1. DME Scores Big with FSU’s Boosters and Football Fans
The Challenge
Universities and Colleges are challenged each year to renew and increase
participation from Boosters,Alumni Associations and season tickets holders
for their athletic programs. At Florida State University, their Boosters and
Athletic programs have been struggling with the reduction of donors and
fans over the last five years. Both programs wanted to approach their
membership renewal and football season tickets campaigns differently
this year as well as pursue new fans in a more relevant manner.
The Solution
Using R4 Marketing Execution as the methodical approach for
campaign development with FSU, it was clear they had two
objectives for 2010 --- 1) increase renewal rate for the Seminole
Boosters and FSU football and 2) recruit new members and fans.
To achieve these goals, the campaign strategy needed to integrate
multiple touch campaigns across multiple channels while using
variable components to maximize the known relationships. In DME
language, this meant offering a campaign page (PURL) with a variable
video, emails and direct mail all of which leveraged DME’s unique
ability to personalize the experience with powerful imagery.
Starting with the Audience, data segmentation was performed
against the Seminole Booster database and Athletic ticket database
resulting in four primary segments --- 1) Renewal, 2) Reacquire,
3) Reconnect and 4) Thank You.A secondary segment, Referrals, was
also realized via the Referral functionality built into the campaign.
Upon completion, this process yielded sixteen unique audience segments.
The next step was the alignment of messaging to each respective
segment to provide relevancy.The Renewals segment received a
“Thank you for being a loyal supporter”; while the Reacquire segment
received a “We want you back” message.The Reconnect segment
received a message addressing the value of supporting the boosters
and participating as a season ticket holder. Once the messaging was
determined, we combined the relevant communication with powerful
imagery from Florida State by applying personalization. This ensured the
recipient gets a one-of-a-kind personalized communication that delivers
relevancy, creates excitement, and increases response rate results.
The tactical execution plan was established next to achieve each audience
segment’s desired result.A combination of communication methods
(ex. – email, direct mail, web, video), frequency (ex. – number of touches
and duration), and business rules (ex. – when to stop) made up each
segment’s communication strategy in terms of execution and schedule.
As the communications were executed, we evaluated the performance
and updated the campaign database accordingly.The client provided
ticket and membership pledge updates from each communication, which
enabled DME to recast the audience segmentation.This ensured
the most relevant communication was sent for each subsequent touch.
For example, we were able to recognize and thank a booster for their
contribution while also reminding them of the ticket deadline.
Summary
Rather than launching multiple independent campaigns between the
Booster and Athletic programs at FSU for renews, “lost customers”,
acquisitions and donors, DME consolidated into one continuous marketing
program and leveraged variable communications across all audiences.
R4 Marketing Execution served as the marketing playbook to execute
the effective marketing campaign to accomplish FSU’s 2010 goals. This
resulted in FSU providing more relevant communications to their various
audiences until their objectives were achieved while maximizing the
relationship of each targeted recipient while gaining economies.
The results of the campaign were strong: the email campaign achieved
over a 26% unique open rate and over 64% total open rate.The
favorable email open rate produced a 40% visit rate to the PURL; which
resulted in the collection of over 1,000 referrals to friends and family.
In the first week of the email campaign the Seminole Boosters had over
$134,000 in pledges and the Athletic department experienced over 1,000
season ticket renewals and 200 new season ticket packages sold.
Accolades:
This program reinforced DME's Collegiate Marketing teams new direction
using the R4 methodology to obtain a series of ongoing executions rather
than just a "one and done" campaign.Thanks to the efforts of Ronnie
Goodrich, Stephen Shanafelt, Ryan Erisman, Neil Rice,
and Terry Webber the FSU campaign puts DME one step closer to
becoming a predominate player in the collegiate marketing vertical.