Insight #024:Membership & Loyalty for Sports & Entertainment Venues: What to Expect

This is the first part of our deep dive on membership & loyalty, the revenue generator that is underutilized in sports and entertainment. Here’s what you need to know about what venue loyalty programs can do for your bottom line, and how to conceptualize their potential impact.

Membership increases brand affinity and value

“Membership is what allows you to maximize your lifetime value with your biggest customers. If you can get more people engaged as members, that’s huge. You’ll see an uptick in season ticket sales, in food and beverage sales, and merchandise purchases,” says Zach. “Developing a quality loyalty program has an additional benefit that impacts casual fans by identifying and creating an opportunity to convert them into season ticket members.”

Why does it work so well? Because membership programs are designed to capture your audience, and create brand affinity through valued rewards. Martin explains, “People want to know that the brands they enjoy and support provide opportunity or enhanced experiences as a direct result of their loyalty. If they know that signing up to a loyalty program will help them navigate where those opportunities are — and get rewarded for their expenditures along the way — then it becomes a very powerful tool. It’s also a powerful tool for the venues themselves, because it opens the doors to us directly interacting with our customers and gathering data and feedback.”

The push to digital in sports and entertainment means that the delivery and execution of a loyalty program to the customer needs to be mobile device focused. This can be done via a standalone loyalty application or by integrating with an existing team or venue app. The key is to convince fans to start engaging with your brand and creating valuable data, while showing the fan that increasing their engagement creates better rewards and value for them. In turn, this benefits the team or venue by encouraging more purchases, increased spends, and higher satisfaction.

Go beyond freebies and focus on experiences

Martin says, “Don’t forget that there is a cost that comes with giveaways – and they’re not always what your customer cares about the most. Freebies have a time and place, but what we’d encourage venues to do is to look further and focus on the value to your customer.”

The reward of being a member should feel like experiencing a deeper level of connection and participation with a brand. This might include gaining access to exclusive content on your venue’s app, or to limited-edition merchandise. It could mean having enhanced experience opportunities or special experiences on game day.

Membership channels are also fantastic ways to gather high-quality feedback. Martin says, “People who are part of these systems don’t hesitate to tell you where their satisfaction lies and what they want. That’s what creates that brand affinity, and it’s vital to the success of a loyalty and rewards program.”

If it’s so beneficial, then why isn’t every venue doing this?

Most stadiums and arenas are already using some type of program – but the million dollar question is whether that program is seamlessly executed and offering users a high valued experience.

“Venues typically have a conglomeration of out-of-the-box and custom or proprietary software pieces to perform various functions,” says Zach. “When you try to bolt these programs together, it often creates challenges. One challenge is related to collecting and aggregating data in warehouses, where due to the breadth and quantity of data in each program and the differences in naming conventions, fields, or otherwise, it often doesn’t aggregate easily. Organizations then require an in-house analytics team to work to try to manage the data, understand what’s going on, visualize?the data, and ultimately, this creates an opportunity for human error with the data.”

Integration breakdowns, data silos, and bolted-together software are making it nearly impossible for teams and venues to design membership systems that will actually drive value and insights back to the business.

Zach says, “Where we at TASK come in is that with our global consumer platform, we simplify that entire process. Effectively, our platform of modules are purpose-built to communicate with each other and effortlessly push and pull this data between them to connect all the major touchpoints throughout the journey. Instead of dealing with a really complex bolted system, and losing insights along the way, you can just use one platform that’s able to manage everything.”?

Intrigued? Read on in Part Two of our Membership & Loyalty in Sports and Entertainment Venues deep dives next week. We’ll look closer at how an all-in-one digital framework works and what it could mean for building membership at a massive scale.