With over 33-percent of college students believing the Internet is as important as air, water, food and shelter, NBA and NHL executives are taking new, technological approaches to drive Millennial attendance at sporting events.
In 2015, Millennials account for the largest generational population in the United States. The 83.1 million men and women making up the Millennial generation check their smartphones an average of 43 times per day. Thus, if teams want to sell tickets to Millennials, the time has come to move away from the box office and onto the smartphone.
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One company helping teams transition away from the box office and into technology for ticket sales is Experience. Through Experience’s Pass One product, teams send ticket offers to fans via social media, email or text messaging. In those communications, teams sell access to a given event, but delay the delivery of the actual tickets denoting which seat the fan will sit in. This option provides teams with an opportunity to evaluate their ticket inventory closer to game time, maximizing the location of seats offered to fans.
Teams are turning to Experience’s Pass One to reach Millennial fans. For instance, this season the Phoenix Suns are using the product to drive ticket sales to college students through the team’s Student Pass program.
Through the Suns’ Student Pass program, students register to receive text messages from the team when ticket inventory is available. The text messages contain a link to purchase tickets for as low as $5. Initially, students receive tickets for standing room only access to the Suns’ arena. However, as game time approaches and the team evaluates inventory, the Suns can relocate the students to seats that would otherwise go unused. In some instances, students paying a mere $5 have been relocated to lower bowl seats.
For the Suns, creating the Student Pass program has significantly increased the team’s Millennial fan base.
“The Phoenix market has 70,000 college students alone. With those numbers, it’s a target rich environment. While there are many in-state students who are familiar with our brand, there are also a lot of out-of-state students coming to college that stick around here after graduating. Having those transplants here, it makes sense to build allegiances with those students in the long-term. Having a ticketing platform that allows us to reach that population and do it in a way that’s convenient and cost effective for them and gets them to our games to become Suns fans is a win-win for both sides,” said Phoenix Suns president, Jason Rowley.
For the Suns, the strategy has paid off. The team’s database of Millennial-aged fans has risen significantly. “We have grown our database [from Student Pass] from 5,000 to 10,000 people in the last year. We have a goal of getting it to 20,000,” Rowley noted.
The significant growth of Millennial interaction that the Suns have experienced comes as no surprise to Experience. According to the company, the median age of people using Pass One products to purchase tickets is 26-years-old. For Experience, Pass One reaching that age group means that the product met the goal it was created for.
“We created this product to help our clients engage with the next generation of fans. These are people between the ages of 18-to-34-years old. They’re getting their first jobs and building their discretionary income. We thought about their lifestyles and realized they’re looking for flexibility, control and access. Offering these fans a standby ticket meets all of those ends,” said Experience’s president, Ben Ackerman.
For Ackerman and Experience, the standby ticketing experiment paid off. “We didn’t know if people would do this. We had to create a differentiated product. Teams couldn’t just sell what they already had to these consumers. When we started seeing results and responses from fans once the product was created, we realized that it was hitting the demographic that our clients wanted,” Ackerman noted.
Today, over 50 clients across professional and college sports utilize Experience’s standby ticketing product. Notably, while the product was initially created for teams to target Millennials, some teams utilize it to reach their entire fan base.
“For years, we’ve sold $15 day of game tickets to ensure that all fans have the opportunity to purchase tickets to a Nashville Predators game for a low price. Over time, we transitioned the initiative away from the box office and began selling day of game tickets online. However, ticket brokers would buy up all of the cheap tickets and would re-sell them at a higher price. We started this initiative to ensure that fans could purchase affordable tickets, so the purpose was defeated when people took advantage of the initiative and sold them at a higher price,” Nashville Predators director of business strategy, Jordan Kolosey said.
Moving its day of game ticket sales onto Experience’s platform reduced the infiltration of ticket brokers purchasing the Predators’ affordable tickets. Kolosey notes that, “the response has been through the roof,” with “tickets going clean faster than ever before.”
While reaching Millennials wasn’t a main goal of the Predators’ use of the product, the team recognized that by offering standby ticketing, it is experiencing greater interaction with Millennials.
“Reaching Millennials is a byproduct of using this technology, because Millennials tend to be more familiar with technology. Teams are trying to get their fans to download their apps. Now, fans have a great reason to download our app, as there is a very highly perceived value in our app for our fans. Downloads of our app have increased between 5-to-10-percent as a result of our using Experience’s Pass,” Kolosey explained.
More than ever, smartphone technology is driving how teams interact with Millennial fans. Identifying innovative engagement tools is one way that teams can ensure that Millennial fans continue checking their smartphones to see what their favorite team is up to or offering.