Maximizing Your Season Ticket Holder Renewal Rates with Data: Part 1

Estimated Read Time: 3 Mins

Retention of your season ticket holders is without a doubt one of the most important campaigns you will run this season. A 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit. Unfortunately what we often find is that with limited bandwidth and lag in information season ticketholders are onboarded and nurtured in unstructured and therefore incomplete ways. Using automated, actionable and predictive data can be a major tool in improving how you strategize and execute on your renewal campaign. This post takes a high-level view at some of the important activities around season ticket holder renewal that should take place, as well as how data can support you in maximizing your customer conversations.

Starting Early

It’s become all too common to ramp-up renewal efforts when invoices are delivered. But the most impactful relationships are built within the first 90 days from when a ticket is sold. This means for renewed accounts, delivering high-quality touchpoints early to make sure they feel their renewal is being valued. For new buyers this means rookie on-boarding starts in earnest. To effectively achieve this, these plans need to be strategized during the off-season before the following renewal year and implemented as soon as possible.

Relationship Building Data Capture Best-Practices

Capturing and documenting these touchpoints in your CRM system can add visibility to your relationship building efforts while also creating a powerful data asset that helps you understand what is working and what isn’t working for future years. At StellarAlgo, we recommend a structure and data capturing process for campaign data that looks something like the following*:

Pre-Renewal

• Contact Date
• Touch Point Type: Phone Call / Meeting (in-person) / Direct Email / Gift / Wow Moment**
• Touchpoint Result: Made Contact / Did not make contact
• Touchpoint Rank: Low / Medium / Significant
• Interaction Sentiment: Negative / Neutral / Positive

Post-Renewal

• Reason for non-renewal: Dark accounts (unresponsive accounts), Team performance, Ticket Cost, Moving from Area, Death, Lost Share Partner, Financial Hardship, Time and Schedule, etc.

There are many ways to structure your data, but these are good starting points that allow you to conduct the predictive analyses that will maximize the efficiency of your renewal in the future. There are other important data points as well but when it comes to CRM / Service Rep touchpoint data these are the most important ones.

Expert Move – Personalization

Aside from segmenting your accounts and focusing on the needs of specific account holder types you can also leverage data to really engage your fans and reward them as loyal fans. By understanding their motivations and interests you can personalize touchpoint content or activities that are specific to them, but symbiotic to your organization.

For example, knowing who in your fanbase are also little league coaches can offer opportunities to engage their interest by providing opportunities with your organization to participate in wider coaching opportunities or related events such as a little league training night. Personalization not only helps engagement, it provides a key method of breaking down your touchpoint campaign effectiveness and allows you to better adjust your marketing and sales activities far better than pray and spray approaches.

Read part 2 of the series: Best practices surrounding nurturing fans at different tenure stages
Read part 3 of the series: How data and analytics, coupled with relationship-building efforts, will drive efficiencies and revenues

Do you have questions about how to maximize your ticketholder renewal rates? Reach out to us today – we’d love to answer them!