The Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia has wrapped an ambitious events promotion that brought a 50-percent boost to their Facebook followers and added over $135,000 in value to their email database.
Known as the Big Ticket, the six-week promotion offered fans a chance to win tickets to every event at the arena for an entire year. That’s every concert at the building, all 42 Philadelphia 76er home games (plus preseason) and all 24 home games for the Philadelphia Flyers, who had a shortened season due to the lockout.
“In the beginning, it was a bit hard to make people understand what we really meant by ‘two tickets to every event.’” said Cody Snider, Marketing Manager for Comcast-Spectacor, which manages the facility. “It’s a bit expansive and tough for people to wrap their minds around.”
What surprised a lot of people was that the promotion also included playoff tickets for both the 76ers and the Flyers. Last season, the Flyers were one game away from making the Stanley Cup Finals although they're currently in last place in their division this year.
Zach Lloyd, senior marketing manager for Comcast-Spectacor said the promotion was rather simple — visitors logged in to the Wells Fargo Arena Facebook page and navigated to a customized application created by ticketing firm Paciolan and social media company Buddy Media. Once inside the application, fans were asked to like the page and then enter their email addresses to be entered to win.
“We designed it so that the content on the page would change dynamically based on whether or not someone was a fan of the page,” said Lloyd, noting his team was careful to follow Facebook’s guidelines regarding contests.
The promotion ran from mid-November to late December, and generated 22,436 fans on Facebook, a 49-percent increase overall. Snider said the promotion also generated 9,457 email addresses for their firm's online database, a value of $136,937.
"That's potential revenue, based on what the average user in our database spent over the last 12 months" said Snider, "I'm very confident that these new customers will exhibit similar purchasing habits, and will continue to for many years to come."
Snider said the hardest tasks were getting buy-in from the teams and building executives and working with Flyers fans, who were very irked about the NHL lockout.
“They have 850,000 fans on Facebook, and even getting one-tenth of them to convert would have been huge,” said Snider. “But any time we posted anything on their page, or had the team post an announcement about the contest, we got a ton of negative comments" by fans who said stuff like "get back to work," "end the lockout first" and "who cares if the Flyers aren't playing."
There were also a lot of positive reactions — local radio station WMMR got behind the campaign and constantly promoted it on Preston and Steve, the highest-rated morning show in Philadelphia.
“They even called the winner on air to tell her she won,” Lloyd said. The winner was a female in her 20s.
There is a tax implication — the winner is expected to pay taxes on the total value of the package, which is estimated to be worth $25,000. To offset her liability, the building will issue her tickets to only the events she plans to attend, along with a parking pass.
Melissa Schaaf, director of Marketing at the Wells Fargo Center, said there won’t be any set location where the winner sits each month, and she won’t be able to resell her tickets. While a year’s worth of inventory is certainly a valuable prize to give away, Schaaf said the promotion costs them relatively little.
“We didn’t spend much money to promote it besides putting a large banner on the side of the building and doing some Facebook advertising,” she said. “Getting the buy-in was the hardest part; after all, we’re looking for two tickets to every game including the playoffs. Once we explained to the teams that our goal was to grow our database, grow our online following and generate buzz, we got everyone on board.
And the building shared the information it collected with the two teams. Snider said the company is looking at launching the promotion at other Global Spectrum-managed buildings, and created a blueprint for other facilities to follow.
"We think it is worthwhile to execute this promotion again next year. With a longer lead time and learning from the challenges we experienced this year, we feel the promotion will be even more successful,” said Snider, noting the company is looking for ways to grow its other online assets like Twitter and Instagram. “There is no reason this cannot become an annual promotion for Wells Fargo Center to account for changing technology and to grow other databases.”
Interviewed for this article: Cody Snider, (215) 952-5441; Zach Lloyd, (215) 952-7321; Melissa Schaaf, (215) 389-9557