Seton Hall University recently launched a new ticket sales promotion that highlights select seat locations to fans that are available for the upcoming basketball season.
In addition to pricing, the weekly email highlights benefits for the upcoming men’s basketball season as well as description of the seat locations to give fans an idea of what the view will be like at the Prudential Center.
We caught up with General Steve Minucci to find out more about the weekly email and how other schools like your own could adopt something similar for upcoming season ticket campaigns.
Learfield IMG College: How did you come up with the concept for Seats of the Week?
Minnuci: While at NATSO (National Association of Athletic Ticket Sales & Operations) last month, Our Assistant Athletic Director of Ticket of Operations Joe Rixon saw this initiative that another university in our conference had been doing. Before he went to the conference, we wanted to find two or three new initiatives that would we would be able to implement here at Seton Hall so this was one of them.
Learfield IMG College: What’s the strategy behind picking the specific seats you do each week?
Minnuci: With the way our season ticket campaign is going so far, we are trying to highlight the best seats we still have available. We’ve had some early success and are trending ahead of last year’s new sales pace so we are trying to highlight different areas of our arena while providing different price levels to purchase.
Learfield IMG College: In addition to selling the seats you’re promoting, what are some of the other goals you have for the weekly email?
Minnuci: Some of the things we’re keeping in mind during this are…
- Awareness of our Season Ticket Member Benefits/Pricing – ensure that fans know what they get when they commit to a full season with Seton Hall basketball
- Urgency/Fear of Missing Out on the 2019-2020 season – We’ve got a lot going for us right now with a majority of our team back, some exciting home games (conference and non-conference opponents) and preseason national rankings so we want to capitalize on all of that.
- Referrals from Current Season Ticket Members – We’re ensuring that our staff is asking on every call, whether it’s an inbound or outbound call
- Our Live Chat Feature – We utilize Website Alive so we make sure this is an option for fans who are receiving the email to be able to live chat with us as oppose to calling in on the main line.
- To draw them to our new Sidearm Microsite – We just launched a new site last month which is a more centralized ticket website and are building some new leads with form submits that we are adding to our pipeline
Learfield IMG College: What have been some results so far?
Minnuci: We are two for two on the early success is definitely there and will absolutely be continuing to do this throughout the summer.
Learfield IMG College: Anything you plan on changing or revising after the first couple of emails?
Minucci: Yes, we are working with virtual venue to actually get the locations that we want to highlight each week. Something that we have also proposed is putting a special raffle or prize if you are the ones to purchase these seats. The format we currently have could use sprucing up, but we plan on ramping this up once we get closer to the season and on sale date.
For more information on “Seats of the Week” contact Steve Minucci at [email protected]