COLORADO BUFFALOES: PRIMED FOR COACH PRIME
It all began with the initial pricing meeting in September 2022. With a huge 2023 schedule on the horizon, it was vital that our team at Colorado began to plan for the 2023 season. At that time, there was no word of a coaching change and it was hard to tell how the 2023 season would shape up with how the 2022 season was trending. Fast forward to November: the idea of Coach Prime coming to Colorado was picking up steam. As the rumors swirled, the Colorado Athletic Department met internally to discuss how we would handle the interest (if the reports were true) and how this could potentially change the trajectory of Colorado Athletics for the foreseeable future.
Even before the talks of Coach Prime, the Colorado team had discussed the idea of launching 2023 football renewals in conjunction with the new head coach announcement. As the actual date of the announcement approached, we settled on December 5th as the launch date for the F23 campaign. As a team, we planned to open renewal applications as well as new season ticket deposits once the coaching announcement was official. Within the first few hours of the announcement we received 1,000+ interest forms and deposits started pouring in. Within 24 hours we had received +1,600 2023 deposits and +3,000 interest forms for the 2023 season.
Flash forward to now, our team has collected +1,900 deposits and +13,000 interest forms for the next football season. We leveraged data and created a Lead Scoring strategy to score all of the deposits based on previous history. The history ranges from previous season ticket purchases to donation history, to single-game and mini-plan purchases, all the way to email open rates and Fanatics purchases. We have already seated +1,000 new season tickets with that number climbing daily. Our expectation is to sell +10,000 new season tickets for football and before the first snap of the season, have every game sold out. We are also expecting to renew our current season ticket holder base at around 95%.
The Coach Prime effect has been real and has led to some great opportunities for our department. Even with a poor on-field performance in 2022, we were proactive with our sales timelines rather than being reactive. We are positioned for success because of our ability to remain flexible and adjust processes as our strategy evolves and improves. This should be a record-breaking year for the Colorado Amplify team as well as the department as a whole.
– Andrew Dardaris, General Manager, University of Colorado – Boulder