Maximizing Your Season Ticketholder Renewal Rates with Data: Part 2

Estimated Read Time: 5 Mins

In the first part of our blog series about maximizing your season ticketholder retention, we walked through a high-level view of the important activities around season ticket holder renewal, as well as how data can support you in maximizing your customer conversations. In this post, we’re focusing on best practices surrounding nurturing fans at different tenure stages and how to increase their likelihood of renewal.

Nurturing Best-Practices

Having carefully spaced cadences of a variety of touch-points will have a material, positive impact on renewal. So are some best practices to take note of:

Nurturing Best-Practices: Rookies

Rookies typically renew at a 10% – 20% lower than ticket holders with 3 or more years of tenure. These important accounts are critical and can often be the make or break segment in terms of hitting your renewal goals. The good news is, if onboarded and nurtured correctly they are impressionable, and their renewal rates will increase.

Key Points:

• Assign dedicated service reps early
  Thank them for becoming a season ticket member
• Introduce and explain their STH benefits to them
• Introduce and encourage them to your organization’s marketing and news channels to build engagement and affinity
• Target a minimum of 3-5 meaningful touchpoints throughout the year; at least 2 of these should be in-person meetings
• We also recommend at least one touchpoint being with an executive or other member of the organization if possible. This broadens the relationship and can minimize the impact of staffing changes
• Don’t be afraid to ask for and capture feedback on what went well and what didn’t go so well in their first year as a season ticket holder. How can the organization support and onboard season ticket holders better? This is best done directly with the service rep but online surveys can work as well.

Nurturing Best-Practices: Sophomores

Sophomores typically renew at a rate 5% – 10% lower than ticket holders with 3 or more years of tenure. This means that the sophomore campaign is as important as (and should be treated as an extension of) your rookie campaign.

Key Points:

• It’s your first chance to let them know how important their business is to you
• Remind them of their benefits and the ways to connect with you.
• Touchpoint goals should be similar to those outlined above
• Explore and identify any potential upsell opportunities that might be a natural fit
• Explore and promote auto-renewal and online renewal opportunities. These should be viewed as benefits and not detractors when it comes to building a meaningful relationship.
• Be transparent, authentic and timely in disseminating organizational information that will impact your fans (ex. price changes, digital ticket changes, benefit changes, etc.)
• Capture feedback and have a process for prioritizing fan feedback.

Nurturing Best-Practices: 3 years +

Great job! You are through the first two and most statistically difficult renewals for your account. The work doesn’t stop there though. Building a long-lasting, meaningful relationship where expectations are managed, met and exceeded is difficult. Keeping fans excited and coming back year-in and year-out is an accountability that each service rep should own, but ultimately it takes a village and is a responsibility of the entire organization.

Keep working those touch points, try different channels and be diligent about collecting data on fans so you can flag any changes in renewal likelihood early. Capturing and rounding out profiles on your customers can be extremely valuable in designing those touch points to be most impactful for your individual accounts.

Other Important Data Critical to your Analytics Capabilities

The service team data points are extremely important, but there are additional data points that are critical to building an actionable data asset that can ultimately act as a secret weapon for your service teams. This is not an exhaustive list but gives you something to think about from an actionable data standpoint:

Key Points:

• Renewal intent and customer satisfaction surveys
• Customer ticketing data (pricing changes, recency of purchase, frequency of purchase, monetary value of purchase, time of renewal, attendance, resale, transfers, price changes, customer information)  – more on this below
• Ticket usage information (attendance, resale, transfers)
• Newsletter, Website, Mobile App and other digital channel engagement

One time events that have major impacts on the fan experience
Other customer data enhancement that we can provide or leverage includes: Customer demographics, customer geographics, customer tenure, macro-economic market data, team performance data, weather data, venue age and location etc). Finally, merchandise, F&B and loyalty program personally identifiable information are other data sources we’ve successfully leveraged, but in general the anonymous or small coverage of the data makes these data points less important at this time.

READ PART 1 OF THE SERIES: Important activities around season ticket holder renewal
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!