Photo via: Troy.edu
With commerce skewing towards the mobile mind, college athletic departments have had to change the way they do business. The cold calls are still there of course, but less frequent. Instead, they are replaced with timely emails, fan profiles, and mobile sites that need to be streamlined in order to sequester a transaction. One misstep in the foundation of the mobile purchasing process, and a would-be sale will crumble in an instant.
Brent Jones, Deputy Athletic Director of External Affairs at Troy University, is well aware of this reality, and that is why he leans on the technology and support provided to him by AudienceView.
“AudienceView has helped with data mining and website aesthetics. We need to make sure that the buying experience mirrors the best marketplaces,” Jones told Front Office Sports. “We have been able to reduce the amount of clicks and reduce the amount of pages. You need to have a strong eCommerce site with a strong support team to go along with that.”
Precision and efficiency are common themes that athletic executives harp on whether their focus lies on the field or off the field. In the sales world, athletic departments are becoming more privy to understanding the purchasing preferences of their fans, as well as their general make up. In the past, a poor sales staff member without a lead would have to call a household with little to no information in their holster about the interests of the person on the other side of the line.
In today’s world, Troy’s sales staff is much more prepared when taking their athletic events to market. Thanks to business intelligence technology provided by AudienceView, Jones and the rest of his team are armed with customer profiles that capture and store information to assist with selecting a strategy to target a group or subset of fans.
“By building out fan profiles with AudienceView, we have made the buying process much more precise. A fan comes online to buy a single ticket, but it may make more sense for them to buy a flex plan – so we have a pop-up ad. They have helped tremendously with that.”
One taxing issue that will shuffle the brain of any man in Jones’ position is deciding when to market tickets for a prospective bowl game featuring their football team. There are cases when a team will play a bowl game a full month after the conclusion of their final regular season game, and executives are wary of infiltrating their fan base’s inbox with ticket offers prematurely.
“This past season we set an attendance record for Troy football, averaging about 25,000 fans a game. We knew we were going to a bowl game, but we were thinking ‘How do we make the (purchasing) process as streamlined as possible?’ We pushed our fans to go online to purchase our tickets, and we had the peace of mind to know that AudienceView had the site built out for us. They allowed us to best serve our fans.”
(Jones was being a bit modest there…The football team averaged nearly 25,000 fans a game despite residing in a town of only 19,000 people!)
Serving is a two way street with AudienceView’s business intelligence technology. When Troy upset heralded LSU in football this past September, Jones relied on the resources he had at his disposal to capitalize on the euphoric state of his fan base instantaneously.
“Through their business intelligence system, we were able to send out an email to our fans right after we beat LSU. It’s about being able to capture the moments to capitalize on those moments. We have to balance the way we communicate with fans and minimize solicitation. AudienceView has the tools that allow us to be successful.”
*AudienceView is a Proud Partner of Front Office Sports
