NYY Ticket Marketing . Revenue
How do you tap into the emotional connection of one of the most powerful sports brands to drive revenue?
That's the question I asked when tasked with driving individual ticket sales.
Background.
A large part of my role at the Yankees was leading all digital marketing efforts focused on driving revenue through individual ticket sales. When I joined the Yankees, they already had a robust digital media spend and data, but all digital advertising and emails were extremely transactional (“buy tickets now”) and they had a very limited consumer segmentation strategy.
I revamped their entire approach to digital advertising to tap into the brand's power and drive stronger ROI for the organization's robust digital spend.
Approach.
There were three main pieces to the revamped approach for the Yankees' individual ticket marketing and digital spend:
Brand over buy now.
I hired a freelance copywriter to define our 2019 messaging strategy, which focuses on the emotional connection to the brand over the transaction.
Target, not spray, and pray.
I defined five target audiences and what they needed to hear from the brand and then tailored the creative, tailored the message, made it relatable, and made it memorable.
Push the experience, not tickets.
I took a more content-forward approach with emails and ads, selling the experience and emotional connection (not just that tickets are available).
My Role.
This is the role I played in driving revenue for the organization:
— Directed the marketing strategy for individual ticket sales
— Managed the budget
— Worked with a design and creative agency to overhaul all creative
— Directed and briefed in all creative assets
— Worked with MLB and Ticketmaster to implement the paid media strategy
— Partnered with our sales and analytics team on ticket promotions
Results.
2018 strategies resulted in 192K tickets sold and 112M impressions.
Here's a sample of the creative meant to sell the experience & emotion — and in return, sell tickets.
Paid Social Creative Examples
Email Examples
The goal of our email strategy was to be more thoughtful with our audience and tailor the messaging and creative to fans.
Working with our analytics team, we created five different segments based on our data — diehards, families, social fans, first-timers, and HENRYS (high earners not yet rich).
We created multi-week campaigns based on fan behavior (opened, not opened, etc.), where email and paid worked closely together. The creative, message, and ticket prices/offers were strongly tied to each audience.
We did more than push general tickets, though — we created unique ticket offers to move game inventory.
Best Friends Day Offer
We wanted to take a more themed approach with our ticket offers, finding moments that felt natural for the brand and team while driving ticket sales.
Best Friends Day is just one example of this. It allowed us to showcase the chemistry of the team while aligning naturally with a buy 1, get 1 free offer.
The flash sale was live for 24 hours and supported across all digital channels: email, site ads, display, Quantcast, organic social, and paid social.
The promotion moved more than 2,000 tickets in 24 hours.
