key here is really to make sure that you know your supporters’ buying behavior. If they have bought it before, they will probably want to buy it again. But like I said right from the beginning, this changes so much that you need to keep a careful eye on this. Otherwise, you will lose contact with your supporters. Then you won’t know what they are buying or not buying. Essentially making it difficult for you to target them with the right ticket offers for example.
Check out these other fantastic blog posts:
Why Sports Organizations need a CDP to grow and thrive
Women in sports: beyond the hashtag – time to make a difference
Everything You Need to Know About NFTs in Sports
The kind of results you can expect with our formula
We have helped many clubs make real revenue with our formula. You can read our success stories for more examples. But for now, let’s look at one super exciting example.
How AIK generated six figures in one campaign
Let’s work backward with this example starting from the results of the campaign and ending with the goal.
Results: AIK generated six figures all within the space of 2 weeks in one campaign targeting only about 2% of their contact database.
Process: At the beginning of the campaign, AIK sent out emails asking their supporters to buy season tickets. After a few days, those who didn’t buy the tickets received reminders to buy tickets.
Goal: AIK wanted to sell as many season tickets as possible.
A win-win situation
If Frank had been a supporter of AIK, let’s just say Frank would have been happy to receive the first email about the season tickets going on sale. He would have been even happier to receive an email reminder to buy the tickets because, with his new promotion, he might have missed the email because of how busy he has since gotten. But AIK would be happy too. Not only are they making Frank happy, but they are making real revenue in an incredibly short period of time.
So, you see, with our formula, you will not only make your supporters happy, but you will be extremely happy with the results as well. Effectively, creating a win-win situation.
Conclusion
Making real revenue in these trying times is one of the biggest priorities of any sports organization. We understand this very well. And as sports supporters ourselves, we are passionate about making this a reality. That’s why we are so liberal in sharing our formula for making real revenue with you. The key to making real revenue is following our simple, 4-step formula:
- Grow your contact database, continuously
- Collect supporter data with contact information and merge it with your sales data
- Find out which supporter segments you should target with your ticketing campaigns
- Send out relevant ticket offerings to those segments in a way that your supporters will really appreciate
It’s one thing to know what to do, but it’s entirely another to do it.
How you can get started today
So, you want to make real revenue and you know that there is no time like the present to do so. Here are a few ways to get started:
If you are a women’s sports organization
We understand that different sports organizations have different needs. That’s why we have a special program for women’s sports organizations to get started with our platform so they too can make real revenue. So why not book a meeting with me to get started today?
Start our free trial today
If you want to see how our platform works, with your own data, then start our free trial today with our incredible Account Executive, Alex Josimovic.
Sign up for our demo
If you would like to see how our product can help you by yourself, then sign up for our demo today and explore the demo at your own leisure.