Passion is the foundation for continued success. As athletic directors and department leaders, you would not have achieved your position without taking initiative and pursuing your passions.
An integral component of your success is cultivating exceptional fan and donor relationships. To do this, you must target precisely the right people at exactly the right time. If we learned anything from the past year, it’s that time is of the essence.
We’ve listened to your priorities and your struggles, and we want to share a few strategies to help your department effectively leverage your data. Our priority? Keeping your passion and energy on your important goals while letting our solutions do the busy work to save you time.
Here are five ways to boost incremental revenue in the 2023-2024 collegiate athletics season:
1. Treat your data like an asset
Data and insights into the behavior and preferences of your fans and donors are no longer a bonus resource. It’s time to treat your data like the asset that it is, providing your staff with the intel to drive targeted campaigns, foster greater engagement, and drive revenue.
Athletic departments have thousands of fans purchasing tickets, but do you know who is buying merchandise, concessions, or interacting with your brand from afar in valuable and meaningful ways?
Affinaquest’s Central Intelligence is the customer data platform necessary to gather various data sources and turn them into clean, actionable insights. By gaining comprehensive intelligence and growing your database, you’ll access and uncover hidden fans and donors who you previously didn’t know existed. Read how the South Carolina Gamecocks generated more than $1 million by uncovering these “hidden” fans in their data.
2. Save time with enriched predictive analytics
You don’t have the time to use a scattershot approach anymore. You need specific, targeted efforts towards the people who actually want to engage with your school. You don’t need spreadsheets, interns, and ineffective reporting. You need clean, enriched data and actionable insights. These insights allow you to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time, maximizing results and driving impact for your institution.
Affinaquest’s Predictive Analytics helps you use appends and multi-source data more effectively.
Want to know which season ticket holders are most likely to renew? Want to know which offers to send to new fans? Want to see which accounts are primed for an up-sell? With our comprehensive intuitive scoring you will have all these answers and more, right at your fingertips.
3. Maximize limited resources
There’s a universal theme running through collegiate athletics: “We don’t have the staff or the money to do that.”
When it comes to data analysis and strategy, you might feel like you need a whole team and a much higher budget. You want to uncover strategic insights, but it needs to happen now, not in five years when you find the funding for more staff. You need a quick solution with a long-term return on investment.
AQ Advantage is the answer to this problem. Affinaquest identifies opportunities and delivers actionable insights to boost revenue –at a much lower cost than adding an analytics team to your department. More importantly, it increases efficiency, drives incremental revenue, creates new sales opportunities, and fosters fan affinity without needing more staff. Think: less work, less burnout, and a more productive team.
4. Enhance your digital fan experience
Personalization is essential for effective digital engagement. If you don’t know the details about exactly who is buying tickets and when, you are losing an easy opportunity to build fan affinity. Digital ticket sales must be considered part of the fan experience. Fans should feel excited, valued, and like they are part of your team.
One of the best ways to improve fan engagement is through Central Intelligence. This is the fast-track to coalescing disparate online data into valuable information. You might have 1000 new fans each game, some of which may be your next big donors, and Central Intelligence will point you directly to them. Not only will your fans return for more, but you’ll also gain access to brand new leads.
5. Choose a CRM that knows athletic departments
In the CRM world, there are a lot of different engagement tools and it’s hard to know how and when to implement them. The right CRM should make your job easier, not more complicated. There are seemingly endless ways to engage your audience, but collegiate athletics require highly-specific, targeted campaigns in order to reach the right fans at the right time.
This is precisely why we created AthleticsRM, a modern CRM powered by Salesforce. Designed by experienced college athletics professionals, this CRM gives you straightforward and comprehensive tools to engage leads, grow revenues, and drive renewals. Choose software that knows exactly what you need and delivers real results.
Final Thoughts
Affinaquest is here to help you use your time and budget wisely. We’ve helped over 40 Power 5 schools maximize their data and boost incremental revenue, including partnering with the South Carolina Gamecocks to generate an additional $1 million from previously untapped fans. We accomplish this through creating golden records, using predictive analytics, and implementing the right CRM tools to unbury future fans.
No matter the size of your program or budget, we have a solution for you. Your time is valuable and your team deserves the best. Let’s find those fans together.
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